I feel better about supporting The Grid. All the papers coming out of Folding at Home are Pande (the main researcher) group projects that are selected by Pande et al. Additionally, it could end up that the fruits of this processing power are patented meds that only truly benefit those with money in their pockets until trickle down reaches the global community as a whole. Of course, this is speculation, but I couldn't find anything about how the projects are chosen on the folding at home webpage. That's one of the reasons I quit running folding at home on my computers.

The Grid on the other hand, appears to be more global community oriented, working on problems that affect the world in significant ways, such as smallpox and malaria.

From the World Community Grid Webpage - "The Advisory Board is an international group of experts specializing in health sciences, technology, and philanthropy. The role of the advisory board is to establish the criteria and process for soliciting and reviewing research proposals, identifying projects that benefit most from grid computing and make the most difference to our world."

I do agree that they need to release clients for Linux, Mac and BSD, as well as implement a cpu usage feature, but this project is truly worthwhile, so give them some time before you give up on them. :-)

Justin

A couple of misconceptions need to be cleared up here. Firstly, WCG, UD and IBM do not "own" the results of the processing that we are providing. The Human Proteome Folding project is being run for The Institute for Systems Biology. More information on them can be found in the Projects Showcase under the Research Participants at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/research_participants.html and http://www.systemsbiology.org/ .

Then, the Human Proteome Folding project and folding@home project have very different objectives. A simple explanation can be found in the Projects Showcase under the Project FAQ's at http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/projects_showcase/proteome_faqs.html .

I would really recommend that any of us that are participating in this project or are thinking about participating spend some time reading the information that the WCG has provided in the sections pointed to by the tabs under the top of the page "world community grid" logo. There is a lot there that will answer questions and concerns that lead to confusion and misrepresentations here in the forums.

My Main-Man investigated this ?Question and gave up on GOOGle-Labz-Toolbar for F@H and again at Http://Folding.Stanford.EDU for 'Folding' Proteins [[which is complimentory to this [Proteome'] ] Not Competetory!!! It just seems like a more friendly application [we do miss Electron Microscope II 'screan-saver-' though - even thou' wcGRID's is good too!