Truth be told, the necessity of the screensaver is behind us. Since CRT monitors have gone the way of the 12-inch Powerbook, most people don't need to worry about screen burn. Yet we still love screensavers.
Why? Some of them do useful things. Others are pure eye-candy. Your friends couldn't care less about seeing TPS reports on your new Cinema Display, but fire up one of these cool screensavers and watch as everyone becomes mesmerized.
10. SETI@Home
SETI@Home falls into the "useful" category‚ sort of. It fills your screen with colorful graphs, but it's what's behind the scenes that's truly fascinating. SETI is a "distributed computing" project that connects your computer to a network of machines analyzing data. In this case, your machine's idle cycles are used to search for aliens. I want to believe.
