Back in 2003, I was majorly into SETI@Home and ran the client religiously. Like most others who participated in the project I hoped I would catch a Wow! signal too. Really. That it didn’t happen isn’t news. Finally when SETI@Home transitioned to BOINC, I stopped because I couldn’t get the client to work properly. I’ve wanted to try again for quite some time now, but have been too lazy to do it. Yes, I could even offer advice on raising funds, but not install the client.
Last week, there was an article in the WSJ about the misplaced priorities of people who donate CPU cycles to a flawed method of alien hunting, when there are far more worthy candidates out there (related Slashdot discussion here, postmortem here). So, in the spirit of contributing something worthwhile to humanity I’ve installed it again, but, this time SETI@Home has to share my processor with ClimatePrediction.net and Predictor@Home. I humbly suggest that you contribute some CPU cycles to this worthy cause too. Here is more information on the different projects that run on BOINC.