Can someone PLEASE explain to me what the hell a "folding team" is?

What is it for? What about privacy? Why is it important? Someone enlighten me and use small words. Thanks!

:-)

...but I think it has to do with offering some resources from your computer as part of a larger team so that a problem can be tackled with more oomph. Software is used to link a bunch of computers together and use their combined power to tackle a complicated problem.

Something like that, anyway. I'm sure others can explain it a lot better.

http://vspx27.stanford.edu/cgi-bin/main.py?qtype=teampage&teamnum=48157

we are folding proteins for scientific research, using many pc's as a type of spread out supercomputer, it runs on your machine in the background using your spare cpu capabilities.........

You download a client that runs as a screensaver on your box. while this 'screensaver' is running, it is actually doing intense mathematical computations on "protein folding" (and it displays pretty pictures." The screen saver attaches to a central server and downloads a block of data to crunch. Whenever the screen saver is running and number crunching, it it tallying the # of hours your PC is contributing. When that block has been sufficiently crunched, the screenserver app uploads the results back to the server, and downloads the next block of data for your PC to crunch.

To encourage more participation, the organization came up w/ the idea of Folding Teams, where an individuals # of hours is combined into your TEAM, with the object being that your TEAM have the most hours of PC time.

All of this proteinn folding computation is geared toward cancer research. SO you are basically donating free cycles on your pc to crunch numbers in the search for a cure. Distributed computing is using thousands of 'small' pc's instead of one super honker katrillion dollar machine.

See here for details and download:
http://folding.stanford.edu/

time they get close to winning a pennant they fold.

folded like a cheap tent
folded like a cheap suitcase
folded like a house of cards

These aren't recent phrases

I can now put it out of my mind.