foldingathome.com/.org

[Scotttheking]

I'm curious, why do these urls lead to your site?
Shouldn't they be going to stanford's?

[Jodie]

It seems stanford chooses to maintain just the *.stanford.edu, kinda like SETI did originally. Someone might as well snap them up...

I could speculate on their inability to map another domain name and the odds that my dog could better maintain a dns server, but I'll save the stanford flames for their board.

[MAD-ness]

I noticed this about a week ago and got a good laugh out of it.

[mr_mann]

maybe i should get it

[Jodie]

The DF folks beat'cha to it.

If Genome@Home and Folding@Home is (tm) or (c), then they might end-up having to give them back at some point, though...

Stanford's law school is better than their CS program...

[MAD-ness]

Their CS department is supposed to be pretty good and the clients are a bit of a pain in the arse, so if thier law school isn't any better relative to thier reputation, there might not be much to worry about.

[Jodie]

I'm a Cal Berzerkeley Alumnae, so it's a moral imperative that I point out that their CS program stinks...

[MAD-ness]

Berkely's?

[Jodie]

[Scott Jensen]

When I was involved in Folding@Home, they were pretty much unaware that the URL was already taken and were first informed about it by us volunteers. This was long before this project went live. Good foresight in regards to the DF people and not so good for the FAH people. But if you knew what the FAH house was like then (and probably still is now), it wouldn't then surprise you. Dr. Pande (Stanford) contacted this project's people and from what he said, a live-and-let-live attitude was taken by both sides. I was slightly surprised that DF didn't just go right ahead and use the URL, but understand why they didn't due to the confusion it would cause.

[Shaktai]

DF or more specifically Dr. Hogue's business entity, registered that domain back in 2000 sometime. It is possible that they may have originally intended to call their project Folding@Home, but were beaten to the punch by the Stanford folks, but already had the domain name registered.

[Brian the Fist]

You guys do pretty good detective work The truth is, as Chris has mentioned before I believe, we had been planning to do distributed folding as early as 1997 when Chris started at the Lunenfeld Institute here. Initially it was going to be all done from the ground up so we developed the Mobidick system:

http://bioinfo.mshri.on.ca/projects/mobi/index.html

Unfortunately this project never reached fruition although it has been used extensively internally on our own cluster. My idea of writing a screensaver/client and using the HTTP protocol to communicate was a natural extension of this, and influenced mostly by the SETI and distributed.net projects which we participated in for a short time, in their infancy, to get a feel for how these projects work.