this is a program that i let run on my computer's here at the house donating spare cpu and gpu cycles to note worthy causes... Boinc(Berkeley Open Infrastructure Network Client). it's easy to use, many projects to choose from... from climate prediction, fightaids@home, to seti(aliens)... Easily adjustable settings and can be turned on and off at your pleasure. website: http://boinc.berkeley.edu/ ; recording about the program: http://www.rce-cast.com/index.php/Podcast/rce-13-boinc.html this program is also associated with GridRepublic, Intel's Progress thru Processors Facebook app, and World Community Grid. (website's; http://www.worldcommunitygrid.org/index.jsp ; http://www.gridrepublic.org/ ) if you have a question about the client or projects feel free to post here or at the forums for boinc. 1 good deed is better than no deed at all.
I ran SETI@home before it was a part of BOINC. Then, I install BOINC, and uninstall 5 minutes later. BOINC sucks ass, and I'll never run it on my machine. The fact that it's set to use 100% of your CPU by default is pretty fucking shady. I'm donating CPU power, that doesn't mean you can go ahead and juice the whole fucking thing.
Its not about researchers... it's about the fact that 99% of the PCs are sitting there idle doing nothing a lot of the time. That is a lot of CPU power that can be used to calculate things and help figure out stuff that may save our lives one day... (cures for cancer etc) I used to do seti as well for quite awhile. I had the same opinion as Rubius though, but maybe it's time to take another look. If it's like seti and only kicks in on screensaver, then great.
thanks jeb, and the boinc client is completely customizable, you can set it to run after a certain idle time has pasted, like 5 minutes or 4 hrs, and you can set it to run at certain times of the day and then stop. the new client makes use of both Nvidia and ATI cards that are cuda/cal capable. some projects have screensavers, others don't but overall one more computer is better than no computer... I wish my College Campus(1 of 5) with it's 1600 computers would donate. maybe i just need to propose it to the administrator.