Join DU's folding@home team. It's easy, and it is a good thing to do.

[alfredo]

Join the DU folding@home Team. It is an easy way to help your fellow man. All it takes is to download and install a client to your hard drive. All you need to do then is to make it a service (Windows) or a login item (Mac) and it will quietly run in the background. It will not degrade performance, and it secure. The only times it makes contact with the Stanford servers is when uploading data and downloading new data for processing.

For more info go to their home page at:
http://folding.stanford.edu /

Read the info. If you want to take part, download the software here:
http://folding.stanford.edu/download.html

If you want, join our team. when you set up your Folding@home client you will see where you can join a team. Type in the number 48157 and that will enroll you. This is not a requirement. You may want to go it solo, or you may want to be part of a team. Your choice. Taking part in this worthy project is what is important.

Here's our team page:
http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48157

Please join us and help find the cure for a host of ills that plague the human species.

[ColbertWatcher]

1. A kick, a rec and a fold! n/t

[alfredo]

4. Thank you. I realized that my little Mac Mini had propelled me to near

the top of the list. We need more people folding because my little machine shouldn't be doing that good. There's some big iron out there that can crunch numbers much faster than my little box.

Keep this kicked and thanks for the Rec.

[Mabus]

2. I'm in.

Then again I've been in since the beginning. :)

[alfredo]

6. I knew I could count on you.

[ddeclue]

3. That's all great except it WILL degrade your computer's performance.

Any application which takes memory and time slices to run on your PC will inherently slow it down.

I get tired of all the widgets and toolbars telling people "we won't slow you down".

They do.

Doug D.

[alfredo]

5. You can turn it off if you need that extra bit of speed. I haven't noticed

any serious degradation. I do a lot of graphics. I haven't noticed any problems. Maybe if I was rendering a large 3D, or compiling some software, FAH might be a problem. As yet I have not noticed any irritating slowdowns.

[ddeclue]

7. Well I do write software and it does slow machines down..

as does all the "toolbars" out there like MSN, AOL, Yahoo,Google, Ask, etc.

Avoid all AOL software altogether, it is designed to capture your PC and turn it into an AOL toaster and slow it down to a crawl.

Same thing with Microsoft Windows Live - don't install that either - it's designed to capture your PC and turn it into a Bill Gates toaster while destroying its performance.

Beware also of GoogleUpdater and all the auto updaters that get installed on your machine to make sure you have the latest and greatest software every hour of the day.

There are also programs like the weatherbug from the Weather Channel, etc.

The problem is that all these widgets eat processor cycles and take up memory and insist on autoloading at boot time or running as automatic services that you have to then uninstall, remove, disable etc.

I hate how all the good "free" software now comes bundled with this crap corporate bot-ware that you have to go out of your way to avoid installing or which you have to uninstall/disable.

They all think they are entitled to turn my PC into their own private distributed processing node while I have to buy ever faster computers just to be able to have a decent web browsing experience.

My advice: Run AdAware, SpyBot, SpyBlaster, CCleaner and AVG home edition antivirus regularly and keep the crapware and spyware down to an absolute minimum.

Doug D.

[alfredo]

8. I do my best to keep such things to the minimum. For my normal

word processing and surfing, blinding fast speed is not a necessity. If it was, I wouldn't be using the next to smallest Mac offered. This is the first non pro model I've bought. My only "programming" is just a shell script or an AppleScript if I can't find what I need online.

[hobbit709]

9. I'm running both the CPU and GPU versions

If I do anything intensive I pause the GPU version. Evidently my machine is fast enough to not noticeably slow me down. And you're comparing apples and oranges-folding is NOT a toolbar. And you think Adaware, etc. don't slow down your system?

[ddeclue]

13. Ad Aware doesn't slow down your system if you don't use their Ad Watch.

Actually it's apples to apples folding isn't a toolbar but YES it is still widgetware (albeit with a more benign purpose) just like a toolbar.

[Blue_Tires]

25. what is a toaster?

[alfredo]

26. It's what you used to get when you opened a bank account.

[Blue_Tires]

28. i meant in the computing sense...

[alfredo]

29. It relates to Video Toaster.

I was being silly

[hobbit709]

10. I was wondering when we were going to get new faces on the team.

[alfredo]

12. I was wondering when I was going to get around to pitching our team.

[myrna minx]

11. I'll look into this when I get home. Thanks. n/t

[Control-Z]

14. It might be nice if you could

give us a least a brief explanation of what folding@home is. Maybe I should know already, but I don't have a clue.

[MiniMe]

16. From the link that Alfredo posted:

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 throughout the world download and run software to band together to make one of the largest supercomputers in the world. Every computer takes the project closer to our goals. Folding@home uses novel computational methods coupled to distributed computing, to simulate problems millions of times more challenging than previously achieved.

[alfredo]

23. thanks for the help

[MiniMe]

15. I'm up and running

It will be good to get some new faces on the team. K&R

[alfredo]

17. Thank you.

[old mark]

18. I believe it's working already.

I joined your team under my other name, but its really me.
Thanks for the opportunity to use up some of the idle capacity on my big ol' HP.

mark

[alfredo]

19. Thank you. Your work won't show until you send in a work unit. Be sure to

book mark your page. If you forget, just look for my posts and reference the team page link. Click on your name and it will take you to your page.

[old mark]

20. my name isn't showing anywhere yet - I'm not sure I joined the team.

I will check again.

mark

[alfredo]

21. It will when you finish a work unit, and their database is updated. If you

have a Mac get Increase. It will help you keep track. On Windows I think you can right click the icon in the taskbar.

[old mark]

22. Thanks - I have 4 icons working now, and I'm on the list at

#314.
We bought this big ol' business size HP without how little room our tiny business would take up, and evidently folding is shaking some of the cobwebs out of it. Glad it is being used for a good cause.

Thanks.
Mark (dogngun on the group list)

[alfredo]

24. Thanks for you help.

[alfredo]

27. As of 9:33 PM EST 03/31 there are 118 active CPU's on our team. Check back

in a few days to see if that number changes.

[ornotna]

30. I'm folding as fast as I can

Dammit! :hi:

http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/user_summary.php?s=&u=174639

[kcass1954]

31. I'm in too - been doing it for about 3 years, but just on the desktop.

I can't get it to work on my (vista) laptop. Downloaded - wouldn't work - uninstalled - downloaded again - still won't work - so I pretty much gave up on that one.

[alfredo]

32. Any contribution is a good contribution. Thank you.

[mia]

33. Great to see the new team members!

:kick: