Viper97
Is no one rooting for PST?  *Sigh*

<<<------ This guy is rooting for PST.  With the 2 GTX970s I just brought online.

You can call me crazy, but don't call me late for dinner!  I'm rooting for PST, and that ain't Potato and STeak... but given Idaho Potatoes and Texas Steak, I'd eat Mountain and Central for breakfast!  

Xavier Zepherious

PS:
not solely by bcavnaugh...I can turn on another rig and add 500k PPD 

I think you should anyway  got to make up for my typo somehow

Punchy

drougnor
Every time I think we can call a 'lead' in the race for #2, it flip/flops again! Keep it up, MST and CST! This is freaking exciting!

The outcome will be determined entirely by how many of bcavnaugh's rigs will be turned back on.  Not fun any more.
 

+1 Not fun any more.

Come on CENTRAL!!!  I'm bleeding my rigs for those few more extra points.  And its bad enough that the A/C kicked on in the middle of the night when it was 36*F outside. 

LearjetMinako
Come on CENTRAL!!!  I'm bleeding my rigs for those few more extra points.  And its bad enough that the A/C kicked on in the middle of the night when it was 36*F outside. 

That is why I leave my Windows Open and I even have 20" Fans in Two Open Windows Pulling in that 20F-30F air in to my home bring down my inside are to about 58F. 51F for a Low and 64F for a High.

Even with The East and Central having more Players they also have MORE STATES.
This really needs to be re-looked at. Number of States are Highest in the East then the Central then Mountain and then last Pacific.
Poor Pacific they only have 4 and a half States. How was the TZC ever a Fair Challenge?

 
Pacific and Mountain Together Would be Far to Central and the East.
Three Teams not Four Teams would be a Legitimate Challenge.
 
Only my 2 and a Half Cents.

kerryd
Seattle has more ppl in it then all of Montana hehe

People, I see. I did have to lookup ppl found to be slang for people.
This is what we get to texting and not using Keyboards any more.
All I can use is a KB and most of the time not very well.
 

LearjetMinako
Come on CENTRAL!!!  I'm bleeding my rigs for those few more extra points.  And its bad enough that the A/C kicked on in the middle of the night when it was 36*F outside. 

All doors and windows open except the front door and bedroom. Just as well I live on the 3rd floor :-)

bcavnaugh
Even with The East and Central having more Players they also have MORE STATES.
This really needs to be re-looked at. Number of States are Highest in the East then the Central then Mountain and then last Pacific.
Poor Pacific they only have 4 and a half States. How was the TZC ever a Fair Challenge?

 
Pacific and Mountain Together Would be Far to Central and the East.
Three Teams not Four Teams would be a Legitimate Challenge.
 
Only my 2 and a Half Cents.

 
Mountain will always have the fewest people - mostly prairie or mountain area
lots of land -mostly farmland or mountain - so very few people on it
 
AB(Can) SK(Can) - prairie
MT prairie
ID - mountain
WY - prairie
UT -mountain
CO -mountain- prairie
AZ -desert
NM desert
 
I think California (a single state) has more pop than all the Mountain zone
and BC(Can) has more pop than AB(Can),SK(Can)
 
the problem for Pacific (California) is high electric costs...ie nuke plants and heat(and AC)
 
East coast was settled first - most of the industrial base of US is there
so most of the population is there - most of the trade is Atlantic trade ... Europe for longest time
as people moved inland central would be next largest occupied space
so from prairie to west coast has low population - and most would settle on the opposite coast
some due to the Gold rush
 
why would you want to live in a desert when you can have nice sunny beaches
 
Anyway I digress....
 
the contest was never ever Fair...OK I can live with that
then leave the weaker zones some chance of some upset - ie the assignment of those outside the zones to the weaker ones
because seeing it EST,CST,MST,PST.....well next year it should be EST,CST,PST,MST  
year after year is pointless
 
 
 
id be happy with PST winning it once - if they could afford to run the rigs
 
Mountain will be in dead last soon with the 4p's going going to the wayside - we just don't have the members to compete against a larger force folding on gpus
I can see us being in dead last next time
 
so we have gpu farms ? (what a dozen members with farms) - well that gets balanced out by everyone on your teams folding on GPUS too
---------
 
so what the alternative???
foldathon?
Zonal challenge (place states/provinces together in a ways that matches them up population wise)? - this gets complicated
XMAS games?...don't let Rudolph play any reindeer ones
 
 
 
 

CENTRAL, turn on EVERYTHING that you have left. Don't hold back!!!
 
