Hi, I used to do alot of WU's years ago and just returned to seti@home and ya know I have never known why they give "credits" for the work. What good are credits?

WUs are of different size, so just counting WUs doesn't necessarily reflect your real participation. Even within Seti only they will vary more now that a second type of application (Astropulse) has been released, let alone BOINC-wide through all the different projects.

Credits are a kind of norming factor, originally calculated by a benchmark * computing time * factor for better numbers, but as people began to cheat by inflating their benchmarks a lot of projects have gone to counting flops.

You can buy a decent coffee in a decent Café for a bunch of Credits (and some real currency ).