I remember when that came out. A friend and I were having lunch at a MosBurger in Akihabara across from one of the myriad little electronics shops. The shop had various game demos running on this ridiculously large (for the time - it was a tube TV) TV out front.
And then Silpheed came on. My friend and I left our burgers at the table and wandered over as if in a stupor to drool over the then-amazing graphics. My folks (who went with us) had to drag us away. We had played the original to death on my PC Jr. years before, and the Sega CD/Mega CD sequel was a dream come true for us.
I don't think that the parent meant that the UC system is getting some kind of break - I think that the parent meant that students in general are getting the extensive discounts.
Hell, that's the only way I was able to afford MY iPod.
Yes - all about the OS. Really, it's been beaten to death in the Mac press, but here're my 2 cents: Given that Apple will doubtless keep exercising control over the internal hardware (I don't see just any ol' commodity expansion crap being supported on the Intel Macs), and given that Apple will continue with their spiffy industrial design, and given that they'll keep on trucking with OS X, well, the processor isn't a big deal.
Apple sells a computing experience - distinctive hardware, distinctive software (OS X, iWhathaveyou, etc.), and sundry other devices (iPod, anyone?) - and the processor isn't as important as the hardcore PPC geeks would make it out to be. Processors pack enough grunt these days to make AltiVec more or less superfluous (Depending on your needs, of course. I don't need AltiVec, and I suspect that most people don't either.), so that distinction is somewhat pointless. AMD's spiffy consumer-level 64-bit processors render the G5 a bit less unique (though I prefer G5 to Athlon 64, name-wise). Given that the PPC "cool factor" is starting to wane, it doesn't really matter to the average user.
Of course, I'll still by buying a G4 PowerBook 'cause I want to get one of the last PPC-based PBs ever, but that's more of a nostaliga thing than anything else.
My OS X machines give me fewer headaches than my Windows machines overall, and I don't think a mere change in processor will change that.
In my personal experience, I agree with the substance of the article more than the style. We've had both Windows and Mac OS machines in our house for some time now - home-built Windows desktop for games, a Gateway laptop that I lug around, and an iBook that my wife uses heavily are the current lineup (PowerBook coming soon). I'm no slouch when it comes to administering and maintaining Windows machines, as I've been in the trenches of IT for about 8 years now at DEC/Compaq/HP, with a few side jobs here and there.
Aaaanyway - my Windows machines are patched regularly (just about every Tuesday), I run anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall software on both (the desktop runs consumer-level stuff, the notebook is used to connect to work, so it runs the corporate versions of same). I routinely run all the beloved "maintenance" tasks on both the Windows machines to keep 'em running normally. And you know what? I still have to reimage the Windows desktop machine every 6 months or so, 'cause things just stop working. The notebook needs a reimage about every 4 months or so.
I don't use Suspend or Hibernate on either machine - when I did, I had to fix things even more often. As a lark, I took a more hands-off approach to maintenance on the Windows machines for about 6 months just to see if my maintenance tasks were making things worse, and there was no change. Desktop Windows install failed within 6 months, laptop within 4.
By contrast, my wife's iBook, which also gets rather heavy usage, only had 1 problem - my wife left it in reach of our 2-year-old son when she got up to answer a phone call, and he pulled it off the desk and used it as something to stand on to reach the other fun stuff on the desk (didn't quite give him the height needed, but points for the effort). He got excited when our cat got up on the desk, and started jumping up and down... on the iBook. There were no native failures at all - especially in the OS or applications. Antivirus and firewall were installed more as a precaution than anything else, and there were 0 problems with spyware, etc. The iBook went to sleep when the lid was closed, and woke right up when it was opened. Effectively the only times we had to reboot the machine were after installing updates, and not always then. I recall maybe twice in 2 years did the some piece of software (or the OS) wedge itself so badly that a restart was required.
I'm not a zealot for either platform, and I have played reasonably extensively with Linux as well (it's got a long way to go before it will be a viable desktop OS for the casual user, in my opinion). When I was a bit younger (and didn't have kids), I would tear down and rebuild my computers regularly. My friends and I would get together and rebuild our computers. While I still appreciate the skill required to do it well, I don't have time or inclination anymore (I'm also looking to change careers to get out of IT, which may be related...) to tinker extensively. System maintenance is moving further and further away from being interesting or fun.
