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if I recall correctly there was language in all the paperwork I signed when I went to school that said something to the effect of 'everything you do while you're attending college belongs to the college'.

Yeah, that sounds about right.

Don't like it? Don't go to a major university.

Trillian's author (and those of all the "compatible" IM utilities) aren't "stealing intellectual property"; they're doing reverse engineering of the protocols,

When they use OSCAR protocol features like buddy icons or file transfers, then yes, they're doing reverse-engineered stuff.. however, for simple stuff like signing on to AOL and sending messages, they aren't even using anything reverse engineered! They're just implementing a publicly documented protocol published by AOL itself.

This is AOL realizing "hey, we bought ICQ a while ago, let's start actually doing something with it", because they were getting stomped in the IM arena by competitors.

Widespread theory as to why AOL didn't integrate ICQ into AIM a very, very long time ago is that they were trying to make it appear ICQ was still somehow "independent" to preserve the illusion that AOLIM was not a monopoly.. of course, now they have Yahoo!Chat and MSN to point at and go "see??", so they don't need to do that anymore..

A better cittion on worms and their strategies: How to 0wn the Internet in your Spare Time by Stuart Staniford, Vern Paxson, and myself.

The warhol paper largely got rolled into the "0wn the Internet" paper.

You probably also want to check out Hubert Dreyfus, author of What Computers Still Can't Do: A Critique of Artificial Reason. Ties Phenomenology directly to AI research.

There are real benefits for Canadian research that can come from this project - certainly there are a number of problems that are numerical and parallelizable, so there can be a lot of future to it if they do enough coordination, but most of Canada's academic supercomputing is currently driven by SETI. Besides scientific research, the other traditional users of supercomputers are weather prediction, oil exploration, and sometimes financial modelling - Canada may have more total supercomputer-based supercomputing than anybody realizes, in addition to SETI. However, the June 2002 top500.org list doesn't show anything in Canada above #227.

Other results from the Top500.org list - SETI@Home is still about 7 times as large as the largest single machine on the list , Japan's NEC Earth Simulator, which is about 5 times as large as the #2 machine, LLNL's ASCII White.

uhh... Well, Seti@Home *has* produced results. Just not a 'hit' on an ET civilization. The project has produced valuable data on hydrogen distribution in our neighborhood of our galaxy. This was reported by S@H back on Nov. 6, 2001 in their Newsletter #10. The URL is here.

I run S@H, and have since it started back in May 1999. I contribute my spare CPU cycles to the project gladly, and I do so to further astronomic research (such as the Hydrogen distribution I mentioned above). The odds, with our current technology of actually *finding* an ET signal are between slim and none, in my opinion, but I do believe there is quite likely some out there.

In my opinion, the whole 'ET' angle is just a hook to get people to process the data on the VERY remote chance that an ET signal MIGHT be detected.

On the subject of Folding@Home (and related bio-medical DC projects): I have tried several of them, but I am worried about commercialization of the results. If, lets say, a cure for some illness (such as cancer) was found, somebody at some drug company would patent it and charge everyone that wanted it large sums of money (similar to what they do with new drugs today). I, due to allergic reactions to many of the more common antibioitics, have had occasion for quite some time to take 'Cipro' (this was years before the anthrax scare made the drug 'famous' last year). The cost? Drug companies sold it at almost US$7 a pill (in lots of 1000, and YES, I used to work in the medical industry, and my sister still does). The reason why cipro costs so much (when other antibioitics cost an order of magnitude less)? 'Bayer' holds the US patent on it, and milks (at least they did *pre-anthrax-scare*) those consumers that needed it for MUCH money. A drug company in India (not covered by the US patent) makes cipro and sells it to much of the rest of the world at around US$1 or $2 a pill, and still MAKES a profit on it. Just as in the software industry, I believe that patents on drugs and genes are a BAD THING.

This is the reason I am really not too keen on 'bio-medical' DC projects. The bio-medical industry's past behavior. As other posters on this subject have indicated, it is MY choice which (if any) DC project I run, just as its your choice which (if any) you run. And I would rather contribute my spare CPU cycles to something that helps deepen our understanding of the universe around us. But, as always, your mileage may vary. If you wish to run one, run your favorite. Many of them do have at least the possibility of contributing useful knowledge.

But, above all, have fun!

KWSN - MajorKong
Member of The Knights Who Say Ni!
KWSN forum admin.

