You're always complaining that David only thinks for himself, that he doesn't allow for outsiders to request changes or point out glaring mistakes.
Here's your chance for ultimate glory: A challenge. Help out the BOINC developers with some things that they're not so much stuck with, but which require an external eye on things.

Help the developers out making Boinc that bit easier to use for others. Once every blue moon I'll put in a thing that the developers would like to have changed/renamed/taken apart & rebuild, but that we cannot get across to any layman as we're thinking too difficult about it. Or there's a technical challenge at stake.

This thread will hold the main problems. You can post in your own thread in this forum what you think about it. Or use the thread I made for this purpose. There is no time limit - unless otherwise stated in the post.

So go on then, make that difference. Or stop your complaining.

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For this first item, it's the difficulty that people have with the following preferences:

Suspend work if CPU usage is above 25% - 0 means no restriction. Enforced by version 6.10.30+

and

Use at most 100% of CPU time.
Can be used to reduce CPU heat.

Apparently there's folks out there who believe that the first preference is a throttle function, while with the second you set the amount of CPUs. Or something... ;-)

I've so far changed it to the less technophobic:

"Suspend all work when other programs use more than X% CPU cycles.
Stops project applications doing work when any other program outside of BOINC uses more than the amount of CPU set.
0 means no restriction. Requires BOINC 6.10.30 or above.

and

Throttle to use a maximum X% of CPU cycles.
Can be used to reduce CPU heat.

If you think you can do better, then please do so. The only restrictions are that we cannot be too technical and that it has to be translatable to other languages.

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Personally. I'd drop the word cycle. Or I'd change to x% of the CPU resource/capacity/capability.

I can check with my boss to see how easy/hard it would be to translate into Korean. Yes, a sample size of one isn't much. :=)

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Kathryn :o)

Personally. I'd drop the word cycle.

Yeah, it isn't in the original preference, but there I feel that "CPU time" doesn't bring across what we mean either. It is about throttling the CPU.

Or I'd change to x% of the CPU resource/capacity/capability.

Not resource as that could clash with the Resource Share, which is about everything, not just the CPU.

Open for other options, though. :)

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The past week there was a new option on the Seti account preferences, since disabled. It was a "Delete Account" option, which did what it says it would do on the tin:

Deleting your account will remove all of your personal information from our servers, including your profile and message-board posts.
No jobs will be issued to any computers attached to this account.

Thinking that a hotheaded person would delete his account in a rage and then when clearer thoughts surfaced, he'd ask for his account back, I asked that a sterner warning be added; which it was.

This cannot be undone. Once your account has been deleted, you cannot get it back.

And even then... not really secure all. Some would only need to have access to an account, not even necessarily his own, to be able to delete it without option to get it back.

As such, here we are. The option is there, it's just disabled at this time until there's a (somewhat) fool-proof method of removing the accounts.

The Ultimate Safest Way is of course to never let the user do it and leave it to an administrator, after the user requested it in a formal way. Problem here is that the administrator may not always have time, or there could hypothetically be something of a very secret thing in that account, that not even an admin should know about. Proof of ET or who shot JFK... things like that. ;-)

In the mean time I sent two options to David already, both of which could be used, but are less secure than aforementioned option. I'm thinking of using the password or the account key. Now any password change link (such as http://boinc.berkeley.edu/dev/edit_passwd_form.php) only asks for the NEW password. None ask for the old password, but OK one may have forgotten that one and logged in with the account key. We can't use the account key at this moment either, as that one's shown prominently
on the account page. Perhaps that this is where we should make the change.

Option 1.
1. Account page only shows Weak account key.
2. edit_passwd_form.php will only change the password, no need for the previous password.
3. Account key is sent to the user again with the email, after registration. This then requires a real email address (and not as is now, a fake one).
4. Validated email address is required.
5. Delete account can only be initiated with the account key.

Option 2.
1. edit_passwd_form.php requires previous password if we want to use the password.
2. Real email address required for account registration.
3. Validated email address required.
4. This way we can send the old password to the user's email address (upon request).
5. User can delete account with his password.

Do you think you can think of another easy to use, but secure method? Tell us.

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