There are not enough folders

[P5-133XL]

How do you get that sig where it lists all your points and positions?

EOC signatures

[mdk777]

see this thread for a discussion of folder # drop off.

viewtopic.php?f=16&t=21367&hilit=what+is+holding

Extended Drought/heat in central US certainly is a factor.
We will have to wait for cooler fall temps to see how big of a factor it actually was.

Some personal anecdotes:
1.
Bought my daughter a high-end laptop for college. For many years, you would see desktops in addition to laptops in the dorms(limited power of laptop computing, recreational gaming) This is decreasing at a rapid pace.

2. often don't even carry my laptop on business trips...large screen smartphone is sufficient.

3. Spending more on Smartphones for family(and consequently on data plans) than buying and maintaining home computers.

4. Most recent graphics card still not supported after 7 months. This delay has always been a weakness of Folding, but as GPU compute matures it remains a major hindrance. (People will not stop using next generation graphics capability because Folding cannot keep up with the software for new hardware...they just stop Folding)

[kiore]

The EOC sig, which I also have doesn't show your combined position if you have folded for several teams though..
I like mine, I use it on sevral forums I frequent and it generates some interest "what the hell is that thing about" which gives me a chance to explain. Also handy for intrateam friendly rivalry.
Alot of people join fold a few or even fold hardcore but for a short time and then move on, or spell their name differently or something.
More people folding seems like a good idea, though I have no idea how many enough would be.

[Jonazz]

I tried to advertise F@H on a few forums, but barely anyone seemed interested. I think it mainly caters to people who have experienced cancer/alzeheimer/huntington themselves or those who have seen it with close friends/relatives. Others just say 'meh', I don't want to pay more for my electricity, I don't trust this thing, ...

I can't even convince my dad that folding is actually a good thing and not some corporation using my CPU time to do evil things.

[Jesse_V]

I tried to advertise F@H on a few forums, but barely anyone seemed interested. I think it mainly caters to people who have experienced cancer/alzeheimer/huntington themselves or those who have seen it with close friends/relatives. Others just say 'meh', I don't want to pay more for my electricity, I don't trust this thing, ...

I can't even convince my dad that folding is actually a good thing and not some corporation using my CPU time to do evil things.

I suppose it depends on how you introduce it, but some people just don't care and that's all right.

[Ivoshiee]

Summer is not a good time for promoting compute intensive applications, being it FAH or something else. Most of people are off to vacations doing a lot of different things not related to computers. Also, there is hot enough without having computers generate additional heat as well. When people are back to school and work then we'll see donator gains.

[Nathan_P]

Some other things to consider,

The economy isn't in great shape at the moment and people are having to cut back or give up folding all together
Some people come for the points, realise its a long term thing and give up.
Problamatic software - be it slow ATI gpu cores, no linux gpu folding, mac OS install problems etc - it doesn't help the project. V7 is a good step in the right direction but it needs more support on other platforms

Most important:- People like and only remember success these days, usually short term success - F@h has had to start from scratch and its taken 12 years for them to get to the point we are now, where they have possible drug candidates in the pipeline - people have folded (in some cases for years), gone nothings happening and given up. Once we can help find a drug that helps, and start telling people this, i think we will see a lot more folders but until then we do what we can.

Most of the top teams run near constant recruitment drives but keeping new folders is hard. I have given up trying to recruit - my friends basically think i am mad for spending what i do on this. Only time will tell who is right

[kiore]

Summer is not a good time for promoting compute intensive applications, being it FAH or something else. Most of people are off to vacations doing a lot of different things not related to computers. Also, there is hot enough without having computers generate additional heat as well. When people are back to school and work then we'll see donator gains.

Of course for many people it is not summer but rather winter now..and even weird ones who live in places like I do, which is in the Northern Hemisphere, but where summer is the cool season and winter the hot season.

[heikosch]

As per http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/ only 3-4% (~20000) of all registered donors/accounts are regularly active.

Heiko

[DoctorsSon]

As per http://folding.extremeoverclocking.com/ only 3-4% (~20000) of all registered donors/accounts are regularly active.

Heiko

I can believe that.
I have several donor names I used for different teams that are idle.
Added all together I am well in the top 1%, but it doesn't take that many points to get there.

Over the years I got a few people started but they all quit in a month.
It wasn't exciting enough for them.

[Jesse_V]

Over the years I got a few people started but they all quit in a month.
It wasn't exciting enough for them.

I strongly suspect that this isn't unique to just FAH. If people are participating for only a short time period in a project which is at the front lines of disease research, what hope does PrimeGrid have? I think a lot of these ideas overlap a lot with other distributed computing projects. In my quick search, I wasn't able to find any graph of BOINC participation for the past several years, but I'm sure there are both temporary and more permanent participants in its projects. I wouldn't be surprised if there were seasonal fluctuations as well. Unless we can provide evidence that F@h is specifically doing something wrong and participation is dropping because of it, we really can't do much except carry on. It's a volunteer project: participation rises and falls. A lot of people including myself would like to see it continually increasing, and I think in many ways we can help with that. Mdk777 pointed out the viewtopic.php?f=16&t=21367 thread that I was using to organize the problems F@h is facing, in the hopes that it can overcome a good number of them.

[PinHead]

As P5-133XL mentioned, it is easy these days to pass someone that did years of work on 1,2,5 point WU. I have 41,621 WU completed, but less than a 1000 of those WU are the newer WU. With less than a 1000 new WU, I went from 1Mil points to to 28Mil points.

[RMouse]

Heh heh heh.....I dont trust myself at math so I deferred. No worries....another WU is in the books.

Fold on!

[jimerickson]

protein folding is the way of the future. as things progress this will become more apparent to others resulting in more folders. i see the glass as half full so to speak.

[Dark Pulse]

I began folding not even a month and a half ago. June 21st is my first completed workunit; I actually have no 1,000 point or 2,500 point milestones because the first update combined whatever unit my CPU did with whatever unit my GPU did... so my first logged milestone is June 21st for 5,000 points.

Doing the math, I'm currently 19894 of 1645470. The math comes out to 0.0120901626890797, which when changed into percentile, means 1.2%.

In other words, this means I've folded more than 98.8% of all donors in terms of points (not in Workunits, that's only about 380) in under a month and a half.

Then again, this machine, at worst, will get about 35,000 points a day. On days where everything in the universe aligns and I get the right workunits, it can be as high as 55,000 or so.

And this is running on a 2600K (overclocked) with a GTX 690 (as of about a week ago; formerly it was a single 580). This isn't accounting for the fact that Kepler stuff isn't even optimized yet (I wouldn't surprised at a good point boost when they have Kepler-optimized cores), nor for the fact I plan to be getting a second 690. Nor for the laptop I'll be buying for when I go back to college in a month... which will have an Ivy Bridge i7 3820QM and a GeForce 680M. (No, this isn't all just for folding; I'm a serious PC gamer first and foremost. )

I admit that part of this is probably my rippingly fast hardware, but I'd like to think that a person shouldn't be able to zoom up that high in such a short span of time.