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.

MOUNTAIN - less than 24h to go.
We're doing great. Keep these machines going and we'll be sorted.

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).)

Maybe the "Time Zone Challenge" could morph into the "Latitude Challenge".  That would combine East through West areas (Latitude-wise) and might help address the problem with the Folder-heavy US East coast component.  IMO, the number to consider (if this contest wants to remain a geographical segmented race) is not State counts, State populations, etc.  The important number is where "Folders" are actually located and how many are in a given geography.  If that could be balanced out with each geographical segment having a fighting-chance to win, then just let the chips fall on who can bring the most iron to the table.  The TZC (for me) was more of just a coming together of Folders that didn't ultimately care what Time Zone was King.  It was that Fall-roundup for Folding that maintained interest in Folding for the team.
 
I always felt that "March Madness" was one of the most fun contests that Troy used to run.  It had all the right elements (what felt like a real competition that could change daily, great team custom-badges and lots of smack talk that was always interesting to read). 
 
My 2-cents...

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.

Well at least I have moved from 20th to 18th Team Rank and back down to 195 for Project Rank.
Sorry wrinvert but then it looks like you are on a Folding Break ATM.

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

bill1024
Do a North vs South, never mind, was done already.

Maybe, but at the time no one had to pay for electricity

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.

Punchy,
My plan was only to Fold around 300,000 PPD for this contest but because we had such a low number of Team Members for Mountain I Fired Up All My Rigs to help off set the low count. It cost way to much now for me now that I am not working.
Next Time The TZC Runs most likely we will not have BigAdv to run so all we will have are GPU and for the most part Cost the Most to Fold. So the TZC would run two to three times longer *even for the East to hit 100 Million Points.
Maybe within the Team we could match GPU Model to GPU Model and maybe even CPU like Intel -v- AMD.
For the most part I will continue to play but at a much lower cost to time for the completion.