My wife's iBook and my Gateway laptop are used for substantially the same thing - word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing, etc. The usual productivity grind. The iBook does it with less fuss and bother, and doesn't require as much maintenace. As my priorities change, the Mac platform becomes more and more attractive. I do enough work at work - I don't want to do more of the same at home, and Windows on the home machines is becoming a bother.
In my own, purely anecdotal experience, the Mac is looking better and better. If they had a spreadsheet component of iWork, it would do literally everything I need, but Office for the Mac is no slouch. We'll probably always have at least one Windows box for games (and one of these days, I'll get smart and make a proper image so reinstalls don't take so long in case of failure), but we'll be moving more completely to Mac in our house.
Seriously, though... about the mummy.
on
We Are Not Related
·
· Score: 1
I just had to do some Google searches on the 'cyborg' mummy, and I actually found a neat article about it. It's interesting to note that these mummies have been found in Xinjiang for over a hundred years, but mostly disregarded until recently. According to DNA testing, they share common ancestry with modern Europeans, and the famous European 'iceman' Ötzi, found in a glacier on the Austrian-Italian border. Kinda sets the history of the area on its' ear, really. The article is a neat read.
Sorry to reply to my own comment... I meant to mention that I do know why the electoral college exists, I just don't like it much. Of course, I shudder to think what would happen if the popular Presidential vote DID really matter beyond making electors look silly if they vote the opposite way. There, that's out of the way.
It seems to have worked reasonably well - until recently, perhaps. The whole 'electoral college' thing has always made me a bit uncomfortable, though. I also think of many times when politicos say, "This is what my community wants, but I'm voting the other way anyway." Sometimes it's conscience, but usually it's money talking. (insert pithy Benjamin Franklin quote here - many of 'em will work) I still prefer to live in a country that at least pretends to be a democratic republic - consider some of the alternatives. For all the US readers out there, let's get out and be part of the inefficiency on Tuesday!
Can you give some examples (not looking for an arguement - genuinly curious) of the conflicts? My copy of the Dune Encyclopedia sadly fell apart some time ago, and I'm not able to dig through it myself. I have to admit, though, that Frank Herbert was right about it being an entertaining read.
I must preface this by saying I've not read this new book, so apologies if I'm off-base here, or if we're not up to the exact time in the timeline. This really makes me wonder if they're going to follow what was listed in the Dune Encyclopedia regarding Jehanne Butler being the cause of it all. Dr. Willis E. McNelly, the author of the Encyclopedia, was a friend of Frank Herbert, and Dr. McNelly was the only academic Frank Herbert trusted to do the work. Wish they'd put it back in print!
Having eclectic tastes myself, I appreciate the variety of music they've got, and I really don't mind a bit paying for the music. I'm glad that someone is offering an a-la-carte service for a flat fee per month.
It is an especially nice alternative to buying a CD for one or two songs. With a lot of the groups I like, there are only 1 or 2 songs per album that are worth listening to (I suppose that says a lot about the crap I listen to)!
Besides, $9.95/mo gives me the incentive to cut two fast-food meals out of my month (which will doubtless prolong my life by at least 20-30 minutes). ^_^
Exactly my point - the Air Force and CIA are definitely different. I've asked some Air Force friends of mine what they use (in general terms) for the more secure stuff, but, not surprisingly, they really haven't told me.
Interestingly enough, the military uses Exchange for most of their non-secure email traffic (which is part of the reason the Air Force is getting on MS's case about security). Hmm.
Apparently, you've not heard of the tiger teams that test security for the military. To quote from the Jargon File entry on Tiger Team (it sums it up better than I could), "A subset of tiger teams are professional crackers, testing the security of military computer installations by attempting remote attacks via networks or supposedly `secure' comm channels. Some of their escapades, if declassified, would probably rank among the greatest hacks of all times." Some of the really "good" security people (as you call them) simply can't talk about what they do.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that the money spent is a waste. IMHO, auction sites allow 'normal' folks to participate directly in this 'free market economy' thing that I keep hearing about, in a much more streamlined fashion. It's a much better way, overall, of bringing the buyers and sellers together, and that connection is, from what I understand, the basis of a market economy, albeit on a rather abstracted level (insert economics dissertation here). Considering the crap that people often shell out good money for in more traditional shops, I can't say that I consider auction sites a waste by comparison.:-)
Cases of fraud like this are lamentable, but as so many other people have pointed out, it happens even in large companies. And think of the bad used car dealerships in your area (no, not all of 'em are bad) that make it into the local news! On the whole, people who sell on auction sites tend to be honest, reasonable folks who genuinely want to sell their stuff in an aboveboard fashion (like most small business operators).