Other civilizations will also go through evolution. So the earliest signals emitted will be the simple ones, and those will reach us first. If aliens detect signals from us at this moment, it will probably be radio or television emisions from decades ago. Marconi transmitted the first radio signal in 1901, but signals from those days are probably too weak to detect, even with technologies more advanced than ours. But earth's strongest transmitters like military radars are sending out signals since about 30 years.

Also see this item in the Seti@Home FAQ.

Check out BOINC an Open-Source framework for future projects. Btw.: use quicksort :)

This(postscript) is the the original paper on the hardness of String Folding problems.

Check out the SEDA architecture with Haboob as web-server. It seems to outperform Apache.

Haven't got the traffic myself to test it though. :-)

Finally someone with a bit of sense.

Whether a black hole behind an event horizon is a singularity or not all depends on the way it formed. If say you cross the event horizon of a black hole this large (ie one with tidal effects that don't rip you apart) you become part of of the black hole... the mass of the black hole edges up a tiny bit and the event horizon expands. But you can still be orbiting it quite happily. In fact behind the event horizon of a super massive black hole there could be many suns that are not part of some central body.

The star spoken of at the beginning of the article is one that is just outside the event horizon.

The star passes within 17 light-hours of a compact radio source known as Sagittarius A, pegged as the galactic center.

If it moved a wee bit closer, within the event horizon it would still orbit - and still be a sun - but be part of the Black Hole.

So the issue of density certainly does not require an infinitely dense singularity.... which sounds like bull-pucky to me.

I think some people have been reading too much science fiction - and not enough science fact.

According to the black hole FAQ at "http://cosmology.berkeley.edu/Education/BHfaq.htm l"

"Loosely speaking, a black hole is a region of space that has so much mass concentrated in it that there is no way for a nearby object to escape its gravitational pull."

How big is a black hole?

"The more massive a black hole is, the more space it takes up. In fact, the Schwarzschild radius (which means the radius of the horizon) and the mass are directly proportional to one another: if one black hole weighs ten times as much as another, its radius is ten times as large. A black hole with a mass equal to that of the Sun would have a radius of 3 kilometers. So a typical 10-solar-mass black hole would have a radius of 30 kilometers, and a million-solar-mass black hole at the center of a galaxy would have a radius of 3 million kilometers. Three million kilometers may sound like a lot, but it's actually not so big by astronomical standards. The Sun, for example, has a radius of about 700,000 kilometers, and so that supermassive black hole has a radius only about four times bigger than the Sun."

Doesn't sound like a point to me...

But opensourcing brings another problem - anybody could just take the source and change it so that it polutes the main system with fake results.

We're in the process of attempting a new solution to this problem. We're open sourcing the distributed computing framework (essentially the operating system) and allowing the computing application to be closed source. This method opens the code signing/verification and data encryption code to be viewed by anyone who is interested, but doesn't necessarily allow untrusted application code to return a result. (Look here for more info).

How many hours is your computer running on a typical day? (118112 responses)
Less than 24 38.26%
24, because of SETI@home 33.19%
24, but not because of SETI@home 28.56%

The situation isn't as dire as it sounds. Our dominant problem has been that the falling economy has caused some of our sponsors to withdraw support. With support withdrawn, we are denied matching funds from the University. Essentially, the University is witholding funding until we find further sponsors. We are actively seeking corporate sponsors who would be willing to donate, and have their contributions matched by the University. Under the matching program the sponsors must be for-profit industry. If anyone reading this works for such a corporation, please contact SETI@home through our web site.

Individuals wishing to make a contribution can do so through the SETI@home web site. Please be aware that our current largest sponsor is the Planetary Society. A membership to the Planetary Society (assuming it is done through the links on the SETI@home page) may return more to SETI@home than does a direct contribution, as it indicates the importance of SETI@home to members of the Society.

Regardless of the funding issues, we are working hard to make SETI@home II a reality. We have funding from the NSF to develop the BOINC client/server code which will be used as the framework for SETI@home II. We are in the process of building the SETI@home II data recorder. What we do with it (multibeam, wide bandwidth) and where (Arecibo or Parkes) depends upon what we can afford.

We are also seeking NSF funding for AstroPulse and SETHI and SERENDIP V.

That said, things are currently somewhat tight here. We'll need to make do with fewer employees until we're back in the black. I don't think this spells the end of SETI@home by any means.

The situation isn't as dire as it sounds. Our dominant problem has been that the falling economy has caused some of our sponsors to withdraw support. With support withdrawn, we are denied matching funds from the University. Essentially, the University is witholding funding until we find further sponsors. We are actively seeking corporate sponsors who would be willing to donate, and have their contributions matched by the University. Under the matching program the sponsors must be for-profit industry. If anyone reading this works for such a corporation, please contact SETI@home through our web site.

