A current frustration has recently beset me, and I have to state this for those who are or may have ideas and simply don’t know. There are a number of reasons not to “borg” and I will name a few here.
First- if you don’t know what “borging” is- it is the practice of “assimilating” computers other than your own for your purposes without either the knowledge or consent of the owners.
The Folding@Home project detests and discourages this practice and has harsh penalties- including the forfeiture of ALL the points under your name. It is dishonest, selfish, misses the point, and dishonors the name of the project. And it may well cost you more than just points.
Below is a picture I can’t tell you much about except to say that the machines shown have been customized to provide enough processing power to produce upwards of about 80,000ppd. And this is just the tip of the iceberg planned for the next few years.
They may likely not produce a single WU.
It is partly because of an employee (and, to be fair, others like him) a few years back who decided to use company computers to run Seti@Home without the knowledge or consent of the company. It was discovered, had to be run down on each machine and removed. I’ll also simply state that this employee has been summarily dismissed. Unfortunately- it has also had other repercussions.
A request at my company to run a Distributed Computing Program (DCP) for whatever purpose, falls on deaf ears. It was made corporate policy to prohibit the running of DCPs and the firewall company-wide prevents communications with DCP servers and sites.
Understand that companies want to provide information security for both their customers and themselves- and some DCPs, including F@H, have issues. They are also touchy about their power costs and how their resources are utilized. While F@H could provide some PR benefit for the company, the abuse of DCPs like F@H is a real concern.
While I see enough CPU power go through my area to double the entire teams’ output about bi-annually, I can and will not install a single F@H client on a company machine- and be frustrated.
I’m on a slow campaign, if just in part, to change that- but by petition according to policy- not by borging. So please, do not borg- it could squirrel away my chances … as well as your own.
I also understand your frustration. I lost a farm of about 25 computers about a year ago at a client location because some new "computer expert" employee said that his CPU was 100% usage and he knew that this was bad for computers. He talked to the CEO and said that 100% cpu usage was going to break the computers and this was virus-like behavior. Now, I had talked to this same CEO about the F@H project several years before, explained the merits, explained the safety of it, and got his permission to run it on his company computers.
Never mind the fact that his company's computers have been running over four years with F@H to no detriment whatsoever - he decided that this new employee was "right" and that was that. F@H gone off of over 20 machines. There was a breakdown of reason, and the project suffered because of it.
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A current frustration has recently beset me, and I have to state this for those who are or may have ideas and simply don’t know. There are a number of reasons not to “borg” and I will name a few here.
First- if you don’t know what “borging” is- it is the practice of “assimilating” computers other than your own for your purposes without either the knowledge or consent of the owners.
The Folding@Home project detests and discourages this practice and has harsh penalties- including the forfeiture of ALL the points under your name. It is dishonest, selfish, misses the point, and dishonors the name of the project. And it may well cost you more than just points.
Below is a picture I can’t tell you much about except to say that the machines shown have been customized to provide enough processing power to produce upwards of about 80,000ppd. And this is just the tip of the iceberg planned for the next few years.
They may likely not produce a single WU.
It is partly because of an employee (and, to be fair, others like him) a few years back who decided to use company computers to run Seti@Home without the knowledge or consent of the company. It was discovered, had to be run down on each machine and removed. I’ll also simply state that this employee has been summarily dismissed. Unfortunately- it has also had other repercussions.
A request at my company to run a Distributed Computing Program (DCP) for whatever purpose, falls on deaf ears. It was made corporate policy to prohibit the running of DCPs and the firewall company-wide prevents communications with DCP servers and sites.
Understand that companies want to provide information security for both their customers and themselves- and some DCPs, including F@H, have issues. They are also touchy about their power costs and how their resources are utilized. While F@H could provide some PR benefit for the company, the abuse of DCPs like F@H is a real concern.
While I see enough CPU power go through my area to double the entire teams’ output about bi-annually, I can and will not install a single F@H client on a company machine- and be frustrated.
I’m on a slow campaign, if just in part, to change that- but by petition according to policy- not by borging. So please, do not borg- it could squirrel away my chances … as well as your own.
I also understand your frustration. I lost a farm of about 25 computers about a year ago at a client location because some new "computer expert" employee said that his CPU was 100% usage and he knew that this was bad for computers. He talked to the CEO and said that 100% cpu usage was going to break the computers and this was virus-like behavior. Now, I had talked to this same CEO about the F@H project several years before, explained the merits, explained the safety of it, and got his permission to run it on his company computers.
Never mind the fact that his company's computers have been running over four years with F@H to no detriment whatsoever - he decided that this new employee was "right" and that was that. F@H gone off of over 20 machines. There was a breakdown of reason, and the project suffered because of it.