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Why can't we sustain interest in Folding?

R

RugoseCone

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Aug 22, 2002
303
0
It seems the team doesn't have too much trouble getting new members, as the list of contributors continues to grow.

The big problem seems to be keeping people active. How do we sustain interest? I know Mrmacman's thread was dedicated to recruitment, but what can we do as a team to maintain interest in members once they have joined. Seems we have lots of formerly active people that just completely dropped off to nothing without a word. Why? Where'd you go? What happened?

I know points and all that are secondary, but the competitiveness seems to be what draws people in. If you haven't checked, we're set to lose about five places in the overall standings this year and two spots by the end of March. Although we've had a recent upwards spike in productivity, we're still trailing lots of people behind us in daily production.

Again, points are secondary, but they definitely help create some buzz. Some excitement. Seems to be the better the team does, the more people will remain active, and the more science will be assisted.

So, to make this less of a observation of the painfully obvious and something more proactive...

Why did you quit folding?

Perhaps if we know why people quit we can develop better retention. Maybe help them get going again. Or does it not matter to anyone anymore? If so, seems kind of pointless to have a "team"...
 
I any group that I have always be with, there is a lot of interest to begin. There there is a precipitous drop off. Usually there is a strong core that actually do the work. As has been mentioned previously mentioned, we do need to get and keep interest in the program. The primary reason for this is medical research. A very nicely designed banner was posted last year. That would be an enormous help for a daily reminder. There is some blank blue area at the top that could be used.
 
I started folding, got to 400 points, and then quit. Now I'm back up with 3200 points. I try to do the most that I can for the macrumors team, but myonly 24/7 folding machine is a 1.33 PB, which, to say the least, is lacking in power. The reason I quit folding before is because my WU's were taking FOREVER, and my computer being on all night kept me awake. Of course, that thing was a flippin' monster dell with loud fans. My PB makes just a whisper, so I can handle it being on all night.
 
I brought my Athlon box back into production after a brief hiatus on... Tuesday of last week. The Windows client was incompatible with fullscreen games, so I had to keep quitting, in the end I just didnt restart. Then the damn thing broke...

Anyway, it's sat there crunching an AMBER core (wtf?) now. Like, number 8 or 9 since I restarted.
 
I run F@H 24/7 on an iMac G4, 800 MHz, 768MB of RAM.

:D

I'm Mechcozmo. Hear me fold. (You can't, because my iMac is so quiet. Trick statement!)
 
Get a site people can look at, have interest in.

People like stats and details.

Mentioning the Folding team every 6 months is just... I dunno. 'weak sauce' as my friend would like to say.

Its lame, pitiful. I mean really, a banner was hard to implement?

Or a news post ever other month?
 
I'm interested in folding but not sure it's worth it, given the computers I have available. I have a 450 MHz cube that could be full-time, but I'm reluctant to use my new iBook. Sorry -- it's my baby. Would the cube really make much of a difference?
 
I fold, but for team 0. Maybe I'll switch to team MR some day. To date, I have 5789 points with a ranking of 52028 of 418440. :eek:

Unfortunately, I don't have a mega arsenal of G5s at my disposal. I crunch 24/7 on a 400 MHz G3 iMac and almost 24/7 on a 1.25 GHz G4 eMac. It would be nice to have a warehouse full of racked XServes dedicated to F@H... :cool:
 
wordmunger said:
I'm interested in folding but not sure it's worth it, given the computers I have available. I have a 450 MHz cube that could be full-time, but I'm reluctant to use my new iBook. Sorry -- it's my baby. Would the cube really make much of a difference?
Click to expand...

Your cube should be fine. My wimpy 400 MHz G3 turns in big WUs well before their deadline dates. You would also have the bonus Altivec option with your cube.
 
Had SETI running on my 2000XP under win 2000 and it took up every last bit of resources that was avaible.

In the end just dumped it, wanted to use it more than a screensaver but didn't like it slowing everytrhing down
 
wordmunger said:
I'm interested in folding but not sure it's worth it, given the computers I have available. I have a 450 MHz cube that could be full-time, but I'm reluctant to use my new iBook. Sorry -- it's my baby. Would the cube really make much of a difference?
Click to expand...

Sure it would be worth it! Even the smallest contribution is worth it, if it advances the project. In the grand picture it doesn't matter if you aren't a big points producer.

Plus I've found that it's kind of a cool thing to talk to people about. Who knows you might mention it to someone that DOES have a bunch of great computers and they might get involved (like I have managed). However, your circle of influence is different than mine, so only you can get that person interested in folding.

Or you could use my folding name of RugoseCone and dedicate your points to my subteam within the MR team. Then it would seem like you were making a more significant contribution! RugoseCone is one person here on the forums (me), but RugoseCone the folder is actual more than one person.
 
I would fold but....... although helping the scientific Community is a noble cause I don't see much point in giving away my proccessing power away when I need it myself more than half the time. As for the rest of the time I really don't want to hear my Dual 2.5Ghz G5 reving it's fans 24/7 at full speed. I may sound selfish but having some prizes or other finnancial gain could sway me to fold again. Computers still use Electricity and take space unfortunately I can't justify running both of my computers 24/7 with one permanently bogged down. I tried setting up my old G4 imac to fold but my brother and GF who use the computer as well wanted me to dump it because it just bogged things down.
 