Individuals wishing to make a contribution can do so through the SETI@home web site. Please be aware that our current largest sponsor is the Planetary Society. A membership to the Planetary Society (assuming it is done through the links on the SETI@home page) may return more to SETI@home than does a direct contribution, as it indicates the importance of SETI@home to members of the Society.

Regardless of the funding issues, we are working hard to make SETI@home II a reality. We have funding from the NSF to develop the BOINC client/server code which will be used as the framework for SETI@home II. We are in the process of building the SETI@home II data recorder. What we do with it (multibeam, wide bandwidth) and where (Arecibo or Parkes) depends upon what we can afford.

We are also seeking NSF funding for AstroPulse and SETHI and SERENDIP V.

That said, things are currently somewhat tight here. We'll need to make do with fewer employees until we're back in the black. I don't think this spells the end of SETI@home by any means.

Unfortunately that idea wouldn't work with their current setup. SETI@home isn't a real distributed system its a multiple node application - it can only run the single program and to adapt it to aything else would require users to download a new application.

On their Future Directions page, they mention that sometime soon they'll be releasing their "BOINC" product which will be a flexible framework for distributed applications.. I would assume they would look at hosting and distributing some commercial applications, and possibly make a few bucks to support themselves. Seems logical to me.

Shayne

I'm guessing part of what is draining their budget would be the hardware to hand all the data units send back and forth and the storage for these numbers. In the last few months, it seems like the Seti@home site has been down more and more for maintenance.

I would guess that the sheer number of people working on this is getting outside of their scripting limits. I suspected trouble when the page for my group, Team LifeUniverseEverything, stopped updating after new units. I can use my password to manually refresh it, but doing that weekly is kind of a pain.

According to this graph the total amounts of donations have just fallen from a few thousand to a few hundred dollars (yes, thank you, I located it from this informative post).

Is this the extent of the problem? If so, it seems like just bringing it up once at /. might solve the problem. But then again, maybe there are more material issues, maybe they missed a grant or something...?

Tor

Sure, finding a signal from ET is a longshot. But the project is also useful for real science in astrophysics.

The large computational power available is unique and makes it extremely useful for finding many kinds of time-variable radio sources (not just ET). The project is also being used to map the Hydrogen in the galaxy as detailed here.

Even though getting signals from an extraterrestrial intelligence may be a pipe dream, the project still has value from a pure scientific standpoint.

If we feel this is a good cause towards humanity's future, let's not sit on our hands, and consider donating to this worthy cause!

Here's the URL... I hope many of your readers use it:

• Donate to SETI@Home

PS: I do not work for SETI@Home. I just think the Internet could work in it's favour if we all shelled out $5+ a piece

If they were to use something like a securely sandboxed virtual machine (and there are several groups I know about doing this with funding in Europe) then it may be an idea.

Of course at that point both the user and seti start having to worry far more about security than someone just changing their processing times or returning incorrectly processed units due to mods to the software which used to happen.

Of course if people want to contribute then they can go to The SETI Donor page and contribute there.

They already have a system for accepting donations.

Go here to donate by credit card or mail.

They also provide a chart of their donations over the last year here.

BWCarver -- 1301 work units and counting...

They already have a system for accepting donations.

Go here to donate by credit card or mail.

They also provide a chart of their donations over the last year here.

BWCarver -- 1301 work units and counting...

Of course I was denied 2 hours ago.. how long could that story have existed? Maybe I took too long by ACTUALLY READING IT :P

Yes, granted, they do pay for a certain amount whether it's used or not, but frankly, it's always in use all the way up to the cap, slowing everybody down, and ultimately forcing the university to purchase more bandwidth.

Yes, granted, they do pay for a certain amount whether it's used or not, but frankly, it's always in use all the way up to the cap, slowing everybody down, and ultimately forcing the university to purchase more bandwidth.

a massive robot truck of the future ... running embedded Linux with 802.11b ethernet

However, one thing that everyone seems to be missing... perhaps until it is too late... is that both non-commercial and educational webcasters were left out of the comprimise. So we are still screwed and will likely have to shut off our webstream.

Joe

Dude, so close, yet so far away. Lignux

Other concerns mentioned here involved the autodownloading of executables in BOINC. We're taking security very seriously in BOINC, and are using MD5 and 1024 bit RSA encryption to protect against malicious attacks, as well as other general design techniques. Finally, the issue of optimization. Since BOINC is open source, you can optimize it however you want, but there won't be much gain since BOINC itself does very little processing. As far as I know there's still no decision on whether to optimize the SETI@home science.

