September 23rd, 1999

[2:45 PM] Team Mac Observer Slips One Place, We Need Your Help! Team Mac Observer, our SETI@home team, has slipped out of the Top 20 Club Teams, and we need your help. We need every Team member to make sure that their machines are crunching data whenever you aren't using it, and if you haven't already signed up, we need you to join! We have gotten thousands of new Observers in the last few weeks, so an explanation may be in order. SETI@home is a project run by researchers at UC Berkeley. The UC Berkeley team gets data from a radio telescope that searches the sky for the type of signals that could come from an intelligent source. They then break the data down into small chunks that volunteers, such as everyone in Team Mac Observer, process by letting a SETI@home screen saver crunch the data when their computers are not in use. This process is called Distributed Processing and the participants do not have to do anything other than install the screen saver. The SETI@home project now has over 1 million participants around the world that have contributed thousands of CPU hours to the effort making it the single most amazingly successful demonstration that distributed processing can work on a large scale. We have more information about SETI@home. Since the formation of Team Mac Observer in June of this year, we have rocketed up the Top 100 Club Teams, showing how fast the Mac is at crunching numbers. We have 277 members and have gotten as far as the number #19 team, beating out hundreds and hundreds of other club teams, and have a very fast average of 17 hours and 20 minutes per work unit. In fact, we have one of the fastest Mac teams in the project, beating out even Apple Computer's Corporate team which has an average of 18 hours and 6 minutes per work unit! In the last few days though, Team Denmark and a bunch of Unix geeks calling themselves Chicago Area UNIX Admins have chased us back down to #21. So help us start climbing again and make sure you are crunching or sign up now! It really is easy. We have all the instructions you will need. A small note here: Apple has just recently shown interest in performing well in this effort and their corporate team has almost doubled in the last 3 weeks. They are now the #8 Large Company Team, far behind #3 Microsoft. Hopefully, Apple will really get on the ball and spank Microsoft in the ground. If you still need another reason to join, the Mac platform is the #2 ranked platform, although we are now far ahead of #3 Sun-Sparc-Solaris platform. Who's the #1 platform? You guessed it, Windows. So if you want to help catch up to Windows, join now! The Mac Observer Spin: This is a very fun project to participate in and the screen saver is handy, and very easy to use. Oh, we have nothing against Unix or Unix geeks, we are Mac geeks ourselves after all. :-) Team Mac Observer