Rhetorical question -- you don't have to answer. I'll answer it for you:

YES!

I see people posting about being only a "white" or "green" folder. (The colors refer to the coding used at the folding.extremeoverclocking.com statistics site. If you are contributing to folding, you're at least "white." If you're contributing 500-999 points a week, you're "green." The colors progress from there.) If you think that you couldn't make a significant contribution by joining SPCR's folding effort or if you think that your "white" or "green" contributions are just a drop in the bucket, please think again!

A brief tangent:

I am an amateur radio ("ham radio") operator and I take pleasure in an activity called "RadioSport" or "contesting." The biggest contests I participate in run for 48 hours straight. For me that means staying at the radio for as many of those 48 hours contacting as many different stations as I can in as many different countries as I can. I compete for fun and to contribute my points (which are based on a complex formula of how many different stations I contact and where they're located) toward the total score of my radio contesting club (much like contributing folding points toward the SPCR team.)

A few miles down the road is a LARGE RadioSport station. The owner of the station owns a radio tower installation business and he installs and services towers all over the world. His station has several towers with dozens of large antennas directing his radio signals at the exact locations he wants and extensive automation to maximize the effectiveness of each radio in his contest station. During a contest he will have several operators scheduled to man up to six radios simultaneously. He regularly breaks scoring records in contests.

In contrast, I have a puny radio station. I have a single radio in my basement, no tower, no automation beyond a PC to keep track of my score, a small aluminum vertical antenna, and a bunch of wires strung up between trees for the rest of my antennas. If I score 5% of what the guy down the road scores, I'm doing pretty well. But I have won world championships.

More accurately, my club has won world championships, with me contributing toward them. A few years ago we figured out how to beat the rival clubs with even more "big gun" contest stations than we have.

It's the little guys who do it.

My club has lots and lots of "little pistol" stations like me whose total contribution adds up to more than the "big gun" stations. Without all us little guys, my club would still be taking second or third place. But a small contribution from many people makes all the difference, and we win world championships.

OK, back from the tangent.

So what does that mean to you and SPCR's folding team?

I just looked at the Stanford and ExtremeOverclocking stats. Right now they say that 278 different user names have contributed to SPCR's folding team, either currently or in the past. Many of them are no longer active. Some have contributed less than 10 points. But it all adds to our score.

Compare that to the current #1 team: [H]ardOCP. They've had 5787 different user names contribute to their effort. Again, many are no longer active, and many have contributed less than 10 points. But all of them add to their score.

They have nearly 21 times as many user names who have contributed to their score as we have, but they have only 11.4 times as many points as we do. That means each of our users, on average, produces nearly twice as much as their average user. But still they have 11.4X as many points as we do. That means that all of the "little guys" are what's making the difference for them. Just to make sure, I checked to see how many "red" folders (highest production level) they have in their top 100 folders. They have 24 -- we have 6. So with 4X as many "big guns" they still have 11.4X as many points. Further proof that the "little guys" are what make the #1.

So if you think that you won't make a significant contribution to the SPCR effort as a "white" or "green" folder, here's a suggestion: Make whatever contribution you can. Then multiply that contribution by helping your friends and other SPCR members join and contribute their "white" and "green" points to the team, too. It only takes five to ten "little guys" to equal one "big gun."

Join the SPCR Folding Team today -- even if you can only make a "little" contribution. We need as many "little" contributors as we can get!

Sbabb,

Let me be the first to say "well done," and thanks for taking the time to put this together.

Good job.

M

Now post this on every forum here. And have an excuse ready for MikeC.
But many people don't look in this forum, I think. You could ask MikeC for a permanent "our f@h team" link somewhere on the main page. Like in the left panel somewhere at the bottom under Site Features.

Excellent post sbabb.

David

The 'little people' are crucial to our effort. In fact a quick analysis at Arachnid with my abacus indicates our top producers are barely pulling their weight!

In the past 24 hours 100 active folders produced 21363 points (at Arachnid). The 70 "white & greens" (who contributed less than 150 points in 24 hours) contributed 5736 points or 27% of the total. Patently our top folders figure Pareto's 80:20 principle does not apply to them when the bottom 70% of our producers are doing nearly 30% of the production.

As an aside, is there any way of hiding the console window F@H is running in under Linux? Having an extra window lying about is quite irritating
At about 2 weeks a work unit, I gave up after the first one, but just turned it back on again...

done.

I think I asked sbabb.


No seriously, excellent! Thx.

Any chance on getting a flashy banner on there as well? Like where the banner ads are now?
Or we can even put sbabs post on the frontpage, and a link at the bottom "go to silentpcreview.com"...
Yeah, that's a good idea. When can you have this done?

