grid.org bought some "new" servers a year or two ago, but I never saw a commitment to use them for the "free" portion of grid computing, meaning you.

I saw one post that the notice to shut down was later than planned. Another moderator said that he would ask that the forum be kept around for awhile. I suggested that he ask someone besides who did the planning. The forum disappeared and the end of mission page showed up at 12:12pm, Fri. April 27, 2007. The Mary Bass thing about new versions or a new beta program could have been mere appeasement, since she was really a Marketing Type Person, not a programmer.

This was not the first time that members were misdirected. "junk" workunits were crunched for 6 months while they were "waiting for work". It was felt that keeping the computers busy with "crud" was better than leaving them idle and getting complaints. I left at about that time and came over here. A couple of months ago, the Rosetta scientists announced that the data that UD gave them for Rosetta Phase 1 was no good. A few members liked to post that they would stay no matter what. One asked Thursday when the grid.org beta program would be ready. I suggested that he read the shutdown notice, and he agreed that it was "a kick in the head".
I never did hear much from Oxford in the last year with new Chemistry projects over there. I don't think that UD really had ANYTHING to work on recently, so they just pulled the plug at an arbitrary date, not waiting for junk workunits out there to finish. I saw no notice of new projects being worked on. I looked.

The evangelism that their "mission was complete" will also come back to bite them. How many of their members actually work for some of those commercial companies that would use grid computing? Ill will and bad reputations are remembered long after the "success marketing messages". The 4th anniversary of "OUR MISSION IN IRAQ IS COMPLETE" is coming up this week.

I don't think that BOINC is required to use UD software, since there is an amazing amount of different projects out there that do all kinds of different stuff. I am connected to 39 myself on one computer. At some point, the UD projects will wither due to the continued use of MP 3 and new things will appear that won't work on MP 3. It will then be BOINC all the way.

I also don't think either that WCG felt like they wanted to be the first guinea pig user of MP 5. I feel that the shutdown was based on their own "bunker mentality", and not anything that either happened or didn't happen over here. On the other hand, what has been running here actually worked. The WCG version of UD.EXE was slightly different from the grid.org version of UD.EXE for whatever reason. The Rosetta scientists were very happy with it, ergo YOU are now working on Rosetta phase 2. WCG has already promised not to play with junk workunits, after seeing many of the earlier concerns from grid.org members that came over here in an earlier migration after the grid.org potato famine.

They should have ordered all of them in XXXXXXXXS size for forest wear instead of XXL overoptimistic.

Yah. I noticed that. Why should that be any different then when somebody was actually in the server room to notice? (I think they are leaving it up for a week, for some unknown reason.) I was trying to get a total to send to http://theregister.co.uk. Their team finished up on grid.org, but they don't seem to realize that I helped to start over 40 others at other projects. It just doesn't sink in --- at either place.