Slashdot Mirror
PS3 Downtime To Fight Disease
Aerenel writes, "CNN reports that Sony has teamed up with Folding@home to use the PS3 to study how proteins are formed in the human body and how they sometimes form incorrectly. From the article: 'Donating [a gamer's] PS3's down time to researchers could help cure Alzheimer's, Parkinson's or mad cow disease.' PS3 users will be able to download a software package that tracks when the PS3 is not being used. While gamers are in school, at work, or asleep, their system's Cell processor can be used to perform simulations for research organizations. The PS3, due in November, has gotten serious negative press in the past few months, and this refreshing good news may win back the hearts of gamers still undecided about purchasing the system."
This definitely seems like a good thing. But I wonder, will gamers really let that influence their purchasing decisions? Honestly, I have my doubts.
Basilisk Digital
Don't forget shortening the useful life of the PS3 itself!
RTFA. It's on a voluntary basis. If you don't like it, don't do it. But it certainly is nice to have the possibility, and, as it seems, officially approved by Sony.
Basilisk Digital
Well, to be fair, the bandwidth is probably minimal and, in cold seasons, the power consumption will just turn into heat and make itself slightly useful.
From the summary, it sounds like this will be something you can download if you want to, just like it is on the PC. I don't think people who don't run Folding@Home are often attacked for being horrible people who support cancer.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I'm going to pay $600 so I can run a second copy of something that's already spinning away on my PC right now?
No, you are going to pay $600 to play games and run Linux on a Cell processor. The F@H thing is just a perk that you can either use to double (or quadruple) what you are doing on your PC right now or not. If you pay $600 for a PS3 just to do F@H, you are an idiot.
There is no "I disagree" mod for a reason. Flamebait, Troll, and Overrated are not substitutes.
> Because privately held research would like to use my PS3 for free and then make money from it when
> they discover something - without any intention to charge less $$ for the treatment / cure in
> exchange for all this free computing?
Once a medical discovery is made it doesn't go away. Yes, it is a money tree for YEARS for the company with the patents. YES, a lot of the research was paid for by others. NO, they won't share. YES, they will charge an insane amount for it.
But a new treatment is A NEW TREATMENT. A cure is a CURE. Stop being so goddamned cynical and take one up the rear for the good of mankind once in a while.
And yes, I'm serious. Mod me down if you must though, I'll understand.
Riiiight.. because the heating/cooling cycles of electronic equipment being turned on and off repeatedly is *much* better for it.
At least try to come up with a valid reason to not use it.
Uh, you aren't allowing Sony to use your spare cycles, you're allowing Folding@Home (or more broadly, Stanford University's Pande Group) to use your spare cycles. And they are a non-profit organization who releases their findings for free. So, yes, you as part of the public can access the information you helped discover for free.
Even if Sony WAS a scientific conglomerate trying to find a cure, would you really want to put a hamper on reducing millions of deaths just because you don't want them to earn money? Please avoid discarding your common sense in favor of bashing a corporation you don't like. Oh, wait, this is Slashdot.
Don't Sony make a loss on the hardware? Maybe they're banking on the Blu-Ray components dropping sharply in price by the time PS3s start breaking down, but it looks to me more like an attempt to get one bit of good PR not written by Official Sony Fanboy Magazine. Note that Wii will also be always-on, but Nintendo have taken the opposite approach, aiming for minimal standby power usage, waking only to receive downloads of freshly minted swag for your games. So, if there's some evil MTBF conspiracy, two companies had the same idea at once... Let's not dump on Sony's decision too much, this will give the research a nice boost, but it doesn't scream out "Get a PS3!" to me by any stretch.
I'm scared of numbers that can't be written as a fraction. It's an irrational fear.
Why would you insist on "scaling" applications when you could just set the priority(win)/nice(*nix) level lower? (i.e., higher nice value in linux, lower priority setting in windows). That way, it will always yield to every other system that needs to use the CPU. (And nevermind the belief that a process can use only 'part' of a single-core CPU)
Because even if my computer isn't running anything important, running it at 100% CPU usage will invoke the full cooling capacity of the system. For a desktop, this means a louder fan noise. For a laptop, however, it may not be well-suited to 24/7 100% CPU utilization. The fans are small and can get _very_ noisy. The bottom of the laptop can get so hot as to be unusable on your lap; quite possibly, you could shorten the lifespan of your components.
"The universe seems neither benign nor hostile, merely indifferent." --Carl Sagan
Did you even READ the post you replied to? He specifically states why "nice" isn't a solution. Nice doesn't stop a program from using all the CPU, it just stops it from using CPU when another program wants it. His complaint is constantly having a system peaked near 100% CPU usage, which produces shitloads of heat, shortening processor life.
When I can run GCC on it without using rare, expensive add-on hardware that Sony quickly discontinues *cough*PS2 Linux*cough*, then it's a computer. Until then, it's a locked-in console.