Just noticed we seem to be losing active members hand over fist. Down to 486 this morning (it was over 600 a few weeks ago). I know summer? is upon us but I wonder if it has anything to do with the changes to the mag? @ James - Could move the folding pages back to the front along with the other mods you informed us about? Personally I feel folding at the back of the mag gives completely the wrong message and in fact could easily be missed by anyone casually browsing CPC. Thoughts anyone?
I think the chances that moving some pages in the mag resulted in a 25% drop in our folders count are absurd. The obvious cause is that people are poorer and feeling it hard.
I left to support a smaller team (and also went from 400ppd to 8,000ppd at the same time ) I helped contribute almost 500,000 pts (plus chimps) though
I don't think the mag placement has anything to do with people leaving, but the following do; 1. Cost of leccy going up 2. Summer temps 3. The recent changes to the points system
I suspect it's mostly to do with people being skint. Pretty much all optional activities (i.e. folding, going out to restaurants, upgrading PCs, going on holiday, buying a new car) are suffering due to it being the 3rd year of a global economic recession.
Is our team worse than others for this? Maybe, its cos the mag has gone up in price and the extra money would have gone on leccy? Cannabis farms don't seem to have issues with leccy bills, why are folding farms in this position?
I've been having issues with my gpu, and can't run my comp 24/7, so bigadv units are out of the question, and heat is another issue. I'll be back on it once I'm back at uni in september though
I've had to stop my home rigs a few times due to temps, even though my SR-2 and 970 are watercooled and normally sit around 60~ish degrees on the cores, the ambient temps have jumped right up taking the cores up and over 70 which is too hot for my liking on 32nm. Also as its my home office I have these rigs then I've not been able to work in it for more than 2 minutes without breaking out in a sweat so think I need to look into some extractor fans, would love a small air-con unit but with the juice of that added on top of the folding rigs = unhappy wallet come electric bill time
I wasn't suggesting the mag was the only cause of our woes, maybe a small contributory factor ? With leccy prices on the rise I've fixed mine till Sept'12. I should be able to continue folding for at least another year
Its not just electricity, its the general situation. My own salary is going to be cut substantially in September just in time for Christmas. I've already got a cutting edge smartphone and rig so I won't be spending money on folding rigs because I can't afford it.
my gpu is dead and i can't afford to replace it, but i still submit the odd SMP unit so i'm still an 'active' folder... just not as active as some...
As I have already said in another thread, I have dropped out mainly due to the recent events with the points system and what I consider to be common stupidity on the part of PG by not letting their contributors know what they are planning so we can do some planning too. Once they make their minds up about the points and how they are going to change GPU contributions etc. I will likely return. I was totally set up for bigadv and don't want to have to spend a fortune on GPUs too (as PG appear to want less bigadv now). At present I am on a steep learing curve with BOINC - mainly contributing to Rosetta which is another protine-folding cure-humanity type program . I dabbled with the fore-runner of BOINC about 10 years ago when I was doing SETI@home and it hasn't improved much as far as I can see but it has got bigger. Ho-hum. It makes F@H look slick. But I was struggling a little with temps as well (Coolamasta, for your info - I re-purposed an existing vent hole in my wall and fitted a cheap 220mm "big-boy" case fan to it - works a treat - dropped the room temp by at least 4~5C and its low power too - 9 watts). I can't leave the windows open as I live in a ground-floor flat. If I did not have the hole already I would have core-drilled a 152mm hole like I did in the bathroom (which got a VentAxia). The price of electricity is a consideration and I limit myself to no more than two systems running 24/7 with one other running about 12 hours per day (it's in the bedroom and the wife won't have it on at night). I also offset my base load with 400Wp of grid-tied solar PV in the back garden..... All the best. Dave.
Best of luck with your BOINC endeavours Dave. It's a fantastic achievement to have folded since 2004 Hope you return soon.
I feel the placement in the magazine could prove things, I'm sure if they set monthly challenges for prizes but covered the comp in the folding section of the publication folks might get involved. I'm a sucker for free stuff. Those who get profiled should win s**t, the modders do.. I'd manly put the decline down to, heat, cost and the why bother factor. I'm folding 24/7 thou... managed to dodge paying a leccy bill for the last 27 years.. J.
I'm away working most of the summer, and I can't leave 19 GPUs and 6 CPUs folding in a small room in summer with me not there. I'll start up again in the autumn.
Thanks phoenicis, you never know it might be sooner than you think. It's not proving to be much of a challenge at the moment - I'm zooming up the leaderboard like a rocket. Up more than 1.5M places (out of 1.8M) in the last three days. Low-hanging fruit I guess. All the best. Dave.