Binky quoted from Wall Street Journal:
>In
>distributed computing, third-party computer users, often
>scientific researchers engaged in large-scale projects, access
>the hard drive space of individual users when their computers
>would otherwise not be on.
Once again, it is NOT the hard drive they are after. They are after the
computer. It seems some people, probably including Wall Street journal,
assume that the monitor is the computer and that the computer is the
harddrive. Heck even a class mate here at university didn't (and probably
still don't) know the diffrence and this is at university level. All they
really want is the "unused" CPU power out there - not storage space. IMHO
there's very little "unused" CPU power since a computer should only be in
two states - on or off (there's also a state called "broken" but it doesn't
happen that often).
> The most well-known example of
>distributed computing is run by the Search for Extraterrestrial
>Intelligence (SETI), which has spread its investigations to 2.8
>million household PCs, which then provide SETI with the
>equivalent of 500,000 years of computing time.
AFAIK the SETI program has been canceled since a few years back. The
SETI@Home project on the other hand uses the approach mentioned above.
BTW: IIRC there was another SETI@Home project (although the name might have
been diffrent) earlier on. In that project people would buy their own
telescopes (only some 1500-2000 USD IIRC <g>) and study the sky along with
many other people. The Internet was then to be used to make sure that the
majority of space was covered.
//Bernie
