The uber coder could have batted that out in an afternoon, but instead spent a week ensuring that histogrammer behind the report was multi-core aware and could scale to billions of data points without dragging the system to its knees.

That is all good except that it may be totally useless. The solution may be scalable for millions of data BUT if the application never needs to handle more than a few thousands of data, then the solution is just over engineering.

The ubbercoder should have implemented a good, simple, correct solution that fits the data that the application must actually deal with. Instead, he just wasted time playing with himself.

There are limits...

I actually came across the video a week or so ago... watched a few seconds and dispatched the link to a friend of mine's that is a Zelda-addict.

And I probably wasn't gonna go to the site again.

Then I saw this on slashdot... and my interest went up and I started to look for it on torrent sites.

Funny stuff.

"I completely agree. How can Slashdot so vocally support SETI@home, a cool, but completely useless endevour, but badmouth a project that aims to save lives? Protein folding and protein chemistry simulations have applications that could and probably will save your life at some point in time. Even if the project did make money for someone, somewhere, so what? What is so wrong with making a profit? Is robbing someone of their right to make earn a living a cause worth sacrificing lives to?"

Well there's no problem in making money. The point is, they may be using your cicles to make atomic simulations & stuff like that. Stuff that would not be as good for manking as a cure for cancer (or other diseases).
If they make money finding the cure, that's good, they found the cure.. we just expect that they will share that cure with the world: the same world that provided free computer cicles.
~
as for the search for 'et' lives.. hey.. maybe they have the cure for cancer, maybe they have the cure for other stuff, and maybe they have the technologie to help us evolve.. maybe they will kill us, and we won't need cures.. but.. wouldn't be great to have friends in another galaxy ?