Folding Forum

I may not be the most persuasive guy, but I find telling people about FAH I am met with astonishing resistance.

Often people think I am a complete idiot for bothering.

Does anyone else encounter that kind of thing?

I remember when I described it to my own parents -- I think they definitely thought it was strange at first. I think some of the key misconceptions are

- this can't be serious: using scrensavers, etc seems strange. You could point people to our awards and results section to show what we've done

- supercomputers can just do this: people don't realize that FAH is more powerful than the very, very most powerful supercomputer

I could go on, but these are the top 2 I find.

Well, I have to say I did hear possibly the stupidest and most bewildering thing anyone has ever said to me... which went....

"I have a my own views on cancer so there is no way I would ever do that."

If someone can translate that, I will buy them a significant amount of beer.

The translation would be just as unintelligible. You can't fix stupid. (no offense intended)

I've seen some nice arguments too :

- some people are opposing the ecological argument : help science, but destroy the planet
- it will damage my computer (easy to counter with web server examples)
- how can I be sure that my ressources won't be used by NSA, FBI or any dark computation ?

I put things in my sig on most forums. I might ask a person if they fancy folding, if they dont i wont continue that part of the conversation as it would be pointless, and irrelevant. I also have met people with the whole my computer will be damaged, and i will never use it because the government can spy on me. I tell them the government already spies on them (haha @ paranoid people), and they are more likely to damage their computers by browsing the web, than FAH. But not many care, so it is also irrelevant.

Convert who you can, ignore who you cant.., but dont do the whole hard sell routine because those people will remember that and tell other people.

v00d00 wrote: I tell them the government already spies on them (haha @ paranoid people), ... ...

You mean, like this?

nothing to see here...

Back to the original topic; some arguments I've been given

-my leccy bill will skyrocket (despite the fact that the person in question's computer is left running idle most of the day and indeed night anyway)
-it's pointless, they won't solve cancer without lab work (answer: project's aims are to analyse protein folding in tandem with lab work, and it's not just cancer)
-it will shorten computer's lifespan
-why would I want to help the Americans do anything? [I'm not joking, someone actually said that to me]
-FAH is irrelevent now due to [insert large pharmaceutical research company name here]'s research

etc etc

Willful ignorance?

John Naylor wrote:Back to the original topic; some arguments I've been given
-my electricity bill will skyrocket (despite the fact that the person in question's computer is left running idle most of the day and indeed night anyway)
-it's pointless, they won't solve cancer without lab work (answer: project's aims are to analyse protein folding in tandem with lab work, and it's not just cancer)
-it will shorten computer's lifespan
-why would I want to help the Americans do anything? [I'm not joking, someone actually said that to me]
-FAH is irrelevant now due to [insert large pharmaceutical research company name here]'s research
etc etc

What would be nice is to build a FAQ in one place to answer these (in this thread) common comments/concerns so we can just point (link) to it when the questions arise.
Of course to build the "best'" answers, that could be another thread (e.g. I have written plenty in various faqs that tries to
answers some of these questions, but my word smithing is far from formidable...)
I do understand that quite a few questions are answered (at least in part) scattered around the Wiki http://fahwiki.net/index.php/FAQ and the http://folding.stanford.edu/English/FAQ but I'm thinking of a more specific FAQ to address concerns (that can then link to other spots if applicable)

socceronly wrote:I may not be the most persuasive guy, but I find telling people about FAH I am met with astonishing resistance.

Often people think I am a complete idiot for bothering.

Does anyone else encounter that kind of thing?

.



Try showing them our Movie: Why we are Folding - Movie




.

All of the above reasons countered (I hope)...

Will F@H reduce the security of my computer?
The Folding@home client and distributed computing service is no less safe than other programs that you can download from the internet and run on your computer. Because security of the FAH client is very important to the Pande Group, they have designed the FAH to be as secure as feasible through encrypted downloads/uploads, file checksums, etc. FAH should not reduce the security of your computer. But, to ensure maximum security of your computer, never download a client or purported client update from anywhere other than the official download page.

Can’t they just use a Supercomputer?
F@H is more than twice as powerful as the world’s current most powerful supercomputer, in terms of operations per second. Even then, the project is still restricted by the power available to it and needs all the extra silicon it can get.

Screensavers can help cancer/protein research? What?
It’s not the screensaver that matters, it’s the “Core” that runs while the screensaver runs which does the processing. These cores are all modified versions of respected open source analysis programs.

I’m worried about the environment, won’t running this program increase greenhouse gas emissions?/ Won’t running my computer at full or near full usage all the time make my bill skyrocket?
F@H needs only to be run when your computer is running. The average system uses maybe 70W at idle, and 120W fully loaded (i.e. when CPU folding - either uniprocessor or SMP). An extra 50W per hour will not have a significant impact on either the environment or your electricity bill. [Of course, Overclocked, or GPU machines will have a much greater disparity between idle and load, but if you overclock your machine something tells me this question will not bother you so much ]
Cheers to Ren02 for approx. power figures

Won’t running my computer at full usage all the time damage it?
Modern computer chips are precision instruments, they are designed to be able to operate continuously at full speed without degrading. A typical example of this would be the humble web server. These serve thousands, maybe tens of thousands of connections a minute and are fully loaded for long periods at a time, yet hardly ever fail due to hardware faults.

This is pointless; you can’t solve something like this without lab work!
This is correct, however Folding@Home uses independently tested and proven techniques to advance and work alongside the work done in laboratories across the planet.

F@H is irrelevant now due to [Company X]’s research. Why bother?
As long as we lack complete knowledge about how and why proteins misfold, the work of the Folding@Home project will remain relevant. Maybe the project will render itself irrelevant by solving these problems, we don’t know. But for the foreseeable future, the project will not be rendered irrelevant by the research of any one company or group of companies.

How can I be sure that my resources, "loaned" for free, will not be used to generate research that will then be sold for profits, e.g. like United Devices?
Folding@Home is a project run by Stanford University, and they release all of their findings into the world free of charge, in the form of peer reviewed papers. See here for more. Anyone in the world can then use the results to further their own research without the need to redo these computationally intensive simulations.

I have an internet usage cap, using F@H will use more than I am allowed, will it not?
Put simply, no. The uniprocessor clients use up to 10MB each way at their normal settings (assuming use of v6 clients), but most computers if run just during the day will only finish a Work Unit every 2 or 3 days. Over a 30 day period that is an absolute maximum of 300MB (if a WU is completed every 2 days, so 15 WUs at 10MB each way), or well within any usage cap. Most Work Units are far smaller than that limit anyway, and the v6 client can be set to limit Work Unit downloads to 5MB each way.

It's not much, but it's a start, and I will admit the first one is ripped straight out of the Wiki, but if we could get all of these answers on one page (for now, here) then it would make a lot of people's lives a lot easier. The Wiki can be daunting when people are just presented with a link to its homepage. Oh, and please feel free to tell me where I have gone wrong or the answers could be improved... unless you're a mod, in which case go ahead and do it yourself!
Any more reasons, type them up and I/we will try and counter them here
EDIT: Added free research and network bandwidth questions, general update.

That's a nice start John.

A nice thing about fah is that if a person is inclined to make donations to charities,
fah enables them to ensure that their donation goes to science, instead of bureaucracy, or to line some fat cat’s pockets.