For more information, you can check out the BOINC source and BOINC documentation

The BOINC client will know how many CPUs you have, how many you are willing to use for processing, and what fraction of your CPU time you want to spend on each of the BOINC projects you have joined. Application binaries can be cryptographically signed to verify origin. BOINC will cache workunits by default, with disk usage limits set by the user. BOINC will support multiple servers. Donation credits will be based upon the amount of work done (FLOPs, int ops, network bandwidth, disk space, etc.) If one project runs out of data, or the servers go down, you machine will devote time to the other projects you've joined.

We're really trying to address all of the lessons we learned throughout SETI@home. And, if there are some we missed, the server/client code is open source, and will be available on sourceforge. Project specific code can be open source or not as the people behind each project desire.

I am up to 32,132 hours. Without the help of a lab or mahines at work. Currently running on my g/f iMac (slooooooow) and her mom's Duron (take that Igor, I switched it again). I think I had it on 3 or 4 machines for a month or two, but that has been quite a while ago. Most of the data is available here, with pretty pics here.

and a physics student at UC Berkeley, I thought I would just provide a little more information for those of you who are too lazy to read the article. SETI@home has been collecting data at the Arecibo radio telescope for the last several years, and we have observed pretty much everything that is visible from that location. We are building a new data recorder that will be capable of observing broadband data/many independent narrow bands, and we will be using this to observe in Australia. We have also applied to re-observe any interesting locations we have found at Arecibo, using this new equipment.

For the last several years, we have been using the data we have gathered for several purposes, amongst which are mapping the Hydrogen distrobution in the milky way and searching for SETI. We are about to start a new project that will search for broadband pulses (which must be very short in durration), which can be encoded to have a reverse dopler effect, which would be a clear sign of ET. However, a normal pulse would be a sign of an evaporating black hole, which has been predicted but never observed.

This new project will run on a system called BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrasturcture for Network Computing (yes, it's open source, to be released under the Mozilla Public License). However, BOINC is not limited to running only Astro-Pulse (the previously mentioned project) and the next generation of SETI@home, but will also be running other independent distributed computing projects. More information is available at the BOINC and SETI@home websites.

and a physics student at UC Berkeley, I thought I would just provide a little more information for those of you who are too lazy to read the article. SETI@home has been collecting data at the Arecibo radio telescope for the last several years, and we have observed pretty much everything that is visible from that location. We are building a new data recorder that will be capable of observing broadband data/many independent narrow bands, and we will be using this to observe in Australia. We have also applied to re-observe any interesting locations we have found at Arecibo, using this new equipment.

For the last several years, we have been using the data we have gathered for several purposes, amongst which are mapping the Hydrogen distrobution in the milky way and searching for SETI. We are about to start a new project that will search for broadband pulses (which must be very short in durration), which can be encoded to have a reverse dopler effect, which would be a clear sign of ET. However, a normal pulse would be a sign of an evaporating black hole, which has been predicted but never observed.

This new project will run on a system called BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrasturcture for Network Computing (yes, it's open source, to be released under the Mozilla Public License). However, BOINC is not limited to running only Astro-Pulse (the previously mentioned project) and the next generation of SETI@home, but will also be running other independent distributed computing projects. More information is available at the BOINC and SETI@home websites.

and a physics student at UC Berkeley, I thought I would just provide a little more information for those of you who are too lazy to read the article. SETI@home has been collecting data at the Arecibo radio telescope for the last several years, and we have observed pretty much everything that is visible from that location. We are building a new data recorder that will be capable of observing broadband data/many independent narrow bands, and we will be using this to observe in Australia. We have also applied to re-observe any interesting locations we have found at Arecibo, using this new equipment.

For the last several years, we have been using the data we have gathered for several purposes, amongst which are mapping the Hydrogen distrobution in the milky way and searching for SETI. We are about to start a new project that will search for broadband pulses (which must be very short in durration), which can be encoded to have a reverse dopler effect, which would be a clear sign of ET. However, a normal pulse would be a sign of an evaporating black hole, which has been predicted but never observed.

This new project will run on a system called BOINC, the Berkeley Open Infrasturcture for Network Computing (yes, it's open source, to be released under the Mozilla Public License). However, BOINC is not limited to running only Astro-Pulse (the previously mentioned project) and the next generation of SETI@home, but will also be running other independent distributed computing projects. More information is available at the BOINC and SETI@home websites.

