My concept of helping is to let them tell me what they want me to do and then doing it. I don't try to tell them what or how.

Sometimes by-passer's idea of helping is not acceptable to the one asking for help. It is quite understandable to me that in those cases help offered gets rejected. Most of times it's nothing personal.

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Metod ...

I don't really care about this, but I have noticed something that seems less than desirable: I usually am disconnected from the internet, so when I reconnect, I usually need more work. Boinc will send a scheduler request for more work, but this almost always occurs before all of the tasks are uploaded, so in my case it doubles the number of connections I make to the server, rather than reducing them.

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The send results definitely needs to be an option. I run between 6 and 11 machines full time. When I walk by and check the status with BoincView, the new version makes it look like multiple projects are down. I then had to either check each project by hand or do updates on all to see what was doing on. If I wanted a bunch of software making decisions for me, I would say so. Until SETI, Einstein, and Cosmo manage to stay up 24/7/365, I'm back to version 5.10.13-.

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If I wanted a bunch of software making decisions for me, I would say so.

Now now, you do trust BOINC enough to get you new work, done all by itself, without you needing to press any buttons or jump through any (flaming) hoops.

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My concept of helping is to let them tell me what they want me to do and then doing it. I don't try to tell them what or how.

Sometimes by-passer's idea of helping is not acceptable to the one asking for help. It is quite understandable to me that in those cases help offered gets rejected. Most of times it's nothing personal.

In practice there are various forms of volunteerism. Some do so without asking for anything in return (the purists), others want more of a partnership with give-and-take on both sides. The purists may disdain the latter, but there is nothing wrong with either form of volunteerism and they are not mutually exclusive. If the purists were to have their way then most projects would have a much smaller collection of computers at their disposal and that would not be as productive. So I don't see any harm in having a little something for everybody who participates in BOINC. The dilemma is determining where to draw the line and who gets to decide.

So I don't see any harm in having a little something for everybody who participates in BOINC. The dilemma is determining where to draw the line and who gets to decide.

Or, better yet, who is to draw the line. And the answer is clear: project management. As BOINC itself has many project managers, it's up to their consent about what to do. I don't know how democratic the debate between them is, but at the end its all about: Berkeley created BOINC, they put it on open for use by anybody and it's up to anybody do decide about fitness for their special needs. If they find it fit, they are welcome to use it and to make suggestions which, in turn, might get accepted or not by Berkeley.

The picture is almost identical when it comes to users: they can join the flock if they see it fit. If they want to have it different, they can make suggestions and those can be accepted or not. If an user finds the whole system not acceptable anymore and gets frustrated by the fact that his/her suggestions were not accepted, then he/she is more than welcome to leave the flock.

In case when Berkeley rejects too many good suggestions, which in turn, frustrate too many users, then all of projects (including Berkeley's own) will loose and that may (or may not) force Berkeley to change decisions. Until Project Managers feel comfortable about the amount of work being done they may discard more user suggestions than some users may like.

Volunteerism is all about free choice: if somebody is not happy about how some particular project is handled, he/she is more than welcome to choose another one.

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Metod ...

Linux users: Run this bash script as a cronjob (say, every 10 minutes). It updates all projects with work ready to report.

Windows users: I could do a little .exe that does the same as the above script. But I won't because:

• I still don't have my C compile environment set up on this machine, and it's too much of a mess to do it. Can't be bothered right now.
  
• The interface of the GUI RPC library that comes with BOINC is ugly.
  
• I'm busy with other BOINC-forum-related stuff. It's going too slow because of distractions. I don't need more.
  
• Gives you another reason to get Linux.
  

Mac users: I think the script for Linux should work for you too, but I'm not sure if bash is the shell bundled with Macs, and I don't know if the script would work on other shells like csh. And I know Mac users aren't really used to having to use the console. YMMV.