Ideally ofcourse the BOINC-server should be smarter and noticing your PC can't handle the ultra-big WU, send you one of the regular, smaller jobs. But this feature is not yet available in BOINC server code unfortunately.

Actually it is. There is only enough space in the feeder queue for 1,000 workunits. When the scheduler connects up to the feeder queue to get work it cycles through all 1,000 slots looking for available work. When all 1,000 queue slots are filled up with large jobs that is what the server returns.

Splitting the queue up equally is supported with different applications. If this is really a big problem we could set things up in such a way that the project believes it has more than one application and 50% of the queue is saved for each application.

Interview: Oil Expert Explains What's Driving Record High Prices
By Jeffrey Donovan
Azerbaijan -- Caspian oil derricks, pollution
(AFP)
Oil prices have climbed steadily since 2004, and today they rose again to new record highs of more than $74 a barrel. What's driving prices -- and can they be brought back down? Government officials and oil executives from more than 65 nations will be asking those same questions when they gather in Qatar on April 22-23 at a meeting of the International Energy Forum. Among the factors driving prices up are fears over possible supply disruption in major oil-producing states such as Iran, Iraq, and Nigeria, where a rebel offensive has cut off one-quarter of output.

PRAGUE, April 20, 2006 (RFE/RL) -- RFE/RL spoke with Leo Drollas, the deputy director and chief economist of London's Center for Global Energy Studies.

RFE/RL: The price of oil continues to climb to record highs. Analysts say fears over the Iranian nuclear crisis is one of only several issues driving up prices. Iranian President Mahmud Ahmadinejad only strengthened those fears on April 19, when he said oil prices are still below their true levels. What's your take?

Leo Drollas: The first thing we must say is that these high prices are really paper prices, in a sense for paper oil, they're not the prompt market -- that is, for real wet barrels, as we call them. So they're obviously driven a lot by news and by sentiment, and they refer to oil that is bought and sold months ahead through paper contracts. And these prices move quite quickly on news, and the news is bad at the moment for oil because of the Iranian standoff, because of problems continuing in Nigeria, and many other factors in the market.

RFE/RL: So you're saying that, beyond fears over Iran or supply disruptions in Nigeria, the futures market is driving up prices?

Drollas: There's a lot of money that has come into the oil market over the last few years. The money that is now tracking commodity indices has increased from about $8 billion in 2001 to about $70 billion today. So we've got a huge influx of money into commodity-tracking indices, and a large part of those indices of course refer to oil. So we've got a lot of speculative money or hedge-fund money or other kinds of investors coming into oil, thinking they're on a roll now and that oil prices will forever increase. And in a sense, this tends to fulfill the prophecy, as long as the money keeps coming in.

RFE/RL: How does that drive prices, exactly?

Drollas: What tends to happen is that the futures prices, especially for months further out, tend to rise, and they create a difference between future prices for outer months and spot prices for oil, especially for "wet" barrels. And this differential encourages people to buy physical oil, and therefore, the pressure from the futures market is transmitted to the actual spot market for oil.

RFE/RL: But isn't capacity part of the problem as well, both in terms of the actual supply of oil and the fact that, particularly in the United States, refining capacity is down, with some refining facilities still not fully recovered from last summer's Hurricane Katrina?

Drollas: Well, this is the huge, unanswerable question as to what component of this price run-up is due to speculation, as we call it, or due to real fundamental factors. My own gut feeling is that maybe $15 [per barrel] or so at the moment is due to these kind of pressures from the futures market, from speculation if you like. In other words, the price should have been quite a bit lower than that, because there isn't actually a physical shortage of oil at this very moment.

RFE/RL: So this gets us back, perhaps, to emotions -- to fears over possible supply disruptions due to crises in key producing countries, such as Iran, Nigeria, Iraq.

Drollas: Of course, the fear is there because of these factors: Iran and Nigeria in particular, and also Venezuela to some extent in the background. But one must bear in mind that there is a physical problem too, in the sense that the spare capacity to produce crude oil in the world is under 3 percent of global demand for oil. And a business that runs with such little spare capacity is vulnerable to all kinds of events that make people worry or fear whether the system is able to cope with the pressures that are put on it in, let's say, the autumn or the winter that we have ahead of us.

