Slashdot Mirror
ProcessTree Gets Its First (Paying) Client
myosin writes: "ProcessTree (sell your unused cycles for $$$) will soon announce it has its first paying client. Here's the [preliminary] announcement :)
From their site:
'The good news is that as soon as the end of the month, some of the suppliers of ProcessTree will be able to earn money with their computers. The bad news is that this only applies to a limited number of participants that will be hand-picked according to the requirements of the project.'" And joe points out (from that same announcement) that "The job is a quality-of-service monitoring system that allows real-time checking on the performance and availability of Web sites. We will initially start with 25 locations, for each of which we plan to have a number of suppliers to provide a 24/7 coverage from each location. Each such group in a location we call an 'ideal machine.'" However, they prefer to trade shekels only for cycles on your permanently connected Windows-based machines for now, thanks.
Now I finally have a way to pay off that Cray I bought on eBay.
I can see a big problem at Schools and Companies networks when all of a sudden there is an increase in network traffic.
From a technical standpoint, distributed computing is damn cool. I don't think anyone here would dispute the technical brilliance of not-for-profit projects such as the SETI network. However, this will not make money.
ProcessTree has a client on-board, but have not yet decided on the compensation rate for the "suppliers". This is where the problem starts. There is not a rate that will work.
If the rate is too high (which it inevitably will be in the beginning, to get "suppliers"), the company will be quickly drained of resources. Whatever ProcessTree is planning to charge the client (can't be much, with the price of processing power these days) will not cover "supplier" compensation, project development time, network bandwidth, administrative overhead, etc.
The only solution to this problem will be to reduce the rate paid to "suppliers". This reduction will continue as ProcessTree attempts to refine their cost structure. Eventually, it will get to the point that "suppliers" don't think maintaining the ProcessTree client is worth the hassle, for a mere buck and a quarter a month. Goodbye, ProcessTree.
To make money, a business must be able to solve an existing problem better than existing means. This project will fail because 1) it will be cheaper and easier for clients to maintain their own Beowulf cluster of monkey brains and 2) the rate paid to "suppliers" will be too low to matter. CPU time is cheap. There is not a significant problem to be solved.
I just have a quick question as to the actual project. In what way does this differ from Keynote's service. I am a contract engineer and my company works very close to Keynote and we get full coverage throughout the globe of the companies websites as well as our competitors. Seems like the same thing, and Keynote is quite affordable for it's services. Is this a case of reinventing the wheel or something new?
Dacels Jewelers can't be trusted.
By your logic we don't have any examples of decent countries run by blacks (to pull a random example) so we should just assume that black people can't run a proper government? Or would it just show that the countries with black leaders are in poorer parts of the world with a lot of religious and economic problems that would prevent any country from doing well under any leader?
I think it's the same with communism. There's no reason communism requires secret police, or anything else that Russia had. Many non-communist counties are brutal totalitarian regimes so it's not like communists have cornered the market (is that a pun in this context?)
Any state can have politicians who want to stay in power and who fear revolution. Look at Clinton/Gore, and the Bush clan... We just watch them a bit better, but if we didn't I think we'd find our freedoms slipping away just as fast as in any other country where someone takes absolute power.
that would probably have something to do with me being an Australian.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Probably because there's 10 times more Wintel based machines for them to pick from than *nix boxes... I doubt the corps that have Onyx's and E10000s in the back room will let process tree's software anywhere near their machines.
When the high end is unusable, the next step is to use the commodity platform, which would be Wintel. Yes, linux and *bsd may be a bit more stable, but to use those would mean to limit themselves to a small subsection of the PC market... Plus, i believe they're only distributing closed source binaries, which further impeeds them from the diehard GNU market.
We're not talking mission critical here... Any machine can crash out for a few hours here and there, because there are so many other machines ready to take it's place should that happen... Kind of like a RAID 5 composed of computers...
wow.. so all those windoze boxen that I have owned can earn me dollars? Cool.
