Well the system has you by the short hairs. You can't get to the top in the DC world without playing the BOINC game. The only alternative in town is to do the non-BOINC projects of which there used to be a bunch of them. However all the boinc crowd pressured the heck out of the majority of the projects and they switched over to boinc. So now reality is that you either play the boinc game or you have a very restricted set of games to play. Take a look at folding@home. They don't play boinc. However they aren't immune to the points game manipulation. Recently the SMP projects within f@h were realigned with their QRB (quick return bonus) point system, which also has point parity issues within just the SMP client projects, let alone the GPU and the non-SMP client projects. And again there you have the science nazi's and the points nazi's going at each other's throats.

So the point is that it doesn't matter really whether it is boinc or non-boinc as there is always going to be manipulation of the system with the carrot and stick approach.

And to carry it on a step further, take a look at distributed.net. They had a nice, solid approach with a good following. One of the projects, RC5-72, turned out to be adaptable to parallel processing so voila, along came the gpu clients for it. And then along came a gent that created a wapper for it, DNETC.COM and there ends up another adaptation to the point system that created a bunch of internal controversy. So within the distributed.net original point system all the folks running the boinc wrapper for dnetc.com end up under one "user" account in the original distributed.net system -- but within the boinc system it is a separate project with it's own point system that falls within the boinc realm. And then voila! Along comes moowrap.net, yet another boinc wrapper for RC5-72. However with this one, it allows each user to add points within the original distributed.net's point system as well as being a boinc project that also has a point system within the boinc realm. So in effect, with moo wrap, crunching away with the boinc wrapper for it you get points within the boinc realm, as well as points within the original distributed.net's point system so you are getting points in two projects by crunching "one" project. So what would that impact? Oh things like the d.c. vault project if it had added both distributed.net's rc5-72 and the moo-wrapper project withing it's competition walls.

So now my brain is beginning to hurt...................................... But anyways, you will always have manipulation of the point system no matter what. DA tried to create a system that would keep things fair across the board -- sort of a global DC point thing to keep some parity across various projects. Why? Hard to say. I don't really think that the folks that create projects really give a rip about any global parity in anything. Rather all they care about is their own project and getting the project's work completed. There's stats whores out there in the world, there's points whores out there, there's scientific whores, and just a lot of plain old whores.

In the end, you crunch because you like to crunch for whatever reason. I participated in the boinc beta testing in the beginning of boinc. There was some serious cheating going on in the DC world prior to the boinc thing. In that regard, boinc put forth a serious effort to try and make a level playing field for all. Boinc was a huge effort that took a ton of time and a ton of talent to produce. Some like it, some hate it. But to build a replacement for boinc is a massive undertaking, and in the end, what would it accomplish? More than likely you would end up with somewhat of the same animal, complete with a love/hate relationship as there is with boinc. Myself, I don't care for boinc and prefer the non-boinc projects. Reality is though that the great masses out there, the great unwashed of the computer users of the world find it easy to use and it has enabled them to participate in many worthwhile projects. And at the other end of the spectrum you have folding@home which is non-boinc, and also has a massive following.

About the only thing for sure here is that Team seti.USA has to embrace the boinc world, otherwise is changes the whole game of why the team originally came into being. So while folks are pinging on DA, it's sorta like saying toilets suck. They may well suck, but they happen to be the most efficient way at present for doing the job they were designed to do................. sorta like DA's boinc.