Capt Underpants said:
The reason I quit folding before is because my WU's were taking FOREVER, and my computer being on all night kept me awake. Of course, that thing was a flippin' monster dell with loud fans. My PB makes just a whisper, so I can handle it being on all night.
Click to expand...


I quit for the exact same reason for a while. When I first got interested it was when Team OS X was passing us last summer. Not knowing about mc68k's scripts I downloaded one of the clients from Stanford and it really made my G5 sound like a jumbojet with the fans in my tiny apartment.

Then I found the scripts, it made things run more quietly, and eventually I moved into my current house.
 
combatcolin said:
Had SETI running on my 2000XP under win 2000 and it took up every last bit of resources that was avaible.
Click to expand...

I haven't had that problem with protein folding. I do engineering work on my Mac, mostly CAD and 3d design. Even then I find I realistically use only a fraction of this machine's power and I've never noticed any slow-downs because of folding.

If anything, my work causes folding to slow down, but never the opposite. Games have been the only thing that I've noticed a performance hit on while folding, but it's always been with demos.

EDIT: And thanks to folding, I finally hit "regular" status here! Only took three years of lurking and membership... .11 posts per day!
 
Apple Hobo said:
I fold, but for team 0. Maybe I'll switch to team MR some day. To date, I have 5789 points with a ranking of 52028 of 418440. :eek:

Unfortunately, I don't have a mega arsenal of G5s at my disposal. I crunch 24/7 on a 400 MHz G3 iMac and almost 24/7 on a 1.25 GHz G4 eMac. It would be nice to have a warehouse full of racked XServes dedicated to F@H... :cool:
Click to expand...

It's unfortunate that you're not donating the points to some team, even if it isn't this one. Of course, if you change the team number, you start over essentially, which doesn't seem fair.

It really wouldn't hurt to switch to 3446, would it? ;)
 
98% of the time Folding@Home is running and I don't even realize it.

It's in my startup items menu, so from the time I start up my eMac to the time I shut it down (if ever) it's running. The only time it's turned off is when I game, and that's not too often anymore.

Heck, most of the time I just set my display to go off after a minute, and let F@H run all night while I'm asleep.
 
I've been interested in F@H - I'll join team MR if I do start, but not on my G4 because it keeps me awake (it's basically next to my right ear when I sleep :rolleyes: ).

I have 3 machines that could go 24/7 - a Celeron 700 MHz(Linux), a PIII 500MHz (Linux again) and a 266 MHz iMac. Would the old iMac keep up? It's about as slow as G3s get, but it takes up less space than the PCs and is quieter.
 
Lord Blackadder said:
I've been interested in F@H - I'll join team MR if I do start, but not on my G4 because it keeps me awake (it's basically next to my right ear when I sleep :rolleyes: ).

I have 3 machines that could go 24/7 - a Celeron 700 MHz(Linux), a PIII 500MHz (Linux again) and a 266 MHz iMac. Would the old iMac keep up? It's about as slow as G3s get, but it takes up less space than the PCs and is quieter.
Click to expand...

I'm of the opinion that the iMac shouldn't be troubled to fold. It's of an age which is more susceptible to failures and won't contribute all that much in relation to the danger to itself.

The others would certainly be useful and your participation appreciated.
 
bousozoku said:
I'm of the opinion that the iMac shouldn't be troubled to fold. It's of an age which is more susceptible to failures and won't contribute all that much in relation to the danger to itself.

The others would certainly be useful and your participation appreciated.
Click to expand...

I thought as much. I'll have to find a spot to set up one of the linux boxes.

We do protein modeling at work and it is done on SGI Octanes, and there's something bigger and much more expensive downstairs on a 1U rackmount, though I can't remember offhant what it is.
 
You convinced me, you just got 2 new computers 24/7:
P4 1.8 768mb RAM windoze xp home
P2 500mhz 64mb RAM windoze 98

Will I churn out many points with these mahcines? Im new to this.
 
Patmian212 said:
You convinced me, you just got 2 new computers 24/7
Click to expand...

Welcome to the team!

And welcome aboard to any of the new folders that don't post!
 
I had a dual G5 1.8 and a G3 400 B&W folding 24/7 for a year. Until I saw my electric bill. Sorry guys, only fold now when I'm behind my G5, and not gaming. FAH keeps messing up/freezing some games (especially Neverwinter Nights). The G3 didn't produce that much, you couldn't see it's output compared with the G5, so that's a waste of power, noise and money. Furthermore, I tried to fold on my pc at work. But for some reason (tried everything) it couldn't get through the firewall and our IT department wouldn't help... For a time I manually brought in new WU's and uploaded the finished WU's via FAH on my G3 with virtual pc. It gave quite a boost at first, until one day, I didn't get any points for those WU's. So, I stopped with that to. I'm still active, only my output isn't that high anymore, sorry guys!
 
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