How we know is more important than what we know.
yes.. if you were to rent the computers and run them 24/7 you could claim their usage off your tax at the end of the year, so essentially cycles cost nothing.
How we know is more important than what we know.
heh.. yes.. their first customer is the Cult of the Dead Cow.
How we know is more important than what we know.
dipshit, they don't store their cc on their machine, they store their username/password to places like amazon on their machine (in a cookie) so they don't have to reenter it next time they go and by a book. Amazon keeps their cc details on their server (which is just fucking stupid) so they don't have to reenter them. I think the virus is a pretty good idea. Mental note: write virus.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Don't forget that there are moral objections as well as ones to the safety of your box. Say that I'm a pacifist, but my box is being used to create terrain maps for missile guideance systems. Or to do particle simulations of the effects of a nuke.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
bah.. it stores the details.. even if you use a wet piece of string to connect the server to the net it is still insecure. Amazon is stupid.
How we know is more important than what we know.
Here the ProcessTree partner statistics.
As you can see Linux is under 2%.
I thinks this is why they chose windows.
. . . They've failed to turn a profit as the selected computers failed to stay running long enough to finish the project by the given deadline.
I'm wondering why they're choosing windows-based machines for this task. I agree that it makes a lot of sense to hand-pick computers depending on the requirements of the job, and I understand that this job requires 24/7 connections and all. However, it seems to me that it's easier to find a *nix machine that's truly on and connected all the time than a windows machine... especially in the realm of home computers, their target audience, most windows machines will be running 9x, which simply can't be considered 24/7. Is it because they have more development time invested in / more control over the windows software? Or is it just because that's what most of the people signed up for the service have?
I've had this sig for three days.
The reason they are only using Windows seems pretty obvious to me. Windows has the largest desktop marketshare, and I'm willing to bet that the majority of people who have signed up at that site are actually running Windows.
So, logistically, if they really intend to be churning out projects in the future, it makes sense. It takes much less time to develop for a single platform per project.
What this also means to me is that depending on the size of the project, different pools of machines will be used.
-lb
Couldn't pay me enough to run arbitrary code for anonymous third parties.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.
Who needs SETI@home when you can just smoke a big fat bowl and talk to aliens anyway(s)?
permanently connected Windows-based machines
Presumably Windows would have to go without a reboot for 24 hours a day?
It's not difficult to safely run untrusted code.
It's all a matter of how secure your sandbox is. In fact, it doesn't matter whether your code is Java or in native code - the only reason all these
distributed pay-you-for-cycles companies are choosing Java is not because it's more secure, but because they've got someone else to blame when a security hole is discovered. It doesn't really matter if it's the JVM or something else that's overwriting my files.
VMware, plex86, User-Mode-Linux - they're all on the right track: trap on the privilegded instructions and safely emulate them. Every bit as
safe as Java, but without the speed penalty. (This assumes of course that VMware, plex86, and UML have all the instructions handled safely, which can be hard to do on the X86 instruction set. But I'd guess that Sun's JVM has at least as many bugs and security problems as VMware does.)
What you couldn't pay me enough to do is to let anonymous third parties run my code. These distributed-processing people need to take a lesson from the online gaming community: Your clients will cheat, and they are smarter than you. The only way to catch them cheating is to re-run the computation, and don't bother with encryption or obfuscation, because remember, your clients are smarter than you. Also, don't even bother to try and keep "sensitive" data hidden from the people running your computation: you can't. Only send things to the remote clients that you don't care if they see, because they're going to.
The problem with re-running your computation is, of course, that it takes more Compute Time. Sure, you can just check up a percentage to take a statistical guess, but how much is your computation worth to you? If you're willing to pay for it you're better off to check everything again, because processing power is "cheap." Even still, for my serious calculations I'll do them in-house, thank you.