Admittedly, I don't get most of what people collect, but if it makes them happy, more power to 'em. I've got a friend who collects, so help me, Cabbage Patch dolls *AND* Russian(and Soviet) firearms (yeah, he's a STRANGE guy, but pleasantly so). Aside from all the wonderful mental images that this generates, it's been a good thing for him in general. On the whole, he gets less runaround from the private sellers via online auctions than he got from private sellers in the toy journals and whatnot.
I think a very good point is raised here. Considering the difficulty that even other humans
have had deciphering the signal sent
out by humans in Nov. 1974 (though I can't really take it as a serious attempt at
communication - sent towards M13, so
we oughtn't expect a hypothetical response for around 45,000 years, give or take), I wonder
how difficult it will be to decipher a signal sent by anyone who is not like us, assuming we
can actually FIND one (the ostensible goal of SETI@home).
In the mid 70s, a lot of science magazines created similar messages and had contests for the
readers to try to figure them out (not a lot of people managed to - mainly mathematicians,
as I recall). There were also a lot of articles about how scientists here on Earth tried to
untangle the Arecibo message themselves - but failed (of course, I can't find much about it
on the web - anyone got any good links on the subject? Most web searches now bring up the
script for Contact...:-)
For fun and edification, try the following: Take the entire binary sequence of the Aricebo
message, and just lay it out as one long string. From there, forget all the exlpanations
you've ever read about how it's been constructed. Also try to forget you're a member of the
same species. Then take into account signal degradation over distance. Then try to forget
that it's NOT just random noise from a big celestial event. Then try to figure it out!
This ought to give you some idea about what we're looking at as far as actually getting a
message. This site has
a similar disclaimer, plus a link to the message itself (just scroll down
and look for the big block o' binary). Some questions that come to my mind are, "What is
it? Does it mean anything? Is it a 23x79 grid, or is it 79 23-bit words? 23 79-bit words?
If it's a 23x79 grid, do the images I percieve mean anything? Am I looking at it upside
down? Am I reading too much into random stellar noise? Did I even receive the whole
message? 1679 bits seems not random, but what if I'm missing some of it?"
That said, I think that there is a lot to be said in favor of SETI@home. The first thing is
(here's more of that subjective stuff again) - I think it's cool! I personally don't have
much hope for it ever finding anything really interesting or useful, but it's a really neat
project. I like to consider it the first really well-handled attempt at massively
distributed computing. It is something of a pioneering project and has shown many of the
pitfalls awaiting future distributed projects (like the bandwidth problem!).
In a more serious vein, without SETI@home, I don't think that distributed computing would
have taken off like it has. By stimulating imaginations (despite the obvious problems
involved in finding a signal at all, I think most of us are still REALLY intrigued by the
concept - enough to participate in a frankly goofy project with miniscule chance of success
in the hope that MAYBE something interesting will turn up), it provided a good vehicle for
getting the whole notion that distributed computing can actually WORK into the world at
large. I don't think it matters that the proof-of-concept was applied to SETI, rather it is
simply sufficient that it was a good proof-of-concept.
In all, I believe that without SETI@home, we wouldn't have all the other interesting
distributed computing projects going on to the extent that they are. I'd be willing to bet
that other distributed computing project groups (especially the cash-poor ones) are watching
to see how the SETI@home folks handle the bandwidth crunch (aside from throwing money that
they really haven't got at it). Many of the resolutions proposed in these comments seem to
have a lot of validity, and I'd hope that the SETI@home folks reading them can use the
suggestions to come up with something that works - and that they can afford. I'd hope,
though, that they can avoid using too many commercial partnerships - I think that the
research end of it would best avoid the specter of undue influence. I've known several good
research projects that lost legitimacy (and I think that the driving goal behind SETI@home
needs to hold on to all the legitimacy it can!) simply by being associated with a commercial
entity - even though there was NO influence on the direction of research. But that would be
another topic altogether.
