Is it possible to include a (empty) "skins" folder in the next release?

Sure.

Seems that SETI@Home is a victim of its own success; or maybe a run-away train. Has there been any discussion on methods to allocate resources between projects? For example, implementing a per user work unit limit based on the users contributions to the project; contributions such as money, time, other projects in which user participates.

The philisophy of the BOINC the framework is to let the participants decide how they want to volunteer their resources.  To that end, it is up to each project to sell their project to the community.  Donating computation time to a project is already an expensive proposition, it costs time, electrictity, and internet bandwidth.  To be honest I cannot see a project being successfull if they started selling workunits to process.  At that point I think a project would loose it's fun and cool factors and would find it's big iron contributors defecting to other projects.  Eventually that project would only be left wth the die hard fans wth money to burn and those who were not affected by the cap.

At that point the project is pretty much on life support, and waiting for the people who are funding the project to pull the plug.

What's the development progress in getting the boinc code (I assume 5.9.x now) up to scratch to use wxWidgets 2.8?

Charlie started the port to 2.8, there are a few things on my plate to tackle. Text gets clipped in the wizard for instance. We'll have it up to spec when we start the 5.9-5.10 release push.

Can auto update (I see it in the code for 5.9.x) be turned on in 5.8.8+ or has it been left out?

I'm not sure what the client will do at this point if it receives the auto update tag, it should just be ignored at this point. That feature has another month of work or more before it is ready for use.

What do you think are the major improvement in 5.8.8+ over 5.4.9/11?

There have been so many under the cover improments, I think the big ones are the improved CPU scheduler, the improved work fetech policy, and CPU throttling.  On the Mac we have the sand boxed environment which is a huge improvement.

What are you most chuffed about getting fixed/working/added?

What do you mean by chuffed?

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Thanks in advance.

----- Rom