A few months ago, the SETI@home project moved to version 3.0. Shortly thereafter, the project started to move to version 3.0.3 which included new tests in addition to other changes. Those new tests added to the time taken to process each work unit, but it also added significantly to the data being processed for the project. The project has now made version 3.0.3 the only version that can send and receive processed and new work units with the SETI@home servers. You can download version 3.0.3 from the SETI@home Web servers.
There is also a new command line version of the software for Mac OS X Public Beta that doesnit waste any CPU cycles on producing graphics for the programis cool screen saver. If you are comfortable in a command line environment and want to get the best performance possible on your Mac, check out this version.
SETI@home is a scientific project that takes data collected from a radio telescope in South America and farms out that data to the millions of people who have volunteered with to help. Those people allow excess CPU time they are not using to be used to process that data. If you need more information on SETI@home, read all about it.
We have a Team named Team Mac Observer organized to compete with other club teams to see who can process the most data. With 2,761,347 people signed up with the project as of press time, there is a lot of competition. We are very proud that Team Mac Observer is the #20 Club Team. We could use your help in rising back up through the ranks and showing the world how fast the Mac is. The PowerPC processor is very good at processing the SETI@home data and is among the fastest platforms participating in the project. Itis easy to sign up and costs you nothing but electricity. [Note to California users: The SETI@home project and The Mac Observer ask you not to run the SETI@home client during Stage 2 and Stage 3 emergency alerts. Especially if you are actually running this on your Windows machine as the Pentium architecture uses far more power than does the PowerPC.] We have the easy instructions for you at our Team Mac Observer Web page.
We have also updated our Top 20 Fastest and Top 20 Most Completed members. Participating sub-team, Team 6100, from our friends at Low End Mac just recently completed 160 Work Units. The PowerMac 6100 is the slowest PowerMac that was ever made, and if you have an unmodified 6100, you can join this sub-team!