DescentBB

This is kinda cool.

Was lookin around. I always amazes me what folks think up to put computers in. I especially like the Commador 64 rebuild.

Yea, saw that one.
Pretty cool! Not really useful though.

Tricord wrote:Yea, saw that one.
Pretty cool! Not really useful though.

i was going to say, ive seen this aswell, and i see alot of uses for something like this.

you guys think we can convince this person to join our Folding Team

AceCombat wrote:i was going to say, ive seen this aswell, and i see alot of uses for something like this.

you guys think we can convince this person to join our Folding Team

Tricord wrote:Not really useful though.

I have my doubts with the usefulness of popular distributed computing projects.

thats your opinion, i think these kinds of systems have alot of uses.

The common distributed computing initiatives (Folding and SETI) are like many research projects: They appear useless until they produce results.

SETI is only slightly more likely to turn up alien signals as a Sioux Indian trying to pick up Telegraph signals by looking for smoke signals on the horizon. I often wonder why I've devoted over 40,000 hours to SETI, but the chance is non-zero, so I give my spare cycles to that chance.

Folding is undoubtedly more likely to crack a few whoppers, and benefit mankind in some way I think.

Well, I look at it this way:

The laws that govern complex molecules such as proteins are so complicated that it is still impossible to simulate them on supercomputers.
Yet, on a distributed system, you don't need simulation software, you get a "data unit" which weighs in at a few kilobytes, and your computer spends hours crunching it!

I find it hard to believe that unit contains an actual part of a molecule simulation with just a few kilobytes in size, an can keep a GHz+ computer busy for so long...

Same with SETI... I'd have to research what exactly they have the computers calculate.

If it was a project to search for prime numbers, I'd be interested because however useless or useful it is to find a new prime number, I would know what my PC is doing.

Tricord wrote:Well, I look at it this way:
If it was a project to search for prime numbers, I'd be interested because however useless or useful it is to find a new prime number, I would know what my PC is doing.

It's called Prime95 and I believe it predates SETI and folding:

http://www.mersenne.org

Yep, seen that one.

Still, I don't feel like installing it