Poll: The Great OcUK DC Census [Poll]

[Joe42]

1: Please vote, tell us why you aren't folding.
2: Take a look below at the poll option you just voted for.
3: Take a look at the two main reasons you should fold.
4: Follow a link to the folding guide that suits you, or pop along to the dc forum and someone will take you through it.
5: Sit back and enjoy watching your pc and your team mount the ranks, while helping medical reaserch.
_________________________________________________
2:

1: I am, for OcUK.
-Excellent. Fold on!

2: I am, for another team.
-Traitor! (better than not folding I suppose, at least your helping the medical research side of it)

3: I’m running a BOINC project instead.
-As long as its doing something worthwhile and its doing it for OcUK, that’s great.

4. I don't know what it is.
-Folding@home is a scientific study using idle CPU time on thousands of pc's to investigate proteins when they misfold, one of the causes of many diseases.
-Its also a competitive sport for pc enthusiasts to compete with each other on who can crunch the most work units and earn the most points.

5. I can't be bothered.
-If you can find time to browse this forum surely you can find 5 minutes to start folding.

6. I thought it made my pc run slower.
-Nope, it stops working as soon as you need the pc.

7. I don't think my PC is powerful enough.
-Any pc bought in the last 5 years is fine, every little helps.

8. I don't think I can run it on my computer.
-There are Linux and Mac clients, see the advanced guide for details.

9. I don't have time
-You don't have 5 minutes to help find a cure for cancer and help your forum?
5 minutes is all it takes.

10. Pc gets too hot/noisy/uses too much power.
-Your pc is poorly designed; sort out noise or cooling problems by posting in the Overclocking & Cooling forum. Folding can be run at a low CPU percentage if necessary which will lower heat and power consumption.

11. I thought you'd need to run your computer 24/7?
-Nope, obviously it will help your production but the client writes regular save points and the deadlines are long enough that most computers can still participate even if they are a bit old or not on much.

12. It's all just pretend isn't it? They haven't actually found anything have they?
-Although it's quite theoretical there have been many interesting and useful findings over the years that Folding@Home has been running
If the medical research side of it doesn't interest you for some reason, its still worth doing to help your team and your forum and for the competitive side.
The fact that nothing was ever found by the SETI project didn’t stop OcUK becoming the worlds best team.

13. Why should I spend money doing research for some drugs company to then charge me for what's produced?
-Folding is run as a non-profit project and all findings are made publicly available through the folding website and publications.

14. It will stress my pc and cause parts to fail prematurely.
Your pc might last 15 years if you don't run folding, 10 if you do. It will be useless due to advances in technology in about 5. Those aren’t actual numbers, but how many CPUs do you know of that died of old age? Even massively overvolted CPUs outlast their usefulness.

The question you should really be asking is 'why didn't i start folding before?'

_________________________________________________
3:
Now let me tell you why you should fold:

1: As mentioned, you’re helping medical research and potentially helping cure diseases such as Alzheimer's and Cancer. That in itself should be a good enough reason to run folding. More info here.

2: Your forum is competing with various other teams and organisations, as well as members of the team competing amongst themselves. It is a lot of fun and it can be very satisfying to pit your latest and greatest machine against the rest and see who you can beat, and who you can’t!
You can take a look at the teams list here to see who we’re up against, the team stats here to see how we’re doing, and the users stats here to see who your up against!
All available from the main EOC stats page here.
_________________________________________________
4:
How to start folding:
-Click here for the Quick and easy guide to folding at home.

-Click here for the complete advanced guide to folding if you have a little more time.

-If you want to ask any questions or want any help, you can start a thread in the DC forum.

-If you can’t be bothered to read either of the guides, just start a thread in the DC forum and someone will be happy to guide you through the setup step by step.
_________________________________________________
5:
You can read the latest edition of the Folding@Home Weekly team news here and get the low-down on who’s stomping who and how everyone and the team has been doing over the last week or so .

Thanks for reading; I hope to see you in the team news next week.
Fold on!

 

[Joe42]

Had to shrink 13 a little, but done.

Fantastic.
Thanks.

Should be an option for everyone there, if not let me know.

 

[Joe42]

All those who voted for the 'i can't be bothered' option, it won't take much longer than it took you to vote in the poll to have a quick read of the Quick and Easy guide to Folding at Home.

Or you can start a thread in the dc forum and someone will tell you what you need to do.

 

[Joe42]

Got a conroe on order though, so if it doesnt turn my room in to an oven i might join the `fun`.

They run relatively cool, so you should be able to join in. It is fun, i promise you. Also rather addictive.

 

[Joe42]

One not on the list.

I simply don't want to.

You must have a reason for not wanting to...
Although before i started folding, i think my reason was i saw no reason to fold, meaning i didn't know it would be fun. Would you say your reason is 'i see no reason to fold'?

 

[Joe42]

That's just plain rubbish. My PC uses too much power by being on when I'm not using it, it's nothing to do with the thermal performance of it. When I don't want to use it, why should I bother leaving it on, wasting electricity that I don't want to pay for?

Folding runs while you are using it, and most of the time you are using it you are not using 100% cpu time, so folding will use the cpu time that you are not using, which unless your playing a game will be most of it.
It will only use the small amount of extra electricity required to run at 100% cpu utilisation all the time rather than about 10% of the time.

I suggested this be put in GH

As i said, i'm not putting spam in a serious hardware forum, a gh thead must be made for the gh, such as a folding competition or a benchmarking thread or something. This thread in gh would be spam.

