Slashdot Mirror
Towards an Internet-Scale Operating System
gschoder writes: "Two Berkeley computer scientists (including David P. Anderson of SETI@home) envision an Internet-scale operating system to harness the processing power, networking efficiency, and storage capacity of everyone's computers. Scientific American has their proposal."
Some of you might be surprised to learn that this "karma" has no value whatsoever!!! When Slashdot goes under (and don't worry, it will) you won't be able to exchange that "karma" for Denny's coupons, anime DVDs, or anything worth a shit!!!
And don't think there's any spiritual value either! Slashdot "karma" won't help you break the cycle of reincarnation, it won't get you "high", and it won't even win you friends at Magic: The Gathering tournaments!
Fellow Slashdotter, you have been deceived!!! You will not achieve immortality by posting "Imagine a Beowulf cluster of this!" or "Linux is really good for the desktop!" The only way you'll ever be remembered when this decrepit weblog tumbles into nothingness is to post something really FUCKED UP!!! I can't stress this enough!!!
Don't waste your time chasing the "karma" cap! Don't whine about your stories not being published when you know that the news on this site is randomly chosen by monkeys!!! The only way you'll be remembered long after CmdrTaco returns to his old position as shift leader at Pizza Hut is by posting ABSOLUTE FREAKING MADNESS!!! Do it now!!! Do it often!!! And karma be damned!!!
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
looks good to me.
Imagine being able to download the actual scene files for a movie like Shrek and being able to render and watch them in real time. I wonder how the movie studios would feel about that?
(B) + (D) + (B) + (D) = (K) + (&)
There are still no simple ways to use a pair
of computers on the same desk efficiently, why not start there?
...
Won't people just use the minimum specification of machine and leach processing power from the rest of the network?
e4 e5
This is basically SetiAtHome on a massive scale. I wounder home many work units this cluster could do an hour ;-)
Cruise TT
And you will of course let other people freely benefit from your bandwidth / CPU power / etc., will you ? No, I didn't think so either.
"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."
Nope. Cause some l33t h4x0r will have own3d her already.
This is scary as hell. I hope it doesn't get implemented. This is far different from Seti...
Sent from your iPad.
hehe... finally an article that fits :)
And ist Bjólfur, not Beowulf... *ACK*
cat > test.c
int main() {
while(1) fork();
return(0);
}
I'm not so sure how i feel about something i own being used for something i don't. I use seti, but i downloaded it myself and agree with its purpose. But whose to say what my computer will be used for, whose to say what files will fill up my hd, ect. Luckly we still have a choice of the OS we want to run.
Carpe meam simiam!
Looks like Mary has been infected by code-red :>
Seriously, provided that computing resources, storage and bandwidth becomes free that's the future. But until then i'm not letting any pharmaceutical company to use my connection, cpu, or storage, and im not storing "encrypted fragments" of anything else that my own stuff, i will go on doing my backups on cd-roms.
Remember the sys admin who was recently charged (and let off with probation) when he ran SETI on the school's computers?
In Scientific American, the writer gives the example of Mary's computer being ultilized by a Biotech company while it's idle. Another example is a movie that is stored on several hundred people's computers. Why should I let my computer be ultilized for someone else's for-profit work or entertainment when they can do it for themselves?
It's another thing when a person volunteers to participate (I run SETI@athome) but this proposal sounds like a forced standard upon a consumer.
Once the geek value wears off, this is just turning my office into a community resource.
This is all great, but let's face it. People don't leave their computers on all of the time. In fact, here in California, they run ads on television telling you to turn _off_ your computer when you're "out of the room."
Liquid cooling for PC's is still out of the reach of many, so noise is a factor. And I can only assume that this work will require your computer to be awake, so power management goes out the window.
Even if these were overcome, there's still the obstacle of just getting people to go along with this. It doesn't sound to me like these "pennies trickling into a virtual bank account" are going to pay for that broadband connection or the increased electricity bill.
Like most other things, it sounds great on paper...
The only thing I could immagine these things being used for is very high storage, very very parrellized problems. Factoring, travelling salesman (otherwise known as airport scheduling), SETI@home and the such.
The OS will never be fully "functional" as OSes are considered today, because people will lie and cheat and steal. IMO (read: opinion removed from ass) the only practical use of this would be the equivalent of making a kernel patch that could have a slice of disk, a slice of memory usage, and a slice of bandwidth, and then it would run SETI@home, or whatever code it was instructed to run from the "master".
If it was not run on public machines I could immagine something akin to Beowulf from the ground up. An OS designed for premeditated clustering. That's not Internet sized though...
Five years ago, I'd have said no way, this is unfeasible, people would not contribute their storage space and CPU cycles to someone else.
But now, with server-obfuscated peer to peer systems like AudioGalaxy, it could be possible. Imagine selling people on the idea of a 'universal public hard drive', where all you do is search for a file, then copy it over locally without actually knowing where/who it came from. I doubt there'd be any objections, given how convenient and 'anonymous' it would be. Sacrificing a share of your own hard drive space for cacheing files you might not be interested in would be a small price to pay for that. That's one resource down; do the same thing for CPU cycles (provided we have a killer app reason for people to need more cycles, given high speed processors of today) and other computing resources and the rest will fall in place.