The Arecibo radio telescope in Puerto Rico receives information from about one third of the sky, all in the northern celestial hemisphere. But what if ET is lurking in the southern skies? The Parkes telescope in Australia is the largest radio telescope in the southern hemisphere and can observe all of the southern sky. Fortunately, SETI colleagues in Australia have agreed to colloborate with SETI@home and host a new data recorder at Parkes. Work on this new SETI@home data recorder is well under way. The new instrument will record data from 13 places on the sky simultaneously, observing 13 "beams" at a time compared to the 1 "beam" at Arecibo. We are trying to raise funds to conduct these southern hemisphere observations for SETI@home. Funding permitting, we expect the new data recorder to be installed and operational at Parkes in early 2003. For more information on the Southern Hemisphere SETI@home plans, see "SETI@home Gearing to Expand the Search" at the Planetary Society

They also name "AstroPulse - the search for pulsars, ET, and black holes" and "To support future projects we are developing the Berkeley Open Infrastructure for Network Computing (BOINC)"

There is also the planned project time line until 2005.

Here are a just a few others off top on my head (all of those have existed for several years):

• U. of Toronto's NetLab
• U. of Michigan School of Information
• Berkeley Center for Globalization and Information Technology
• Berkeley Center for Information Technology and Marketplace Transformation

Here are a just a few others off top on my head (all of those have existed for several years):

• U. of Toronto's NetLab
• U. of Michigan School of Information
• Berkeley Center for Globalization and Information Technology
• Berkeley Center for Information Technology and Marketplace Transformation

To scale an image in Photoshop, ALT-I, S. Quick. GIMP I had to use the mouse, or hit the arrow keys a crapload of times.. Thats the one major thing that GNOME is lacking (haven't tried KDE since 2.1 or something.. so I can't say if KDE has it) is nice keyboard shortcuts for the menues.

So remap them.

A professor I work with, Brian Barsky, heads up the OPTICAL research project at UC Berkeley.

Their latest work, "RAYS (Render As You See) is a system for "vision-realistic rendering" which can simulate the vision of actual individuals. Vision-realistic rendering is particularly interesting in the context of laser refractive eye surgeries such as PRK and LASIK. Currently, almost a million Americans per year are choosing to undergo such elective surgeries. RAYS could convey to doctors the vision of a patient before and after surgery. In addition, RAYS could provide accurate and revealing visualizations of predicted acuity and simulated vision to potential candidates for such surgeries to facilitate educated decisions about the procedure. Still another application would be to show such candidates the possible visual anomalies that could arise from the surgery (such as glare at night)."

A professor I work with, Brian Barsky, heads up the OPTICAL research project at UC Berkeley.

Their latest work, "RAYS (Render As You See) is a system for "vision-realistic rendering" which can simulate the vision of actual individuals. Vision-realistic rendering is particularly interesting in the context of laser refractive eye surgeries such as PRK and LASIK. Currently, almost a million Americans per year are choosing to undergo such elective surgeries. RAYS could convey to doctors the vision of a patient before and after surgery. In addition, RAYS could provide accurate and revealing visualizations of predicted acuity and simulated vision to potential candidates for such surgeries to facilitate educated decisions about the procedure. Still another application would be to show such candidates the possible visual anomalies that could arise from the surgery (such as glare at night)."

That group's almost as scary at these guys. But nowhere near as scaray as The bin Partridge family!

The only way we have been able to verify that a Win2K box have been taken care of is when we do it ourselves... unfortunately, this only happens when we've already shut off the connection to compromised machines.

There will be a new security campaign similar to the bandwidth campaign we have (Be Nice to the Net) It has so far been a fairly effective educational campaign to inform residents about avoiding bandwidth wasting activities.

Just for the record, I work for Residential Computing at UC Berkeley (the analog of Resnet at UCSB, except it's at Berkeley :), so you know I'm not completely talking out of my ass.

This has been a topic of discussion recently at our office mainly because there have been a tremendous number of security issues relating to Windows 2000 (not so much with NT since these are students, not corporate users). I personally think that the move is a little drastic, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out at UCSB (especially how they will enforce it).

There will be people talking about how secure/insecure Win2K is. Allow me to give a common trait to all of the compromised machines:

1) Blank Administrator Password
2) Unpatched Windows (i.e. no Service Packs installed)

In nearly ALL the compromised machines, the computer is not updated and has a blank Administrator password.