Are you lot in DC really that hard up for people, its like 3 DC pimps per week now.

We have an ambition to become the best team in the world, and we are representing you and this forum.

Please don't forget that this is primarily a medical reaserch project helping to cure illnesses. That alone should be reason enough to spend 5 minutes setting it up, if the competative side doesn't appeal to you.

Thanks to everyone who has voted, and welcome to the team to everyone who has joined in. Keep the comments coming...

 

[Joe42]

Is it really 'spam' considering its a research project?

In a hardware forum yes, in the general discussion, no.

How can i track my own stats and see myself in the OcUK team?

Welcome to the team.
Its all in my first post, section 3 part 2 near the bottom.
You won't appear untill sometime after you finish your first wu.
Download fahmon to see what its doing.
The team users list here is probably what you want.

 

[Joe42]

If like me you want to keep a bit of your cpu free you can use
http://mion.faireal.net/BES/

to manage how much of your cpu SETI will use.

I didn't see it mentioned in the DC sticky.

Folding will let you set cpu ultilisation, so if you want to you can set it to use 50% so it doesn't get too hot or loud or whatever.

 

[Joe42]

Sitting here sweating like a peodophile in a playground at 00:48 because i'm a Dc addict

Will be shopping for an Athlon mp rig for team 10 soon

Why do my folding gd threads always coincide with extremely hot weather...?

 

[Joe42]

Simply because it costs me more in electricity bills to run a client.

This was proved to myself, when I stopped running United Devices, and my bill dropped by an average of £1/week.

Would you think of it in the same way if i was asking you to donate £52 per year to a medical reaserch charity such as Cancer Reaserch?

For all those saying they can't be bothered, please remember what this really is, its helping to find cures for diseases.

I have written a Quick and Easy guide to folding at home which makes it extremely easy to set up and takes literally 5 minutes to do.
Surely its worth the bother? The guide is here.

Thanks for voting everyone, and thanks for joining to those who have.

 

[Joe42]

Edit: Out of interest, how much does it cost in electricity to run folding above the cost of having the PC idle?

According to Basmic about £1 per week, but i'm not sure how many pc's that was and if they were on 24/7 or what. It also depends on the pc itself and the cost of electricity.

 

[Joe42]

Its reasoning why we should be arsed..

To help find cures for diseases and donate cpu time to medical reaserch which may benefit you and will certainly benefit the human race.

 

[Joe42]

DC stands for Distrubuted computing, its a way of splitting computational work which would require a super computer amoungst millions of home pcs, as the university that runs Folding at Home cannot afford a huge super computer.

What is protein folding and how is folding linked to disease?
Proteins are biology's workhorses -- its "nanomachines." Before proteins can carry out these important functions, they assemble themselves, or "fold." The process of protein folding, while critical and fundamental to virtually all of biology, in many ways remains a mystery.

Moreover, when proteins do not fold correctly (i.e. "misfold"), there can be serious consequences, including many well known diseases, such as Alzheimer's, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington's, Parkinson's disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes.

You can help by simply running a piece of software. Folding@Home is a distributed computing project -- people from through out the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer makes the project closer to our goals.

Folding@Home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems thousands to millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

Take a look at the official site: http://folding.stanford.edu/

 

[Joe42]

Well... theres life in the old thread yet.

Lets have a few of you people who voted lazy take a look at the quick and easy guide and start folding... for cancer reaserch and for the good of OcUK. You know you want to...

 

[Joe42]

Thats fair enough, but surely a pc old enough to struggle with firefox and winamp isn't going to have a massive heat output?

I mean i'm folding on a p3 733 that gets used for everything except games and its as fast as it is without folding installed. Same goes for my celeron 800.

 

[Joe42]

Since the Quick and Easy guide to folding at home isn't quick and easy enough for some people, i present:

The Quicker and Easier Guide to Folding@Home:

1: Download the client here

2: Make a folder for it in program files or somewhere and put the downloaded client in the folder

3: Run the client and enter the following:
* User name: enter a username, pick one that no other OcUK folder has chosen
* Team number: 10
* Launch automatically at machine startup, installing this as a service: yes
* Ask before fetching/sending: no
* Use Internet Explorer settings: yes/no. yes if you have a proxy, else no
* Use Proxy: yes/no as above
* Allow receipt of work assignments and return of work results greater than 5MB in size (such work units may have large memory demands): If you use the machine for things other than F@H and have less than 256MB RAM no, else yes because these units get far better points
* Change advanced options: no

4: Done! When you reboot the window will disappear and you will never know its there. Your pc is now helping find a cure for cancer and its helping team ocuk.

 

[Joe42]

There aren't any deadlineless wus atm.
When they pass their deadline do normal wus terminate?

 

[Joe42]

Some people do it for the competative side, some for the medical reaserch side, some for both.
I like to feel i'm doing something that could cure cancer, but its the competative side that keeps me interested. You don't need to be interested in it to run it, once its installed you need never do anything again, but it is fun competing and with other users and other teams.

 

[Joe42]

Snip

If you want to have a play with the advanced options, just say yes instead of no and if you are unsure what anything means ask in here.
If you want to re-configure it, make a shortcut to the client and right click on it, then put -configonly at the end of the target field. It needs a space between it and whats already in the target field. If you can't get that to work let me know.

You can have a read of the complete guide here, but its quite long so if its easier just ask about everything your stuck on in here.

Thanks for joining anyway.

 

[Joe42]

<snip>

I expect if the weather had been cooler less people would have chosen that option.