MyFursona.com

Mar 30, 2008 6:46am

Well, I bit the bullet and used a mixture of credit from trade-ins, cash, and credit to pick up a local 60 Gig PS3 I found -- the 80 GB model I have coming from TraInn will be sold locally or on furbid/furbuy or something to cover costs. Why? With about 110 PS2 games and triple that many PSX games in my collection, the ability for one machine to play them all reliably is important to me -- even some PS2 games don't load correctly over the PS2's component cables. Hell, I don't even have any PS3 games yet! LOST on Blu-Ray is all I need right now and it looks (as Tom would say) FABU-LOUS.

Although I am way too busy to be messing around with this, I just wanted to post for any fellow PS3 owners (or furry geeks who just happen to leave their computers on all day -- AND THATS ALL OF YOU) to nudge them about Folding@Home (http://stanford.folding.edu). If you haven't heard about it, its software from Stanford University that runs in the background, and uses your spare, idle CPU processes to analyze protein sequences (and this is a simplified version) and generate models in order to further our scientific understanding of biological compounds. Every protein has several degrees of structure, from their building blocks to the way the building blocks interact with one another to give a protein its shape, the tertiary structure, it is this pattern that is essential because it has a great impact on the way an individual protein interacts with other molecules.

And oh my God, LOST looks fucking amazing in HD. You can see the freakin' scratches on the CD Juliet puts into her stereo in A Tale of Two Cities. But I digest...

Effectively, its a project that allows you to make a vast contribution to society for a relatively negligible contribution; the current goal is to use the data to further understand the molecular basis of and facilitate the discovery of a cure for Alzheimer's disease. As of a year ago, the PS3's running folding at home accounted for more than twice the computing power of all combined Windows PC's running folding at home...and the number of Windows PC's running the software was greater than the number of PS3's by a factor of ten. So, if you have a PS3, run Folding@Home when you're not using it! And if not -- install it on your PC! Let it run in the background so when someone asks you what you're doing when they catch you jackin' it to FurAffinity or VCL, you can simply answer, "Saving the world."

And like Xbox Acheivements, nothing gets people going like pointless scoreboards. That's why I've started a team -- Umgotts: Furry Folding, #119680 -- to get some furries together to fold some proteins! Download it for Windoze, Mac, Linux, whatever, and join up! I've got it running on everything that can (Uhh, just for future reference, do NOT try to mod your toaster to run Folding@Home, it WILL cause a fire).

As I said, its a tremendous contribution to society that requires effort that is completely negligible...just like recycling, but the idiots in my dorm apparently can't be bothered to throw their cans and bottles into the recycling containers that are right fucking next to the trash cans. I will probably have to fight them if this continues (and deflect all litigation to Ted Turner and blame Captain Planet warping my impressionable young mind). Also, recycle or I will fucking punch you in the mouth.