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Thread: Folding at Home is Killing the Planet |
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Thread Status: Active Total posts in this thread: 20
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
Folding at Home is Killing the Planet
In case you didn't know how evil all distributed computing projects are, this guy is willing to spell it all out for us. Of course he only mentions F@H because its the most popular, but who are we kidding? We're evil too; we just cant live up to our full evilness without a good GPU client. This article is backed up by lots of hardcore scientific fact. Did you know that it would take 3650 pounds of coal to power a Playstation 3 for a year? I sure didn't. I never should have gotten rid of my wood-burning Dreamcast. All kidding aside ... W.T.F? Is this guy serious? I had to check and double check the website to make sure it wasn't a parody site like the onion. Or maybe the guy's a Borat type jokester who wants laugh at me after I overreact to his story. Nope. Looks like he's serious. People should stop running DC projects and take the extra money they would have spent on electric bills ($35-46 a month, according to his unnamed sources) and instead donate that same amount of money "to the Rain Forest." I'm not sure how I'd send money to the rain forest. I've never sent a letter outside the U.S., but I'm sure I would at least need a street address or something. I guess once my money got to the rain forest, someone there would put it to good use. I also like where he says DC costs users "between 12 and 70 million dollars a year." That's a helluva shotgun estimate, but I guess if you're pulling facts out of your butt, you can pull numbers out of thin air. Anyway, I just wanted to know if any of you had any thoughts on this. |
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PecosRiverM
Veteran Cruncher The Great State of Texas Joined: Apr 27, 2007 Post Count: 1054 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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Numbers don't add up. I think the person needs to do more homework.
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Coleslaw
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Mar 29, 2007 Post Count: 1343 Status: Offline Project Badges:
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Well...some of his numbers may be legit in some ways, but he doesn't adjust for the amount of electricity that would be consumed letting those same systems sit idle either. There certainly is an increase, but his theoretical donar system wont work like he describes simply because many people don't trust their money will be spent wisely by the organizations. The people who run them make a lot of money. I know a lot of people who were upset after the 9/11 incident with the twin towers in New York because the American Red Cross has so much money donated that they felt they couldn't manage it well enough. So, they sent a lot of it to other charities. This may seem like a good thing or an efficient one, but people wanted the Red Cross to use it. They trusted The Red Cross. If they wanted some other charity using it, they would have sent it there. Now, I'm not quoting statistics, rather just remember the complaints locally after they found this out. By having a computer do the donating, I have something to show for my money and I feel good. I also know that it is not sent into a CEO/CFO's pocket for a pay raise.
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
The computing being done, is going to be be done by someone, which is better, a group of people donating the cost (via elect bills and computing time) or some corp that charges for the same plus adds labor and profit and perks.
The reason DC was created was to find/develop a low cost alt |
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Richard Mitnick
Veteran Cruncher USA Joined: Feb 28, 2007 Post Count: 583 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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O.K., here is another fact. Dr Foran's project Help Defeat Cancer at the Cancer Institute of New Jersey resulted in a database for tissue typing that reduced the time on one PC from 137 years/sample to 1 day/sample.
----------------------------------------Now, who is going to stand up and tell me that this project is not already saving lives? |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
probably my favorite part: "Even your PC is not really designed to run at 100% CPU usage all of the time, that additional heat will greatly increase the likelihood of a Failure. If your MTBF is 3 years, assuming the device is on 6 hours a day you can expect that it will be 9 months to one year if the device is run at 100% 24 hours a day."
This means that the computer I bought last December and have had running WCG since I got it is about to fail. What a load of crap. I've never had a computer die of old age. They all outlived their usefulness and I gave them away or sent them to the recycle bin. |
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GeraldRube
Master Cruncher United States Joined: Nov 20, 2004 Post Count: 2153 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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This jerk is stupid--Did anyone really read this and why didn't you leave a comment??!!
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sk..
Master Cruncher http://s17.rimg.info/ccb5d62bd3e856cc0d1df9b0ee2f7f6a.gif Joined: Mar 22, 2007 Post Count: 2324 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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The URL says a lot, random-news/rants-and-tangents/folding-at-home-is-"killing-the-planet"/
----------------------------------------[Edit 1 times, last edit by skgiven at May 19, 2011 9:43:20 PM] |
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Former Member
Cruncher Joined: May 22, 2018 Post Count: 0 Status: Offline |
The outset is not worth anyone's time. Can concoct any argument with numbers, good for the gullible and the easily excitable to fall for them... a concern-troll if you will. No matter how, the energy will be spend to do the research, DC crunching brings the knowledge collection needed to build new knowledge on, years sooner, with help of volunteer computing! If that costs 70 million or more, in the end the saving in lives and healthcare way way outstrips this fractional amount of energy. A Google data centre's annual power bill is higher... heck they need their own serious power-plant, each, so let's offset, by using their services a little less.
Let's move on and have this sink! --//-- |
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nanoprobe
Master Cruncher Classified Joined: Aug 29, 2008 Post Count: 2998 Status: Offline Project Badges: 
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The outset is not worth anyone's time. Can concoct any argument with numbers, good for the gullible and the easily excitable to fall for them.. Sorta like MMGW.   
In 1969 I took an oath to defend and protect the U S Constitution against all enemies, both foreign and Domestic. There was no expiration date.
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