you're on your way to getting the whole picture. glad you're advocating both sides and exploring what is really happening. people should do more of that. More power to you.
I like how you took an idea that was semi-out there, molded it, made it free, and tossed it out there. genius. I think the best thing you guys did with stack overflow was to give the community so much potential power. bravo.
Honestly, I think no matter what we do we are doomed to be consumed by microsoft. I love linux. I have some friends who are staunch Mac users and others who eat, sleep, and pee linux. All of them have microsoft products on their computers. Schools, offices, homes, microsoft is everywhere all over the world.
The sad fact is that pc's are cheap and most people (general population) are lazy or uninterested in installing (or even learning about) other operating systems.
The product is sort of forced upon us. All we can really do is cope.
It seems like a lot of people upgrade their windows operating system when a new one comes out (except with vista because of all of the bad reviews).
I'm actually a bioinformatics major, bioinformatician by profession. We do work with computer scientists a lot, but one thing we find very frustrating is that 99% of them don't know biology, biochemistry, chemistry, or organic chemistry to the necessary degree. They also don't know how to read lab tests we run or how to interpret them.
Personally, I think that computer programming is something that anybody can do. The advantage computer scientists have is a deep understanding of the inner workings of computers and computer language structure-- which is how computer scientists are able to optimize so well.
Since I'm currently working in the field of bioinformatics, I'll tell you this...KNOW YOUR SCIENCE!! You don't know how many times a computer scientist will optimize the hell out of an algorithm and make it look great and run like butter, but only to have it be junked in the end because is doesn't make any scientific sense.
As for the computer languages we use, we use perl a lot... too much even. perl has become our staple language because it takes less than a minute to write good script if you know what you're doing. python is popular too, but I'd say the majority of people use perl.
Another important language most bioinformaticians use is C/C++. Why? Wouldn't you want to use a faster language (C) to crunch 100 gigabits of genetic data instead of a slower one (perl).
And note, bioinformatics and computational biology are two different fields. This is a very common misconception. Do a little bit of research and you will discover this.
protein folding is one of the more prominent areas of biology being researched right now. Good luck with the learning and feel free to contact me.