idle computer

EcoButton (Computer Standby Button)

The EcoButton is a cool USB gadget that saves you money and fights global warming! I can practically hear your tuts of disbelief back at Zath HQ. But seriously this little eco-friendly gizmo will do exactly that and even has the balls to gloat about it too!

I am talking about the EcoButton. Essentially it is a large nicely lit button that plugs into a USB port and once clicked puts your machine into “Eco Mode”. This allows your computer to go into a standby mode that only uses 1.8 watts of power (apparently that is loads less then most normal standby modes). “who cares” and “nothing new” I thought when I first saw it, but I decided to look a little deeper.

Distributed Computing Software Downloads

Folding@home is a distributed computing software system that means you can put your idle computer to good use by means of distributed computing project which is similar to one of the first projects of this type; SETI@home. Distributed computing software uses the spare computing cycles of your home computer by sending it a small chunk of work to process, which alone isn’t a great amount, but when thousands of other computers are also contributing to a project in this manner, all that combined processing power equals a huge supercomputer which can process highly complex data.

In this case, distributed computing software centres around simulating the folding of proteins in the human brain – which when they fold incorrectly cause diseases such as Alzheimer’s, Mad Cow (BSE), CJD, ALS, Huntington’s, Parkinson’s disease, and many Cancers and cancer-related syndromes. Folding@home hopes to help in the medical research of finding cures to these diseases and you can help this research by downloading and running the Folding@home software.