Yesterday's post about a Wall Street Journal article critiquing the current allocation of distributed number-crunching projects drew a huge range of comments, some favoring the proposition that seemingly quixotic distributed-computing endeavors (specifically, the alien-hunting SETI@home project) were diverting resources better spent on closer-to-home, pragmatic research, such as cancer or climate prediction, or perhaps best never converted to electricity in the first place. Read on for the Backslash summary of the conversation.

Ant writes "Neatorama mentions Steven Hilton's Software War Map that depicts "the epic struggle of Free and Open Source Software (FOSS) against the Empire of Microsoft. It was updated in 2006."

HaloZero asks: "I work for a medium-sized company (350+ users), and am charged with new builds and deployments for a mix of aged and new desktops, and a smattering of similar laptops. The hardware is certainly not uniform across the entire infrastructure. Our current deployment 'system' (Ghost/Sysprep, Acronis/NewSID) is somewhat of a kludge -- as my mentor would say -- and I've been looking into alternative, cleaner methods. We're burgeoning on an Active Directory domain, so RIS has been the hot topic on my desk as of late. Does anyone have any experience with RIS? Is there anything that isn't very well documented that I should watch out for? We're considering other unattended install solutions, such as nLite, and a composite of Bart's PE Builder-type setups. Any other suggestions out there?"

Trip writes "What happens when you combine 200 liters of Diet Coke and over 500 Mentos mints? It's amazing and completely insane. The first part of this video demonstrates a simple geyser, and the second part shows just how extreme it can get. Over one hundred jets of soda fly into the air in less than three minutes. It's a hysterical and spectacular mint-powered version of the Bellagio Fountains in Las Vegas."

Billosaur writes "BBC News is reporting that the password to the dreaded Archiveus virus has been discovered and is now available to anyone who needs it. Archiveus is a 'ransomware' virus, which combines files from the My Documents folder on Windows machines and exchanges them for a single, password-protected file, which it will not unlock unless a password is given. The user would normally be required to pay the extortionist money in order to receive the password, but apparently the virus writer made one small, critical error in coding: placing the password in the code. BTW, the 30-digit password locking the files is mf2lro8sw03ufvnsq034jfowr18f3cszc20vmw."

stockpicker_dude_78 writes "Robert Cringley has written a thought-provoking article on Google's insular nature, and compares them to the similar environment at Microsoft." From the article: "Google is secretive. This started as a deliberate marketing mystique, but endures today more as a really annoying company habit. Google folks don't understand why the rest of us have a problem with this, but then Google folks aren't like you and me. The result of this secrecy and Google's 'almighty algorithm' mentality is that the company makes changes -- and mistakes -- without informing its customers or even doing all that much to correct the problems."

op12 writes "CNET has an article describing how AT&T accidentally leaked sensitive information involving the NSA lawsuit. From the article: 'AT&T's attorneys this week filed a 25-page legal brief striped with thick black lines that were intended to obscure portions of three pages and render them unreadable. But the obscured text nevertheless can be copied and pasted inside some PDF readers, including Preview under Apple's OS X and the xpdf utility used with X11. The deleted portions of the legal brief seek to offer benign reasons why AT&T would allegedly have a secret room at its downtown San Francisco switching center that would be designed to monitor Internet and telephone traffic. The Electronic Frontier Foundation, which filed the class action lawsuit in January, alleges that room is used by an unlawful National Security Agency surveillance program.""

gsch writes "'In 2004, Bret McDanel was convicted of violating section 1030 when he e-mailed truthful information about a security problem to the customers of his former employer. The prosecution argued that McDanel had accessed the company e-mail server by sending the messages, and that the access was unauthorized within the meaning of the law because the company didn't want this information distributed. They even claimed the integrity of the system was impaired because a lot more people (customers) now knew that the system was insecure. Notwithstanding the First Amendment's free speech guarantees, the trial judge convicted and sentenced McDanel to 16 months in prison. I represented him on appeal, and argued that reporting on security flaws doesn't impair the integrity of computer systems. In an extremely unusual turn of events, the prosecution did not defend its actions, but voluntarily moved to vacate the conviction.'"

Neopallium writes "Red Hat has announced that the U.S. Department of Transportation's Federal Aviation Administration (FAA) saved the federal government more than $15 million in datacenter operating and upgrading costs by migrating to Red Hat Enterprise Linux. The FAA executed a major systems migration to Red Hat Enterprise Linux in one-third of the original scheduled time and with 30 percent more operational efficiency than the previous system."

Tycoon Guy writes "TrekToday reports that Paramount has asked 'Lost' creator J.J. Abrams to direct a new 'Star Trek' film. The movie will be set at Starfleet Academy and will feature younger versions of James T. Kirk and Spock, chronicling their first meeting at the Academy and their first outer space mission. The movie is set for a 2008 release and will apparently be one of Paramount's biggest projects for the year."

VirtualizationBuff writes "KernelTrap has a fascinating interview with Andrey Savochkin, the lead developer of the OpenVZ server virtualization project. In the interview Savochkin goes into great detail about how virtualization works, and why OpenVZ outshines the competition, comparing it to VServer, Xen and User Mode Linux. Regarding virtualization, Savochkin describes it as the next big step, 'comparable with the step between single-user and multi-user systems.' Savochkin is now focused on getting OpenVZ merged into the mainline Linux kernel."

blanchae asks: "Does anyone still use Token Ring, or is it dead? I remember hearing about 100 mbps TR a few years ago but nothing since. I remember that the strong point of TR over Ethernet was the QOS and the consistent response time. Does the banking community still use TR?"

Alien54 writes "Texas software company Winternals Software LP has sued Best Buy Co. Inc. in federal court, alleging that the nation's largest consumer electronics retailer was using unlicensed versions of its diagnostic equipment. Best Buy's Geek Squad, is alleged to be using pirated versions of the software since talks on a commercial licensing agreement broke off. A restraining order has been granted."

An anonymous reader writes "Whitedust is running an informative interview with their Founders - Mark Anderson and Mark Hinge. In the interview the two Mark's set out the reasoning behind and the future of Whitedust.net." From the article: "Mark Anderson had been on at me as regards doing what he coined 'HTML Ezine' for a long time - I had been a bit of a purist about it but he finally won me around to his mode of thinking. At the same time there was something that had personally been bugging me since @stake took over hackernews and that was the lack of centralized INFOsec information; people had tried to produce a site along these lines but had either become totally bias, or been maintained badly (lack of updates etc). I saw what I considered a gap in the market and convinced Mark that the topic of any 'HTML Ezine' should be Information Security (something we both knew a fair bit about anyway)."

Professor writes "Be 'nice' to your computers and examine some general guidelines for tuning server performance. A computer is like an employee who does tasks for you -- it's a good idea to keep from overburdening them. Keep this from happening by using the UNIX 'nice' command."