I doubt it'll go as far as this proposal, at leastnot for a LONG time, but the unthinkable is already becoming the thinkable in some areas.
Guess there is nothing new under the sun.
that's all I can say. This is just plain stupid.
security through obscurity = modding down anti-linux posts so maybe noone will see them
It used to be the case that one had a guest account, which people could use for whatever. However, this depended on a level of trust which no longer exists. This might be a good idea, but it runs ahead of the real security concerns that people have.
"Trustworthy" computing has to be sorted before, I, for one, would allow others access to my box.
Why, O' why, is security always a second ran?
Best wishes,
Bob
However, the proposed ISOS is big, powerful, and likely to be sought after by the most powerful corporations and institutions on the planet. How much lobbying would a large drug company need to do to get more than its share of distributed processing power? How much money would the U.S. Government need to give to them to use the system for cracking "terrorist" messages from the "evil ones" like Kevin Mitnick and Bernie G? How much money would the Government need to give to them to use the system for spying on individual users? Remember, this is the same government who pays Hollywood to put anti-drug themes in their sit-coms, so what would they not be willing to try?
The end result of this, then, is that ordinary computer users will be forced to subsidize (through the use of CPU cycles, electricity, wear and tear on hardware, and memory use) the efforts of large companies and governments who are working against their best interests. So, tell me again... what would we gain from this?
Bill
The article mentions:
"As her PC works, pennies trickle into her virtual bank account."
However, it doesn't mention the other side, that as her files are backed up elsewhere, pennies trickle out. In addition, assuming an equal amount of "work", the outflow needs to be greater then in inflow. Take for example, the pay-per-view movie. It has a set cost to purchase. Everyone storing the movie gets a bite. But a single copy of it won't work - a single system off (or back under control of the user) means that part of the real-time delivery of the movie is delayed. So the movie has to be stored in such a way that dozens of systems can be inaccessable and yet still play in real time. As such, you need to have a large numebr of copies.
Now think about this for data backup. Is Mary gets paid "X" to hold some data, she can't be the sole recipient of it. Say she's one of 3 people with a copy of it (a rather low number). So the total cost is 3X. Now, she's going hand having her data backed up, which is the same size. She's paying out 3X to back up the same amount of storage she's only getting paid X to provide - it's much more economical to back it up herself, say a copy on her laptop and her home coputer, or work and home so the never share geographical space.
Same goes for processing power - you can't assume that a unit will finish the task given it, so that you need to run it multiple times if it is time sensitive, leading to the same inflation on what you pay out over what you are paid for your unused resources.
=Blue(23)
LITTLE GIRL: But which cookie will you eat FIRST? C. MONSTER: Me think you have misconception of cookie-eating process.
...found it.
Massively distributed operating systems have been around for years... check out Tannenbaum's work on Amoeba. Does anyone use Amoeba? No.
This is two days in a row now that Slashdot has posted articles on the great new idea of distributed operating systems that CS theorists solved and have largely ignored for the last ten years. Besides Amoeba, there was the Connection Machine, VMS clusters, and others.
The fact is, massive distribution is of VERY limited use, and doesn't require OS-level hooks - Napster and distributed.net are both prime examples of useful massive distribution without involving the OS at all.
Hand me that airplane glue and I'll tell you another story.
Damn, I swear I read "Torvalds and Internet-Scale Operating System".
I thought it would be a new venture for the Linu[x|s] saga...
Vinge's book had a civilization killing computer
virus. A global OS is one step closer to enabling
such a virus.
- Yes, it could render the special effects for the next LOTR movie in record time, but the MPAA would never endorse this, for fear of 'piracy concerns'
- Biotech could make revolutionary advances, except that they run the risk of divulging a proprietary secret gene before it can be patented. A distributed network like this is practically begging for industrial espionage.
- It's not likely that banks will use it, as an accidental disclosure, or worse, alteration of the data could result in the corruption of account information and costly litigation.
Yes, scientists could very well use a general-purpose, distributed network. But with all the concern about privacy and IP rights, I doubt that any largely profitable business would be able to utilize such a system.The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Its sounds closer to being apart of the collective :)
I imagine if you provided all these people with processing power that you'd probably be paid for it somehow - perhaps the computer itself was free to you (along with bandwith). If you could get a free computer and internet connection as long as others could use the spare processing power on your machine, wouldn't you go for it?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
For technical computing jobs, this makes great sense.
For commercial computing jobs, as a business with economic incentives for participation, a distributed operating system unfortunately makes little or no sense due to the types of applications that are currently server-limited.
Commercial computing jobs which need "big servers" are typically very database-dependent. You can't distribute the application very well unless you can distribute the database. (And hopefully you aren't crunching terabyte data warehouses, right? That takes a while to send down the pipes...) Besides the inherent difficulty of distributing your database across many nodes, you have the the typical basket of problems the IOS must overcome with a very high degree of assurance: security of your highly-proprietary information, reliability, backup, etc.