As for the redundency on the results, well I don't think they changed it from the default BOINC settings ;-), also since it goes into a database and they are actually generating 'results' (rather than R@H's more developmental setting) it needs to be double checked at least. Also that's the way it works on Grid.org software...

Have you studied the effect of oil price on the other commodities? I mean if price of oil goes up, it will cost more to run a tractor across a field and harvest sugar cane, or cotton or oranges... and electricity costs will increase which has a great impact on smelting of metals, precious or otherwise. I mean how much of the increase in the prices of these other commodities is directly attributable to the increase in oil prices?

I have been finding lately that when I check on my computer running version 5.24 I see the following message:

6/24/2006 1:31:16 PM|rosetta@home|Message from server: Your computer has only 266780672 bytes of memory; workunit requires 233219328 more bytes
6/24/2006 1:31:16 PM|rosetta@home|Message from server: No work sent
6/24/2006 1:31:16 PM|rosetta@home|Message from server: (there was work but your computer doesn't have enough memory)
6/24/2006 1:31:16 PM|rosetta@home|No work from project

E-Mail from CASP team 16/06/2006

Bad news first ...
It was brought to our attention that a paper was published on CASP7
structure T0294 ( http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.jmb.2006.05.018 ).
As this happened less than 3 weeks after the target release, we are
canceling this target according to our rules. No models will be assessed
on this target. This information leak is not a fault of the SG center
that provided the target, as the publication is from another group that
solved the same protein.

@Dimitri

The big WU are only sent to machines with 512 MB RAM and above. I'm glad they finally decided to use this BOINC-Feature to send larger jobs to higher-spec-machines.

We've marked these WUs as high memory jobs and they will only be sent to machines with more than 512M memory.

The Danger of Speculation
Commentary by Mike Norman for FOX Fan Central

Mike Norman
It’s time to speak the truth. No more disingenuous questioning and wondering. No more exasperated resignation. We know the reason why oil prices are high, and it’s time to admit it and do something about it.

Oil prices are high because of speculation, pure and simple. That’s not an assertion, that’s a fact. Yet rather than attack the speculation and rid ourselves of the problem, we flail away at the symptoms. High gasoline prices? Oh, let’s use hybrid cars, or drill in the Rockies or off the California coast. How about doubling the use of ethanol, even though it costs more to produce than the energy you get out of it? Then again, we can go to Alaska, or build more refineries, or triple the number of nuclear power plants. Sound good?

What if we just stopped the speculation?

No, you can’t do that! That would be interfering with the “free” market.

Hey, the “free” market is starting to get awfully expensive.

Tell me, how is it free when speculators rule the roost? It’s one thing when they do what they do with pieces of paper called stocks, but it’s another when they do it with a vital commodity like oil. We saw the devastation their behavior wrought in the 1990s, and we’re witnessing it again right now.

In an interview after a meeting here of the Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries, Ali Naimi said other cartel members are having trouble finding buyers for all the crude they are producing, at a time when global stores are near full and many refiners have closed facilities for routine maintenance. One Saudi official said an estimated three million barrels a day of refining capacity is out of action and unable to process crude, at a time when the world is using some 84 million barrels a day of oil products like gasoline and jet fuel.

"It's not just heavy oil. Even light oil is having problems" finding buyers, Mr. Naimi said, referring to premium grades of crude known as light crude that are highly prized by refiners because they have high gasoline yields.

Asked if the kingdom was easing up on supply because of concern about the buildup of inventories in the U.S. and other importing countries, Mr. Naimi rejected such a motive, replying: "At $70 a barrel?" Mr. Naimi suggested that producers will sell all the oil they can at such high prices.

The implication of Mr. Naimi's remarks is that Saudi Arabia would again open its oil spigots when buyers ask for more oil. For the past two years, the Saudis say, their policy has been to sell as much oil as buyers want, to the limit of the kingdom's production capacity.