As I say in the subject line, what follows is wildly off-topic.
Unfortunately, it's also interesting :-).

Yesterday (May 17), UC Berkeley officially inaugurated a SETI (search for
exterrestrial intelligence) program that requests your help -- or more
accurately, your PCs'. They're looking to engage 250,000 to 400,000 PCs,
Macs, and UNIX/Linux boxes to become one extremely large, world-wide
supercomputer, all woven together through the internet.

The way it works is that you download and install a client for your
PC/Mac/Linux machine. The client on a PC is actually a fairly attractive
screensaver that performs fast Fourier transforms looking for "patterns in
the chaos" (Jody Foster's line from "Contact") when the PC is otherwise not
in use (or the client/screensaver is purposefully being run as the "active"
foreground process).

After you install the screensaver, the client dials Berkeley and downloads a
"work unit" (an approximately 10-50 second chunk of observational data taken
from the Arecibo radio observatory in Puerto Rico earlier this year). My
chunks have been relatively small so far (about 150K), but the processing
times have been about 100 hrs.

I have since discovered that it's important to go to the Control
Panel:Display settings in Windows and set the screensaver to go blank after a
few minutes. The pretty graphics are apparently more time consuming than the
actual data crunching. By turning the graphics off, the computational process
is sped up by about 4 or 5 times, reducing a chunk processing period to about
20 hours.

Because all of our PCs are constantly connected to the internet, data
transfers are completely automatic, but if your connections are only dial-up,
the screensaver/client blinks when it's completed its processing and is ready
to transfer data back to Berkeley.

Of our seven PCs, we only have two that are big enough to be used for this
project (32MB is required), one of which is the $399 "cheap PC" e-machine
that Gavin waxed enthusiastic about a few weeks ago, but I do plan on getting
more memory now for the others. As best I can tell, the processing puts
absolutely no wear or tear on the PCs. It's totally CPU & RAM based. There
are no disc transfers that I can detect. And because it only works when
you're not using the machine, there seems to be no interference at all with
normal operations, except for that small period of time when you wake your PC
up again. The screensaver client does take a bit of time to shut down, so
wake-up is more sluggish than it used to be, but that's not a big deal.

I've been able to deduce from their data patterns that they send out the same
"work unit" chunk to eight different client machines. I'm sure that they do
this solely for reliability, so that no chunk gets missed or miscalculated,
as well as data verification.

The chance that this process will discover life other than our own is
vanishingly small. And the chance that if we did that you'd be the one to
process the chunk that indicates that life is similarly tiny. But, if nothing
else, this project is a form of computational process that wasn't even
possible a few years ago -- and it costs almost nothing for everyone involved.

The address to get started if you want to participate is:

     http://setiathome.ssl.berkeley.edu/

Wirt Atmar