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I remember when that came out. A friend and I were having lunch at a MosBurger in Akihabara across from one of the myriad little electronics shops. The shop had various game demos running on this ridiculously large (for the time - it was a tube TV) TV out front.
And then Silpheed came on. My friend and I left our burgers at the table and wandered over as if in a stupor to drool over the then-amazing graphics. My folks (who went with us) had to drag us away. We had played the original to death on my PC Jr. years before, and the Sega CD/Mega CD sequel was a dream come true for us.
Good times, good times.
I don't think that the parent meant that the UC system is getting some kind of break - I think that the parent meant that students in general are getting the extensive discounts.
Hell, that's the only way I was able to afford MY iPod.
I'll still BE buying... Can't type tonight, and didn't even catch it in the preview...
Yes - all about the OS. Really, it's been beaten to death in the Mac press, but here're my 2 cents: Given that Apple will doubtless keep exercising control over the internal hardware (I don't see just any ol' commodity expansion crap being supported on the Intel Macs), and given that Apple will continue with their spiffy industrial design, and given that they'll keep on trucking with OS X, well, the processor isn't a big deal.
Apple sells a computing experience - distinctive hardware, distinctive software (OS X, iWhathaveyou, etc.), and sundry other devices (iPod, anyone?) - and the processor isn't as important as the hardcore PPC geeks would make it out to be. Processors pack enough grunt these days to make AltiVec more or less superfluous (Depending on your needs, of course. I don't need AltiVec, and I suspect that most people don't either.), so that distinction is somewhat pointless. AMD's spiffy consumer-level 64-bit processors render the G5 a bit less unique (though I prefer G5 to Athlon 64, name-wise). Given that the PPC "cool factor" is starting to wane, it doesn't really matter to the average user.
Of course, I'll still by buying a G4 PowerBook 'cause I want to get one of the last PPC-based PBs ever, but that's more of a nostaliga thing than anything else.
My OS X machines give me fewer headaches than my Windows machines overall, and I don't think a mere change in processor will change that.
It once took me about three hours to undo what it took him but a few moments of random button mashing... We always lock the computers now...
In my personal experience, I agree with the substance of the article more than the style. We've had both Windows and Mac OS machines in our house for some time now - home-built Windows desktop for games, a Gateway laptop that I lug around, and an iBook that my wife uses heavily are the current lineup (PowerBook coming soon). I'm no slouch when it comes to administering and maintaining Windows machines, as I've been in the trenches of IT for about 8 years now at DEC/Compaq/HP, with a few side jobs here and there.
Aaaanyway - my Windows machines are patched regularly (just about every Tuesday), I run anti-virus, anti-spyware, and firewall software on both (the desktop runs consumer-level stuff, the notebook is used to connect to work, so it runs the corporate versions of same). I routinely run all the beloved "maintenance" tasks on both the Windows machines to keep 'em running normally. And you know what? I still have to reimage the Windows desktop machine every 6 months or so, 'cause things just stop working. The notebook needs a reimage about every 4 months or so.
I don't use Suspend or Hibernate on either machine - when I did, I had to fix things even more often. As a lark, I took a more hands-off approach to maintenance on the Windows machines for about 6 months just to see if my maintenance tasks were making things worse, and there was no change. Desktop Windows install failed within 6 months, laptop within 4.
By contrast, my wife's iBook, which also gets rather heavy usage, only had 1 problem - my wife left it in reach of our 2-year-old son when she got up to answer a phone call, and he pulled it off the desk and used it as something to stand on to reach the other fun stuff on the desk (didn't quite give him the height needed, but points for the effort). He got excited when our cat got up on the desk, and started jumping up and down... on the iBook. There were no native failures at all - especially in the OS or applications. Antivirus and firewall were installed more as a precaution than anything else, and there were 0 problems with spyware, etc. The iBook went to sleep when the lid was closed, and woke right up when it was opened. Effectively the only times we had to reboot the machine were after installing updates, and not always then. I recall maybe twice in 2 years did the some piece of software (or the OS) wedge itself so badly that a restart was required.
I'm not a zealot for either platform, and I have played reasonably extensively with Linux as well (it's got a long way to go before it will be a viable desktop OS for the casual user, in my opinion). When I was a bit younger (and didn't have kids), I would tear down and rebuild my computers regularly. My friends and I would get together and rebuild our computers. While I still appreciate the skill required to do it well, I don't have time or inclination anymore (I'm also looking to change careers to get out of IT, which may be related...) to tinker extensively. System maintenance is moving further and further away from being interesting or fun.