The easy solution: install SP3!
An easier solution: set an Administrator Password!

All really simple solutions that would prevent 99% of the issues we have encountered thus far.

So I said it was a security problem. How is it a bandwidth problem?

Allow me to point to the DarkIRC and Nimda security bulletins we have written up by our security.

So you've got a zombie, what do you do with it? A number of things:

1) use the compromised machine in a DoS attack
2) use it as a FTP server
3) use it as a IRC bot ...

A script kiddie can just use a machine on a fat bandwidth pipe at will to his liking. It's definitely NOT fun when the pipe is already clogged as it is with folks and P2P apps.

So there you have... if you don't think it's a problem, it IS a problem. There are too many calls about this to our helpdesk to have it be a minor issue that everyone else makes it out to be.

Just for the record, I work for Residential Computing at UC Berkeley (the analog of Resnet at UCSB, except it's at Berkeley :), so you know I'm not completely talking out of my ass.

This has been a topic of discussion recently at our office mainly because there have been a tremendous number of security issues relating to Windows 2000 (not so much with NT since these are students, not corporate users). I personally think that the move is a little drastic, but it will be interesting to see how this pans out at UCSB (especially how they will enforce it).

There will be people talking about how secure/insecure Win2K is. Allow me to give a common trait to all of the compromised machines:

1) Blank Administrator Password
2) Unpatched Windows (i.e. no Service Packs installed)

In nearly ALL the compromised machines, the computer is not updated and has a blank Administrator password.

The easy solution: install SP3!
An easier solution: set an Administrator Password!

All really simple solutions that would prevent 99% of the issues we have encountered thus far.

So I said it was a security problem. How is it a bandwidth problem?

Allow me to point to the DarkIRC and Nimda security bulletins we have written up by our security.

So you've got a zombie, what do you do with it? A number of things:

1) use the compromised machine in a DoS attack
2) use it as a FTP server
3) use it as a IRC bot ...

A script kiddie can just use a machine on a fat bandwidth pipe at will to his liking. It's definitely NOT fun when the pipe is already clogged as it is with folks and P2P apps.

So there you have... if you don't think it's a problem, it IS a problem. There are too many calls about this to our helpdesk to have it be a minor issue that everyone else makes it out to be.

• Chord from MIT.
• CANfrom ICSI.
• Pastry/Tapestry from UC Berkeley/Rice.
• Kademlia from NYU.

- Fzz

Dumbass...

Do you mean THESE GUYS?!?!?!?!?

Since that the RC5-64 algorithm has finally been brute forced, perhaps we can put those now idle computers to work looking for ET? Seems a more worthwhile effort to me...

Business as usual, I suppose. Once everyone has their 1.whatever GHz processors, they have to go and show off something faster. People need to realize that, despite all these newer, faster processors, we don't need them. The Space Shuttle still launches, performs missions, and lands without too many failures, and they're not running much more than a 486 equivalent. We don't need 4.7 GHz. 2 GHz is more than sufficient for everyday use.

When you think about it, the average user (AKA Joe and Jane Sixpack) do three basic things with computers: Internet (including e-mail, browsing and the occasional Multimedia site), Music, and Games. That's it. They're not ubergeeks like most of us /.ers. They won't be trying to scan, edit and compress 10 gigs of high quality video/audio data. They won't be compiling an insanely huge Linux Kernel. They won't be dabbeling in Voice Over IP. Hell, they probably mindlessly rely on MS apps to do the work for them, using Outlook, IE, and others.

They'll get all wide-eyed and tickled pink at the thought of that kind of power, but all they'll really notice is windows opening faster. It's a huge waste of money, and they'd be too blinded by the thought of "this will make everything so much better" to notice.

It won't make MP3s play any clearer, it won't filter out the spam that clogs 90% of their inbox, and it sure won't make "HotChicksPorn.com" load any faster. Unless the Sixpack's are running SETI@Home, they wouldn't notice much of a difference and feel ripped off. Those FFTs would render rather quickly on a 4.7 GHz machine, though, which I wouldn't mind.

Production people like me would kill for a machine that fast. I do alot of digital video and audio work, and that kind of processing power would be most welcome. But people like me (and you, the ubergeeks of the world) are a relative rare breed. Maybe it's time for Intel and friends (or is it enemies) to start splitting demographics a little better and targeting specific types of "Joe and Jane Sixpacks" with different processors instead of just offering up the same two processors (Pentium and Celeron) to everyone as if we're all the same. The need to upgrade constantly isn't that big a deal, or at least it shouldn't be treated as such...