Can you expand on that a little? I used to do Seti@Home when I was younger but moved onto something which could have a little more direct impact. http://folding.stanford.edu/results.html Those are the posted results of the F@H program.
Sure. Thanks for asking civilly instead of just flaming me (which might've happened if someone else had perceived a slight). I believe the analogy is apt. Someone else mentioned "curing cancer" as the justification for participating in the distributed computing project. Now as laudable and impressive as that goal is, it is a *holy grail* of the project. In other words, a wishful, distantly realisable, or even unrealisable endpoint. In the same way that contact with ETs is the holy grail of SETI. While I believe that significant incremental tangible benefits in terms of understanding secondary and tertiary protein structure will accrue in the course of the Folding@Home project, something as startling as a fully tenable cure for the basic defect(s) in neoplastic pathogenesis is almost unforeseeable, IMHO. Just like it's almost unforeseeable that we will actually pick up a "hello" from Alpha Centauri in our lifetime. I don't believe I am alone in this healthy skepticism. I think Urotrash (also a medical doctor) also feels the "curing cancer" claim to have been hyperbole. (BTW, Urotrash, if I misinterpreted your post, my apologies). That's all I meant. I think this is a great project, but it's probably not ideal to entice a lay person to participate by saying they're helping to "cure cancer" with great confidence. Better to be honest and tell them they're simply helping to further our knowledge of how proteins form and malform, and perhaps (someday) that knowledge will help us in devising an actual cure for cancer for actual people.
I have to admit, I agree with you 100%. The reason why I boil down the issue to something so simple as 'curing cancer' is because it 1) attracts attention 2) is easy to relate to When I tell people, "yeah this program downloads work units and then uses your computer to fold proteins" they look at me with a blank stare. When I tell them "yeah this program may have a chance to cure cancer" it's a little easier. For the same reason we tell people the cpu is the brains of the computer. It's to get the message / point across while at the same time to minimize confusion. I've been blessed with not having to worry too much about where my money comes from (thanks dad) or my education (thanks USA government) and with those two things + summer, I have lots of free time on my hands. I have a personal interest in seeing success come out of this project as my grandfather passed away from cancer and although I don't think it'll cure cancer (as much as I want to hope it can) the tertiary and secondary (like you said) goals make it so much more worth it for me. I've learned that flaming people is only appropriate at certain times. That and I'm really tired. My cousin just bought a new Macbook Pro and I had to fill out all those rebate forms and set the laptop up for him. BTW: What kind of doctor are you? My uncle (cousins dad) is an anesthesiologist. Always helpful to have a doctor around!
Glad to see we're in broad agreement. How's that Mac treating you and your cousin? I recently entered the Mac world when I got a 12" iBook G4 free as part of some contest. Luckily it's been very easy to adjust as I'm fairly used to the Unix shell (I've been using various distros of Linux as a desktop OS for many years), so the BSD base of Mac OS X is a pleasant welcome. I'm a clinical microbiologist in training. I'm actually not a noob here, I was previously registered under Turb0flat4, but accidently screwed up my password change and lost access to the email acccount I had initially registered under. Oh well, hope Rob and the mods don't get unduly mad with me, it's not really a double registration since I won't be posting under the old handle, but if they have a way to restore the old account, they can always PM me.
I love the MacbookPro. If only Peachtree ran on Mac... then I could switch the entire office over. Alas it doesn't, so we're going to have to code our own accounting and payroll software Long nights ahead are in store for me (+ college, finally!) I tried linux on and off for the past few years, red hat, suse, mandrake, ubuntu recently and Fedora. Just haven't been able to grasp it enough to make me switch. Granted I never had the chance to run VMWare decently so I guess that plays a big role as well. Thanks to the switch to Intel's I can always run Windows under Parallels if I really feel like torturing myself (nah, Picasa is a level or so better than iPhoto). vBulletin has a way to merge accounts. I should know, I'm an admin @ mbworld.
team member statistics only shows this, seems kinda light for the interest below: Date of last work unit 2006-08-14 18:09:59 Active CPUs within 50 days 2 Team Id 45428 Grand Score 64241 (certificate) Work Unit Count 285 (certificate) Team Ranking (incl. aggregate) 3256 of 44837 Home Page http://www.ferrarichat.com/forum/ Team members Rank (within team) User Score WU 1 Ben_Cannon 60042 254 2 tjacoby 2225 16 3 Mr_Marmot 1668 13 4 Rovingardener 306 2
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/technology/5287254.stm Fold on your PS3 Well at least the PS3 will be good for something...
Howdy guys! Quick update on this stuff. A lot of our members have seemingly lagged out. http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=45428 According to that it says out of 4 members, we only have 1 active cpu. Members can have multiple cpu's and I bet that's the case, so that means a few folks aren't even contributing. Heck, with only 1 active cpu, that means only one person is actually contributing! I'm really disappointed x2 because Ferrarichat can't even break the the 2000th rank. If we can get higher rank, than we can view more detailed statistics from a website I know called Extreme Overclocking. It'll let us see where we're ranked and how other teams within our range are doing so we can see if we'll be overtaken soon and who we are going to overtake. Also there's a lot of new stuff regarding Folding at home. If you have an Intel Mac, there is a nifty new client out that works about 8x faster than before. If you have an ATi graphics card on Windows, there is a GPU client out that is about 300!!x faster than normal. We need more members representing Ferrarichat.com ! It's for a great cause and is really easy to install!
I'm kinda sad mbworld's team is ranked in the low 400's. Clublexus just broke 2000 this weekend Ferrarichat chat is 3944th however with only one active member! Where are all you PS3 folks!
ummm....for those that are a bit behind....can someone give a run down explanation on what folding @ home or this thread is about? -too lazy to read the faq
I'd be more than happy to Folding@Home is a program you can run on your windows machine, your mac, your linux box, or your PS3. It's a program that simulates the natural process of how proteins (basic building blocks of life) fold. It would take one man lifetimes to simulate one "run" while a computer can do it in a few days. That's what this project is trying to do, gain more knowledge by running simulations which they compare through statistical analysis so we can learn how proteins "misfold" -- or how they cause cancer, alzheimers, horrible thigns like that It's so easy -- you download a program from Stanford University and you run it. It stays in the background and only uses your idle cpu cycles. It's like saving humanity without even knowing it!
