“An operating system spanning the Internet would bring the power of millions of the world’s Internet-connected PCs to everyone’s fingertips”. Read the interesting article by David Anderson (SETI@Home director) and John Kubiatowitz (assistant professor at Berkeley Uni). Our Take: I am wondering if Plan9 could actually fit in such an OS model.
Distributed Systems: The Worldwide Computer
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Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
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Would this mean I could have better fps in fps?
No, but your computer could be doing something useful while waiting for you to press keys while surfing OS News.
Bwa-ha-ha…
– chrish
Is my prefered distributed program, because all clients are optimized … My G4’sAltivec Units are used by dnetc, not by Seti@Home.
Maybe reason of that app is different, but i can see much similarities.
I’m talking about BeShare, and other file sharing apps which can recognize the same files at different hosts.
Of course it’s only for file share, file backup (not intentionally, but files shared and downloaded will be there for a long time
Kewl article
Only those understanding Rebol in its principles know they have typo in the article – it is not ISOS, but IOS – Rebol IOS – we will gete there … 🙂
-pekr-
the problem with giving people money for stuff like this is that it is far too difficult to apportion it correctly. for example: if youre using someone’s bandwidth while grabbing something off their hard-drive is it fair to reimburse them? what about if their connection is slower? if you pimp your computer out to the highest bidder for fun and profit then what about all the good causes, like SETI, that couldnt afford it? what if someone cheats the calculations, shortcutting them to appear to do more work and getting more money?
its safer as it is: work done for free for one person by another in return for the same service (in the case of freenet) or simple the satisfaction of doing something for a good cause (SETI)…
How do you say … vaporware?
And more yawn
And what about privacy issues?
Methinks if Microsoft had propsed something like this, the uproar would be deafening.
Release Raissi you wankers!
The projects that can’t afford it will just have to suffer. The world doesn’t run on charity. Its not that hard to safegaurd against hackers and tampering anyways. Just require multiple computers to compute any one result as SETI does not.
I’d rather do something worthwhile like Folding@Home or something. SETI’s real accomplishment is letting the world know distributed computing really does work and is possible. Otherwise everyones spent a lot of time scanning dead radio space and still no little green men.
Just require multiple computers to compute any one result as SETI does not
the trouble with that is youre duplicating the effort so youre effectively doubling (or tripling) the time to get an answer back. this means, since the client wont pay more, the hundredths of pennies oozing into your account will be reduced, even if youre doing your work properly…
its fine for GIMPS, etc, because the search space is mostly empty. they care more about false positives than negatives. and so they only check the positives, i guess SETI does, and distributed.net too…
but noone running a finite element analysis of the next 747 is going to be satisfied with “dont worry, we check every 20th computation”…
Plan 9 looks like a great OS for this sort of thing. Might GNU HURD go well here also?
This’d be great. I wouldn’t actually have to buy new hardware to play Doom 3. All i’d have to do is leave my computer on for a few nights running seti, so I could afford ‘buying’ the processing power off of others.