SoylentNews

martyb [soylentnews.org] writes:

Another month is winding to a close. Here are a few updates on site activity. If you are interested, please read on after the fold. Otherwise, a new story will be along shortly.

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Server Updates:
As I write this, The Mighty Buzzard [soylentnews.org] is in the process of rebuilding three of our Gentoo servers: lithium (our development server; hosts https://dev.soylentnews.org/ [soylentnews.org]), aluminum (our eventual replacement for beryllium which is our sole CentOS server), and magnesium (which is one of our two load balancers; the other is sodium). All rebuilds are in progress and happening in the background. The only user-noticeable impact should be a brief outage when the dev server reboots. That is anticipated to occur later tonight (EDT).

Editor Activity:
First off, it's my pleasure to welcome Subsentient [soylentnews.org] back to editing duties on SoylentNews after a bit of a hiatus. We look forward to his contributions to the site! Also, it gives me great pleasure to announce that chromas [soylentnews.org] just posted his 1,200th story! [soylentnews.org] And with that accomplishment, it also marks his moving up to 9th place among our Most Active Editors on the site Hall of Fame [soylentnews.org]! Congratulations! That represents a great commitment of time and energy in support of SoylentNews. (Not to mention his systemd bot on IRC (Internet Relay Chat) [soylentnews.org] which offers several commands that make our jobs as editor so much easier. Thanks chromas!

Folding@Home (F@H):
Folding@Home is a distributed computing project that leverages spare computing resources on participant's computers. The majority of those resources arre now being applied to better understand the SARS‑CoV‑2 [wikipedia.org] virus which causes COVID-19 [wikipedia.org]. The current statistics [worldometers.info] reveal over 25 million cases world-wide with over 850,000 deaths. Note that many survivors have reported experiencing long term, debilitating consequences. Also, there is not just one virus. It has been mutating as it spreads, so continued monitoring is required to keep on top of things.

Back to F@H, it is my pleasure to report that Runaway1956 [soylentnews.org] is now at the top of our team's standings [soylentnews.org] with 396,857,185 Credits and having completed 11,702 Work Units. That makes him the 2,461th-highest contributor in the world. Thank-you so much for your efforts to fight this terrible disease!

Original Submission