-Erik
Hello there, Armin Lenz from Distributed Science here.
Our decisions to launch with Windows client software first is a simple one: Linux clients are in the works but are under a contractual deadline, which is hard to meet by itself. As we provide updates, Linux clients will be rolled out as well, in particular because Linux boxes are considered 24/7 reliable (unless they are dial-up, of course).
A large number of the locations chosen for the first run are in Asia and South Africa. If you have a suitable machine and were not called upon directly, don't worry, the project is supposed to expand to several hundred locations over time and if you are in a sizeable city, chances are good that we'll have use for you there.
All this is independent of processing jobs that require computing time or storage capacity. Projects of this kind will be rolled out later, we are responding to customer demand first and try to get as much of the ProcessTree network utilized so the suppliers can earn some money.
ProcessTree - Isn't it time your computers started paying for itsel
Well, whoever saves their credit card number on their machine deserves to be billed for this new 47" television that's making its way up to my doorstep...
Ahh, that's what I want. For my car to be a billboard for random corporations, for my friends to mock me for it, and get paid not nearly enough for the heckling I will endure.
Maybe you can use that $400 a month to get a prostitute, because I don't think you'll be picking up chicks in that car.
BilldaCat
1. There are more Windows machines
While true this project needs a limited number of hand picked 24/7 reliable systems.. There are more 24/7 Reliable Linux boxes that are not otherwise employed (Not part of a larg IT network) and are just "personal systems" that would want in on this.
2. Linux users won't install strage software.
Distributed.net proves Linux users will (by in larg) do exactly that if motivated... As well as Windows and BSD and Solarus and well anyone really.
The number of people who worry about closed source binarys is significant but most will set such conserns asside... given the choice most would pick open over closed but not allways...
3. No Linux client yet
The IT sector dosn't think of Linux first.. they just automaticly think Windows first... so the Windows client was done first...
The Linux client is "on the way" but they couldn't wait for it...
Also likely the Windows client was a quick and dirty... to be replaced later with quality code.. Linux people are far more picky about this.. they can (and do) recognise shotty code eating cycles...
I don't actually exist.
I agree, it's called representative democracy but when they don't actually have to represent you it sounds a bit hollow...
I've often thought that the party system should be outlawed - they promise to represent you but then they get into power and vote for the party line, something opposite of what their constituents want.
There was a case of it in BC 5-8 years ago (I don't remember) where someone polled most of a district and found that 85% of people who responded wanted one thing - their MP still voted the other way.
I think they should be sued, for breach of contract maybe, treason at the outside... (it's basically subversion of the system.)
What's the sheckle to USD conversion?
Fight Spammers!
Okay, I know this is slightly off topic, but hear me out...
Yeah, it's cool that you can get paid for the use of your computer, but how about Getting Paid to drive your car!
www.autowraps.com and www.freecar.com are both websites that pay you up to $400.00 a month to drive arround with an advertisement on your car.
Sounds kinda silly to me, but I'd actually consider it.
That sounds a lot like reselling CPU time and bandwidth. I don't think ISPs will like this. They may declare that if you wanna do this you need a bussiness account. I know that Road Runner charges a lot more to businesses than consumers and I bet they aren't the only ones. Be careful...
Does the whole scheme make economic sense? Given the rapid depreciation of hardware, is it not cheaper to contract out to a bunch of datacentres which may have uneven loads (note that studies show web traffic peaks around 9pm). SETI@home worked for individual machines but that was a popular project that captured people's imagination and who were willing to "donate" cycles. If the cost of monitoring an individual machine + electricity cost + network costs + loss opportunity cost + risk, does it make economic sense? The risk factor of having unknown programs potentially loose within a coporate network is enough to give sysadmins heartburn, especially if someone puts in a trojan horse for data stealing.
It'll be interesting to look at their cash-flow distribution plan, not much point if you have to pay out 120% of income to offset marketing + cycle compensation time.
LL