Folding at Home (what is this?)

[Gene Heskett]

On Friday 22 October 2004 15:02, Kyrre Ness Sjobak wrote:
>fre, 22.10.2004 kl. 15.48 skrev Gene Heskett:
>> On Friday 22 October 2004 02:38, Tom Taylor wrote:
>> >On Thursday 21 October 2004 21:21, joelbryan wrote:
>> >> Hi, For the sake of science, will Fedora Core participate at
>> >> Folding at Home?
>> >>
>> >> --
>> >> Music = Apple iPod + Rhythmbox & iTunes
>> >> Browser = Mozilla Firefox & Epiphany
>> >> Desktop = Gnome, Mac OSX, Longhorn 4074
>> >> Distro = Fedora Core
>> >> Language = PHP, MySQL, Python, HTML
>> >> Graphics = Gimp 2.0, gThumb
>> >> Editors = FrontPage 2003, vi, gedit
>> >> Codecs = FLAC, Ogg Vorbis, Apple Lossless
>> >
>> >Hmmm:
>> > Folding.  Is this like an origami party?  Or perhaps an envelope
>> > stuffing afair?
>> >
>> > Home.  Whose? Why? Where? When?
>> >
>> >Hee, hee, hee says he while ducking the tomatoes.
>> >
>> >Tom
>>
>> Its a program to study how proteins fold as they combine to make
>> the end products chemically.  It has quite far reaching
>> implications in the development of new drugs.  Such research
>> requires the sort of processing power thats only available from
>> the organisational aspect of something like setiathome.  I'm
>> currently running seti, but the replacement for seti, called boinc
>> (and I forget exectly what that acronym stands for), I will
>> probably convert to when seti runs down. Its also doing various
>> areas of medical research, but isn't limited to that only.  Both
>> would seem to be projects that have potential for the betterment
>> of mankind whereas seti is basicly an itch scratcher.
>
>Who gets the benifit of this research?
>Anybody-who-wants-to-download-the-result, or some multi-billion
>pharmaneutical reseach company that will use it only for own profit?

That was, (std disclaimer here) the last I read, still up in the air.  
Being a bit paranoid, if there are profits to be made from something 
my machine helps to discover, it only seems right that I should get a 
pittance for the electric bill or better yet, a royalty check from 
time to time.

-- 
Cheers, Gene
"There are four boxes to be used in defense of liberty:
 soap, ballot, jury, and ammo. Please use in that order."
-Ed Howdershelt (Author)
99.28% setiathome rank, not too shabby for a WV hillbilly
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by Gene Heskett are:
Copyright 2004 by Maurice Eugene Heskett, all rights reserved.