Being serious for a moment and ignoring the smiley, you can get the same effect by running a hypervisor (VMware, Xen, etc.) and more than one operating system. Some OS's that are not hypervisor-aware will continue to accumulate CPU time when the OS is not actually running. There's really no excuse for this ... mainframes have handled it properly for about 40 years now. Anyway, back to the point, you can get more CPU hours while getting less actual work done, which isn't good for WCG or for the projects involved.

It will always be possible to "game" the system one way or another, but everyone's goal should be to get the most WUs completed (and valid) as quickly as possible.

- D

Isn't it all about crunching WU? A quad that crunches 5 WU is more valuable to WCG than a single core P3 crunching one WU. Any form of recognition that attempts to make the two machines equal is counter-productive to the idea of recognizing member's contributions.

another thought I had was to make badges for use of specific operating systems. I only use Windows and Linux but I would like to show people that I use these kinds of systems...

I say leave things as they are, but additions would be nice. The enhanced badges for longer achievements are a great idea - whether it's diamonds added or a numeral. I also like the idea of printable certificates. Stanford's Folding at Home has some linked straight from your stats page and based upon your most recent milestone in a couple categories. Example points Certificate Example Results Certificate Also, the old Find-A-Drug project did similar certificates including one for the total number of Gigaflops you had contributed, which I thought was an interesting measure.

Certificates on call off is a standard BOINC website feature these days, at least now seen it on a number of projects.