What distribution do you use? I run a few Gentoo boxes and F@H emerges as a service (emerge foldingathome). If there's a startup script in /etc/init.d or wherever then you should be able to do something along the lines of:

to add it as a service and:

to start it without rebooting.

Mandrake 9.2. I'm going to switch to Gentoo eventually but as my current PC probably only has 9 months to a year of life left in it that'll wait.
I did look in /etc/init.d but didn't find any files I recognised as definately startup scripts.
F@H does sometimes end up running in the background, but I haven't worked out why yet.

I am SuSE 9.0, but after running the ./finstall script I just
1) editted /foldingathome/CPU1/FAH script to add -advmethods -forceSSE as default flags
2) added
cd /home/me/foldingathome
./folding start
to /etc/init.d/boot.local

Aw, shucks! Thanks everyone!

I received the latest issue of one of the amateur radio magazines in the mail yesterday and I started wondering how SPCR's Folding team compared to my contesting club in terms of big/small contributions. So I did some research and found that we have a very high points-per-historical-folder ratio compared to other teams close to us in the rankings (except for the Knights Who Say Ni! whose numbers are completely out of whack.) Examples:


Part of the reason for this is that we have a very high ratio of folders who are still active to folders who have dropped out compared to other teams. We have a dedicated bunch of folders here!

In my radio club we have 30-40 "big gun" stations that might make up 30-50% of our total score in a contest. The other 300-400 "little guys" like me make up the other 50-70%. I think if SPCR's team can get a little contribution from a lot of people, then we will shoot up through the rankings. We're not going to be a threat to the top 5 teams without a huge increase in our folding output sustained for a long time, but we can certainly make our way into the top 20 or maybe the top 10, if we get a little contribution from a lot of people.

Fold on, teammates!

Scott

Our numbers are in-line. WE'RE out of whack !!!

One more thing to consider folks:

Sure, Folding@Home is about medical research, and maybe it's a long shot, but what if this research actually leads to a disease cure, or at least greatly eases the suffering of those who are afflicted with some physical or mental malidy?

Assume for a moment that this long shot gambit pays off and even if all you have to contribute is a dusty tired old 500MHz machine that you setup for folding and it only turns in one measily work unit per week - wouldn't you like to know that you were a part of that cure?

To view this from another perspective, if you had a crystal ball and you positively knew for a fact, without a doubt, that a cure for some nasty human ailment was going to come from folding@home, would you fold then? I think most of you would, in fact you might be running around telling other people about it just like those of us here on the SPCR Folding Team Why, well if a cure was certain, let's hurry it up and get it sooner than later right? Of course!

So, bring it home where it matters and ask yourself "How good would you truly feel when that great medical breakthrough does occur and you knew for a fact that you, and your dusty old PC, played a very real part in it?" Come on people, how many times in your lifetime do you ever get to be involved in something so purposeful with such high stakes for all of humanity? When was the last time a true scientific genius of the likes of Vijay Pande from Stanford University knocked on your door and asked you to do something so grand and wonderful for all of mankind?

And at what cost? Really people, it's just a couple bucks per month in electricity per PC! I'll bet we all waste a LOT more money than that every week on junk food and movie rentals that we don't even think twice about, and those things have very little actual redeaming value in the big picture of life.

Remember, you don't have to become a folding fanantic to do your part, some of you might, but that's a personal choice that you make on your own. And you don't have to run your PC or PCs 24/7 like some of us do, again only if you want to. But honestly folks it sure wouldn't hurt you one bit to give your PC something meaningful to do while it sits there and twiddles it's virtual thumbs most of the time.

Stevo
-----------------
Do a little something good today with your PC and set it up to fold@home for team SPCR

I am basically a cynic at heart. The cynical part tells me this will all come to nothing. A huge waste of time. But there is some little voice that says "Yeah, and what if you're wrong? What if they DO accomplish something wonderful, or worse, what if they COULD HAVE if only you and a few thousands of others had chipped in and helped?"

I was truly "looking" for a project like this, and yet not looking, because it had been going on for a LONG time before I got involved. I was even a member of SPCR for a few months, and had seen some of the folding posts, but just hadn't taken the time to figure out WHAT THE HECK IS FOLDING?

I remember seeing the thread "I'm Green! I'm Green! I'm Green! I'm Green!" and was SO curious about why in the hell that would be so exciting as to justify repeating it FOUR TIMES, that I read the post. The enthusiasm was infectuous, I took time to read a litle about the project, and I knew right away that this was the project I had been looking for. Little did I know I would go NUTSO like I have (at the time I had just a single computer!), but I have never regretted my deep involvement for a moment. I guess you could say that hidden down deep inside, there lives an optimist.

David