“When Mary gets home from work and goes to her PC to check e-mail, the PC isn’t just sitting there. It’s working for a biotech company, matching gene sequences to a library of protein molecules. Its DSL connection is busy downloading a block of radio telescope data to be analyzed later. Its disk contains, in addition to Mary’s own files, encrypted fragments of thousands of other files. Occasionally one of these fragments is read and transmitted; it’s part of a movie that someone is watching in Helsinki. Then Mary moves the mouse, and this activity abruptly stops. Now the PC and its network connection are all hers.” Read more about an operating system spanning the Internet that would bring the power of millions of the world’s Internet-connected PCs to everyone’s fingertips.
The Internet Spanning Worldwide Computer
About The Author
Eugenia Loli
Ex-programmer, ex-editor in chief at OSNews.com, now a visual artist/filmmaker.
Follow me on Twitter @EugeniaLoli
i wonder what would happen if my computer suddenly lost its internet connection… *GG*
And just how do I get paid for this use of my hardware, hmm? Or am I just supposed to be philanthropic about the use of thousands of dollars of my equipment?
Sounds to me like a way for money grubbing capitalist pigs to save money on hardware, and then charge me for the new products and services they create (using my hardware).
If biotech companies really are looking for the next multi-billion dollar cure or new drug, are they really going to lack money for a first-rate data processing facility? I don’t think so.
they just want to access your data under the pretenses of using your cpu!
in 10 or maybe 20 years from now, a network (internet or something else) will be as essential to computing as electric power currently is.
more and more we see those computers being connected, and we see huge amount of ppl all getting permanent connection setup (adsl/cable/etc..). Given some more time and projects to link up entire cities/provinces using fiber optics, your net connection will become as reliable if not more than your phone or power is.
What this means is that instead of having 30,000 individuals each using 6MB for an mp3, the mp3 could be stored only once and you read it on whoever’s computer it is when you need it. Just this single song will save over 180GB of storage, which should be enough to store quite a couple of movies.
Scared to not have enough freedom? Your system will basically be split into two parts, one shared and one for your personal data. All shared data will most likely be stored in a separate tree. Your own data is then just stored like normally. The peer-2-peer network permanently setup for your local area will be able to get files only in the shared section, so your own personal data is safe.
This my friends, is the future, a redundant, fail-safe, naturally backed-up, space saving environment, where the failure of a single machine doesn’t mean losing 4 years worth of work (as long as you store your file in the shared area (encryption anybody?)).
And quite frankly, your idle cpu cycles are doing nothing for you, why not give them away. You feel violated by getting your unused cpu cycles used? just click the small ‘disable cpu sharing’ option button in the control panel and you are done.
I personally can’t wait to see all this happen.
It sounds like a geek’s wet dream and a conspiracy-theorist’s nightmare. I’m torn
This reminds me of a paper I wrote in the mid 90’s about a distributed computing and storage economy. The idea was that each computer comes with a certain amount of funny money called quatlus. Your computer can sell unused cycles or storage to other computers to offload their storage or processing. When your machine needs more storage or processing it can use these quatlus to purchase it from other computers. The scheduling/bidding/selling algorithm would be intellegent enough to, for example, sell off processing during peak hours when the price was high so it could buy more processing later when it is cheaper if it has a long running job or one that doesn’t require rapid turn around. The technical problems for this system are counterfeiting, security, and privacy. I haven’t worked it out but now I believe that signing currency through a PKI would be the way to eliminate counterfeiting and if the processing were symbolic enough than the security and privacy concern might go away though obfuscating what the program is actually doing might be difficult.