I can't add anymore, out of PCIe slots. I already have an i7-930, i7-2600k, GTX660Ti, GTX660 and 2x GTX560Ti folding for our last battle day.

Xavier Zepherious

bcavnaugh
Even with The East and Central having more Players they also have MORE STATES.
This really needs to be re-looked at. Number of States are Highest in the East then the Central then Mountain and then last Pacific.
Poor Pacific they only have 4 and a half States. How was the TZC ever a Fair Challenge?

 
Pacific and Mountain Together Would be Far to Central and the East.
Three Teams not Four Teams would be a Legitimate Challenge.
 
Only my 2 and a Half Cents.

 
Mountain will always have the fewest people - mostly prairie or mountain area
lots of land -mostly farmland or mountain - so very few people on it
 
AB(Can) SK(Can) - prairie
MT prairie
ID - mountain
WY - prairie
UT -mountain
CO -mountain- prairie
AZ -desert
NM desert
 
I think California (a single state) has more pop than all the Mountain zone
and BC(Can) has more pop than AB(Can),SK(Can)
 
the problem for Pacific (California) is high electric costs...ie nuke plants and heat(and AC)
 
East coast was settled first - most of the industrial base of US is there
so most of the population is there - most of the trade is Atlantic trade ... Europe for longest time
as people moved inland central would be next largest occupied space
so from prairie to west coast has low population - and most would settle on the opposite coast
some due to the Gold rush
 
why would you want to live in a desert when you can have nice sunny beaches
 
Anyway I digress....
 
the contest was never ever Fair...OK I can live with that
then leave the weaker zones some chance of some upset - ie the assignment of those outside the zones to the weaker ones
because seeing it EST,CST,MST,PST.....well next year it should be EST,CST,PST,MST  
year after year is pointless
 
 
 
id be happy with PST winning it once - if they could afford to run the rigs
 
Mountain will be in dead last soon with the 4p's going going to the wayside - we just don't have the members to compete against a larger force folding on gpus
I can see us being in dead last next time
 
so we have gpu farms ? (what a dozen members with farms) - well that gets balanced out by everyone on your teams folding on GPUS too
---------
 
so what the alternative???
foldathon?
Zonal challenge (place states/provinces together in a ways that matches them up population wise)? - this gets complicated
XMAS games?...don't let Rudolph play any reindeer ones
 
 
 
 

 
Sort of what I was thinking: Possibly balancing it out by population density. (However, that still doesn't address the cost-of-electricity matter. Though I can't logically think of a way to mitigate that one. ... Send your GPUs to a folder in an area with lesser $/kilowatt?? - but then that would get tricky, and possibly ugly, what with figuring out costs due to the owner of the donor box, and the possibility of someone not being honest enough to return your GPU(s).)

Colorado under Xcel Energy and 3 Tier cost is VERY High Winter for me is just under $500 and $1200 in the Summer.
My Estimate for this TZC will be about $600. 

Xavier Zepherious
"the problem for Pacific (California) is high electric costs...ie nuke plants and heat(and AC)"

 
Nuke Plants should be free.
 
Also Once Core 15 Tasks Stop this will cut cost almost in Half.

Do a North vs South, never mind, was done already.

I think texinga was on to something, that it's not total population but population of folders in a given geography.  However, I'd go a step further and say it's not just the population of folders but also the distribution of production of those folders.  For example, if a "time zone" contained only brilong at 16 million PPD alone, it doesn't really matter how many other folders are in that time zone.
 
There are really only 2 possibilities here: either an unbalanced competition based on some attribute of each person (whether it's time zone, latitude, longitude, birthday, last digit of phone number or postal code, etc), or a "balanced" competition that again groups people by some attribute but then attempts to balance things somehow.
 
The current TZC is a hybrid of the 2: there weren't enough non-North-American folders to balance out EST, so it was a given that EST would stand alone and win.  The "extras" were allocated between Pacific and Mountain to at least balance those out.  However, this competition has been the most dramatic demonstration ever of how "balancing" fails.  Balancing only works if people are accurate with their production estimates.  Hence the registration rule:

• All information must be reported as accurately as possible during registration.

When the information isn't accurate, balancing won't work.  In previous competitions we have put caps on production for "overachievers", but even that won't really work, because then the winning team is the one where the most members come closest to the cap (thus rewarding the team with the most sandbaggers).
 
I think we should abandon the notion of balanced competitions for good, and come up with some other way of assigning people that gives us a reasonably even distribution and "let the chips fall where they may" as texinga said, or come up with some other way of picking a winner.