Frankly, the one part that mystifies me is the large space between member/title and the country... nobody is going to put her/his full home address there. Contract and insert a separation line if need be is my thought on this.

I don't think the point is to reward the ones that have money to buy the fastest systms. There is a lot of bandwidth tied up on all those 900MHz systems out there. That is the whole point of distrubuted computing. I don't want to see them give up on WCG and go somewhere else just because you want more points.

Skgiven, do you remember the first introduction of badges (you should because you joined earlier than me)? I think it was just one single badge per project to acknowledge that you contributed at least 14 days of work for that project. That intention was changed later to provide more levels of contributed time, first until yellow, now until blue(, later until ???). So this was a consistent extention of the original purpose - to show that (and how long) a member contributed to a project, not to reward its computing power.
To do that the badge ideology really had to be changed, but that's a key question - acknowledge contributed time or contributed computing power. I prefer the first one because I consider it more important to attract masses of private computer users (with less computing power) that few computer farm owners (with incredible computer power). Sure the latter case could speed up project completion but if the masses back out simply because they have not the slightest chance to reach more than the first few badge levels, we loose popularity and attractiveness. And that could mean that the computer farmers later vanish as well.
WCG should not degenerate to a competition platform for most computer power...

just my opinion

Skgiven, there is a problem with awarding Badges based on workunits:

When the Genome Comparison Project was active the workunits were so tiny that a lot of people got tens of thousands out of it in merely months. Other projects have huge workunits equal to 15-20 work units form Genome Comparison, or old Dengue workunits (before linking 4-6 of them in a bigger unit) etc.
So, the workunits being variable in length, the Badge Levels would be way easier to get in Help Cure Muscular Dystrophy - Phase 2 for example than FightAIDS@Home or Human Proteome Folding - Phase 2.
That being said, as a side effect people will tend to go to the projects were more workunits can be process in one day than the other Projects. That will create a bad environment for science as some very important Projects need bigger units and they will not be favoured by "badge hunters". The "per Day" system has some flaws but in general suits the needs of badge hunter or Projects.
Also changing the hole system to "per Points" will require a lot of work then just sticking with the old system "per Day" that it just needs adjustment here and there and maybe more Badges "to go boldly where nobody went before"....

The whole point of introducing the badges was so all the "normal users", the roughly 70% of users that runs WCG on a single computer that is either single-core or dual-core, and has no hope of ever reaching top-10k by points, also should get some recognition for their long-term committment to WCG.

Please remember, if the "target usage" of the home-computer is to read/write email, check the news and pay the bills, and maybe play an ocassional game like solitaire, you don't need an i7 to do this, even a dual-core is on the high-end compared to the requirements. Since already got the computer, choosing to also run one or more DC-projects is just an added bonus for the projects, and actually it would be an advantage to get many more of these users to run DC on their system.


For the multi-computer-users, there's the top-lists to compete in, so adding point-based badges isn't really neccessary in my opinion.