My wife's iBook and my Gateway laptop are used for substantially the same thing - word processing, spreadsheets, email, web browsing, etc. The usual productivity grind. The iBook does it with less fuss and bother, and doesn't require as much maintenace. As my priorities change, the Mac platform becomes more and more attractive. I do enough work at work - I don't want to do more of the same at home, and Windows on the home machines is becoming a bother.
In my own, purely anecdotal experience, the Mac is looking better and better. If they had a spreadsheet component of iWork, it would do literally everything I need, but Office for the Mac is no slouch. We'll probably always have at least one Windows box for games (and one of these days, I'll get smart and make a proper image so reinstalls don't take so long in case of failure), but we'll be moving more completely to Mac in our house.
I just had to do some Google searches on the 'cyborg' mummy, and I actually found a neat article about it. It's interesting to note that these mummies have been found in Xinjiang for over a hundred years, but mostly disregarded until recently. According to DNA testing, they share common ancestry with modern Europeans, and the famous European 'iceman' Ötzi, found in a glacier on the Austrian-Italian border. Kinda sets the history of the area on its' ear, really. The article is a neat read.
Sorry to reply to my own comment... I meant to mention that I do know why the electoral college exists, I just don't like it much. Of course, I shudder to think what would happen if the popular Presidential vote DID really matter beyond making electors look silly if they vote the opposite way. There, that's out of the way.
It seems to have worked reasonably well - until recently, perhaps. The whole 'electoral college' thing has always made me a bit uncomfortable, though. I also think of many times when politicos say, "This is what my community wants, but I'm voting the other way anyway." Sometimes it's conscience, but usually it's money talking. (insert pithy Benjamin Franklin quote here - many of 'em will work) I still prefer to live in a country that at least pretends to be a democratic republic - consider some of the alternatives. For all the US readers out there, let's get out and be part of the inefficiency on Tuesday!
Can you give some examples (not looking for an arguement - genuinly curious) of the conflicts? My copy of the Dune Encyclopedia sadly fell apart some time ago, and I'm not able to dig through it myself. I have to admit, though, that Frank Herbert was right about it being an entertaining read.
I must preface this by saying I've not read this new book, so apologies if I'm off-base here, or if we're not up to the exact time in the timeline. This really makes me wonder if they're going to follow what was listed in the Dune Encyclopedia regarding Jehanne Butler being the cause of it all. Dr. Willis E. McNelly, the author of the Encyclopedia, was a friend of Frank Herbert, and Dr. McNelly was the only academic Frank Herbert trusted to do the work. Wish they'd put it back in print!
I agree that E-Music seems to be a Good Thing.
Having eclectic tastes myself, I appreciate the variety of music they've got, and I really don't mind a bit paying for the music. I'm glad that someone is offering an a-la-carte service for a flat fee per month.
It is an especially nice alternative to buying a CD for one or two songs. With a lot of the groups I like, there are only 1 or 2 songs per album that are worth listening to (I suppose that says a lot about the crap I listen to)!
Besides, $9.95/mo gives me the incentive to cut two fast-food meals out of my month (which will doubtless prolong my life by at least 20-30 minutes). ^_^
Exactly my point - the Air Force and CIA are definitely different. I've asked some Air Force friends of mine what they use (in general terms) for the more secure stuff, but, not surprisingly, they really haven't told me.
Interestingly enough, the military uses Exchange for most of their non-secure email traffic (which is part of the reason the Air Force is getting on MS's case about security). Hmm.
Apparently, you've not heard of the tiger teams that test security for the military. To quote from the Jargon File entry on Tiger Team (it sums it up better than I could), "A subset of tiger teams are professional crackers, testing the security of military computer installations by attempting remote attacks via networks or supposedly `secure' comm channels. Some of their escapades, if declassified, would probably rank among the greatest hacks of all times." Some of the really "good" security people (as you call them) simply can't talk about what they do.
