Hi Everyone,

My first post (please excuse my shaking hands) ;-)

The question is how to crunch more numbers. It would appear that we have almost all the "geeks" crunching for BONIC now and a few with a lot of time on their hands.

In a "Shout" post I made the comment about making "it" more "friendly and somehow more appealing to the masses of people who leave their machines on 24/7.

I got one of my friends to join the BONIC, but he is not sure he wants to remain. Here is his comment:
"Not sure if I like running this [SETI] program [as] it won’t let the computer sleep and it speeds up the hard drive as I can hear it humming along, drawing extra power."

This is a person who is making judgments about something he knows little about. Not his fault as he is not a "geek". He is a great guy, father and brilliant in his profession, but sorta computer illiterate. Computer challenged, if you prefer.

When I first approached him via email to join I never got an answer. Later I found out while replacing a HD in his machine, he didn't have a clue on how to go about joining and the different screens were daunting. I spent a whole 3 minutes and got him in. He still didn't know "why" were doing this AND how his machine would help. I spent some time doing a dog and pony show for him and know he understands. So what do we do as a collective group to invite "others" to this worthwhile effort with out having to go over to their homes and talking like this is some sort of a pyramid scheme of some sort.

One suggestion is to invite The Discovery Channel to film a documentary. That would certainly be a big boost in acquiring new members. Nothing like notoriety I always say. BUT, we have to be able to keep them.

Another is to restructure the presentation of the stats so the "little" guy can participate. The way they are now only allows those with the largest number of credits to be number one. That is not bad by itself, but the new guy crunching 10 - 20 credits a day will never have a chance at any thing. My average runs about 390 credits per day. I will never be able to compete with those who can crunch a third or more credits. As it is, I have the largest I can afford: 3.4 GHz, 800 FSB 2 gig DDR2 512, WD SATA and this set me back a pretty penny. (I didn't put it together for this project)

Getting more people to join the team will help, but if they are the average Joe, I would need 100's and that is not a realistic goal - I do have a life. (I know I should give it up for the cause of BONIC, but my wife has something to say about it as you might guess.)

We have some smart people out there who can surly come up with ways to make this more of a game of competition. The "normal" cruncher is going to run credits in the low 50's a day / week and we need them to feel part of the team. I like basketball, but the Miami Heat has not been knocking on my door for me to put in a celebrity appearance because I crunch numbers for BONIC.

Another way to enhance stats is to allow teams / member's to join other teams without loosing their accumulated credits. I have some other ideas, but I would like a discussion first from others out there.

HOW do we do this? Comments?