Just thought I'd throw this out there for anyone who hasn't heard of this and may be interested.
Folding@Home is a pretty cool little program that you can run in the background of your computer or Playstation 3. It is a low priority process so it will not preempt anything else you're doing; it just uses the unused cpu cycles when you're idle or you can set it to only run when the screen saver is going. I've been running it pretty much constantly on both of my machines for months and I've never noticed any sort of performance hit even when playing games, while editing video or anything else that requires heavy cpu use.
What it does is basically takes a project and breaks it into small work units that it assigns to systems running the program. You're computer works on its assigned unit in the background whenever you're idle then sends the completed unit back to be put into the big project. Basically it bands many personal computers into a sort of massive super-computer used to simulate protein folding, among other things, which is useful for a number things including furthering research on the cures for a number of diseases like Alzheimer's, Huntington's Disease, Cystic Fibrosis and a number of forms of cancer.
You can also create or join teams that rank it's members. Teams and ranks really don't mean anything though; just fosters a competitive spirit which can help people get more into it and get more done. The official
FiestaFan.com Folding@Home team number is 90021 if you want to join it.
Anyway, I just think it's a really cool thing. It doesn't hurt anything and has the potential to do a lot of good. Check it out if you got a minute. They also have an
FAQ or an article on
Wikipedia if you wanna read more.