I wouldn't go so far as to say that the money spent is a waste. IMHO, auction sites allow 'normal' folks to participate directly in this 'free market economy' thing that I keep hearing about, in a much more streamlined fashion. It's a much better way, overall, of bringing the buyers and sellers together, and that connection is, from what I understand, the basis of a market economy, albeit on a rather abstracted level (insert economics dissertation here). Considering the crap that people often shell out good money for in more traditional shops, I can't say that I consider auction sites a waste by comparison. :-)
Cases of fraud like this are lamentable, but as so many other people have pointed out, it happens even in large companies. And think of the bad used car dealerships in your area (no, not all of 'em are bad) that make it into the local news! On the whole, people who sell on auction sites tend to be honest, reasonable folks who genuinely want to sell their stuff in an aboveboard fashion (like most small business operators).
Admittedly, I don't get most of what people collect, but if it makes them happy, more power to 'em. I've got a friend who collects, so help me, Cabbage Patch dolls *AND* Russian(and Soviet) firearms (yeah, he's a STRANGE guy, but pleasantly so). Aside from all the wonderful mental images that this generates, it's been a good thing for him in general. On the whole, he gets less runaround from the private sellers via online auctions than he got from private sellers in the toy journals and whatnot.
I think a very good point is raised here. Considering the difficulty that even other humans have had deciphering the signal sent out by humans in Nov. 1974 (though I can't really take it as a serious attempt at communication - sent towards M13, so we oughtn't expect a hypothetical response for around 45,000 years, give or take), I wonder how difficult it will be to decipher a signal sent by anyone who is not like us, assuming we can actually FIND one (the ostensible goal of SETI@home).
In the mid 70s, a lot of science magazines created similar messages and had contests for the readers to try to figure them out (not a lot of people managed to - mainly mathematicians, as I recall). There were also a lot of articles about how scientists here on Earth tried to untangle the Arecibo message themselves - but failed (of course, I can't find much about it on the web - anyone got any good links on the subject? Most web searches now bring up the script for Contact... :-)
For fun and edification, try the following: Take the entire binary sequence of the Aricebo message, and just lay it out as one long string. From there, forget all the exlpanations you've ever read about how it's been constructed. Also try to forget you're a member of the same species. Then take into account signal degradation over distance. Then try to forget that it's NOT just random noise from a big celestial event. Then try to figure it out! This ought to give you some idea about what we're looking at as far as actually getting a message. This site has a similar disclaimer, plus a link to the message itself (just scroll down and look for the big block o' binary). Some questions that come to my mind are, "What is it? Does it mean anything? Is it a 23x79 grid, or is it 79 23-bit words? 23 79-bit words? If it's a 23x79 grid, do the images I percieve mean anything? Am I looking at it upside down? Am I reading too much into random stellar noise? Did I even receive the whole message? 1679 bits seems not random, but what if I'm missing some of it?"
That said, I think that there is a lot to be said in favor of SETI@home. The first thing is (here's more of that subjective stuff again) - I think it's cool! I personally don't have much hope for it ever finding anything really interesting or useful, but it's a really neat project. I like to consider it the first really well-handled attempt at massively distributed computing. It is something of a pioneering project and has shown many of the pitfalls awaiting future distributed projects (like the bandwidth problem!).
In a more serious vein, without SETI@home, I don't think that distributed computing would have taken off like it has. By stimulating imaginations (despite the obvious problems involved in finding a signal at all, I think most of us are still REALLY intrigued by the concept - enough to participate in a frankly goofy project with miniscule chance of success in the hope that MAYBE something interesting will turn up), it provided a good vehicle for getting the whole notion that distributed computing can actually WORK into the world at large. I don't think it matters that the proof-of-concept was applied to SETI, rather it is simply sufficient that it was a good proof-of-concept.
In all, I believe that without SETI@home, we wouldn't have all the other interesting distributed computing projects going on to the extent that they are. I'd be willing to bet that other distributed computing project groups (especially the cash-poor ones) are watching to see how the SETI@home folks handle the bandwidth crunch (aside from throwing money that they really haven't got at it). Many of the resolutions proposed in these comments seem to have a lot of validity, and I'd hope that the SETI@home folks reading them can use the suggestions to come up with something that works - and that they can afford. I'd hope, though, that they can avoid using too many commercial partnerships - I think that the research end of it would best avoid the specter of undue influence. I've known several good research projects that lost legitimacy (and I think that the driving goal behind SETI@home needs to hold on to all the legitimacy it can!) simply by being associated with a commercial entity - even though there was NO influence on the direction of research. But that would be another topic altogether.