Technology's Frank Capra moments

The technology sector can feel like a fairly brutal place to live. The job cuts and bloodshed of the most recent downturn are only really the tip of the iceberg.

Out in the open there's the vendor infighting, the lawsuits, the anti-trust cases and the bad blood between ISPs. Behind closed doors there are the fraudsters, the hackers, the script-kiddies and the virus writers all planning their next malicious moves.

At work you're inundated with spam emails and scam emails. Perhaps your favourite site's just run out of money and closed down. Because of tightening legislation you can no longer download music to listen to at your desk. Then there's downtime, crashes and the blue screen of death.

All in all you could be forgiven for wondering whether life wasn't actually better before all this technology came along promising to make things easier.

And then something comes along that reminds you that technology is doing so much to improve our lives.

Today we covered a breakthrough at Stanford University in the US where scientists have successfully mapped the folding patterns of proteins. Clusters of misshapen proteins can be found in the brains of patients suffering with Alzheimer's and Parkinson's but the Stanford experiments mean medical science now has even more ammunition with which to fight these two diseases.

But it is not just the nature of the breakthrough which is so heartening. It is the means by which the findings came about. The Stanford scientists were using a distributed computing model - similar to that used in the SETI (search for extraterrestrial intelligence) experiment.

Thousands of everyday computer users have willingly signed up to share the processing power of their computers with the scientists at Stanford, with the common wish to fight serious illness. In an age when people are rightly suspicious of much that goes on in cyberspace, it is encouraging to see something which constitutes an act of giving.

The processing power sitting idle in the world today is immense. Just think of the amount of time you leave your machine on at work. Think of the potential your PC has to perform thousands of calculations per second and then multiply that by the millions of machines worldwide. If harnessed this power could revolutionise every aspect of modern science and medicine.

So before you switch off your machine and turn your back in despair next time all this technology gets on top of you, remember how much good that box could be doing if you left it on.

Related stories:
Scientists hail 'first success' for distributed computing
http://www.silicon.com/a56073
Bunch of Fives: Grid Computing
http://www.silicon.com/a55942