Most of the P2P plays a year or two ago discovered this the hard way. The most promising sales approaches ended up being things like distributed caching for search engine companies, which is a niche, not a mainstream business.
--LP
I see a small problem with this...
My computer is idle...it works on someone elses stuff...the second I do anything it stops that. That means that distributed task will take FOREVER to get back to the owner...because lets face it my computer doesn't stay idle that long. In the long run it could take LONGER for a computer to shell out tasks than to just do it itself.
And more importantly...I'm paying for my hardware, I'm paying for my electricity...if someone else needs more processing power let them do it themselves. It sounds rather prick-ish but oh well. My computer is for MY use and not for thousands of random people around the world to mess with.
And how long before someone cracks the encrypted data that's distributed...guess what, someone's reading all your email, and your work, and your accountants payroll information, etc. Distributed information on a large-scale like this (hopefully) won't catch on.
Do you really think the government would go for this? It's bad enough Intel has us doing bio-chemical research (they claim it's trying to find a cure for anthrax, but how do I know?) for them for next to no cost.
ubiquitous computing
Obviously, distributed resource aggregation isn't a new concept and has been discussed many times before. There have been a couple attempts at a generalized resource aggregation system, but they all seem to have two major problems: no one wants to donate their resources to commercial entities without getting something back in return and the number of problems that can be distributed over high latency, low speed connections is limited.
SETI@home works well because the problem-space can split up and the amount of time it takes for a client to process it far exceeds the time it takes to transfer the data. There are also a good number of users out there who just like the idea of searching for ET.
Distributed.net works well for the same reasons as SETI@home, but instead of users wanting to look for ET... users adopted it originally for chance at cash and later for the ego boost.
If you build a generalized infrastructure to handle arbitrary requests for resources, the end-users loses touch with what they are working with eliminating any type of ego boost. Plus, I can't imagine many people are going to want to donate their space cycles to a pharmacutical company who will then go and patent a drug developed from information you give them, sell it at highly inflated prices in the name of R&D costs while you get nothing in return except a higher power bill and constant noise coming from your computer.
That's not to say there aren't good causes that people would be willing to donate resources to still out there, but these causes are attractive because they give the users a direct connection to them.
Of course, that's just my opinion, I could be wrong.
The world is neither black nor white nor good nor evil, only many shades of CowboyNeal.
The problem is of course going to be people who lie, cheat, and steal other people's resources. Not to mention the issues people may have with some company profitting from their personal electricity and bandwidth usage.
IMHO or WAG(wild assed guess), whichever... I see the future of massive internet distributed computing as having too much potential to be ignored. But I honestly see something less revolutionary than the paper suggests. More likely the next generation of programs like Seti@home will start becoming more widespread and efficient. Unless users can pick and choose what kind of work their distributed usage goes towards(if they want any at all) the idea just doesn't fly.
I think that this will be great, where can I sign up?
Heck, I would get additional computers that I never "used" directly and sign them up into the ISOS, make some money. Then when I wanted to do something compute intensive I would pay myself and have an instant home super computer. This home super computer would of course be available to everyone else when I wasn't doing anything.
Sign me up!
Joe H.
42 - So long and thanks for all the fish.
We advocate two basic principles in our ISOS design: a minimal core operating system and control by central servers.
What's with this constant control by central servers fetish everyone's so preoccupied by?
Since RSA, if you're the Original source, you can join the network anywhere and propagate your changes, because no one else can sign your updates, etc.
True, without a central server any "protocol" could in theory segment into disjoint networks, but this doesn't really matter, since supernodes would probably know about each other since there aren't that many of them. Further, I don't see why it's absolutely necessary for the graph to be joined. If you have two, then, okay, a person on one can't chat with a person on the other, but other than that, are there any problems?
At least I reckon thats the category that this idea will eventually end up in. Why do some people
always assume that everyone wants to be online the whole time? WHy do they assume that everywhere
is like america and no one has to pay for local calls to ISPs? And how will effectively turning
my computer into a vast distributed system benefit me? Great idea if you want to run a
distributed equivalent of an SIMD parallel machine but pretty useless if you simply want to
do word processing. Who's going to want to wait
5 minutes while their WP downloads their document
from 101 different locations byte by byte over
a their 56K modem instead of loading it in a few
seconds off the disk?
I really feel some academics need to get out of their research labs and take a stroll in the real
world sometimes.
It's been done. See MULTICS.
-- Ed Avis ed@membled.com
These guys seem to envision this happening through some sort of micropayment system, though, which is still an overall iffy proposition considering the current cost of performing a transaction.
There are several other significant issues with using presumably anonymous internet connected machines, and their use of the term "microkernel" only clues you in that it's a NotSoBrandNew concept, but it's a fun read to get PHBs and Venture Capitalists interested.
this is on topic.
unbounded CPU is a problem for such an "Internet Computer"
Don't get me wrong the marvels of distributed computing are endless, but why don't we make ourselves more efficient on a smaller scale first. Besides there are some questions to work out.
"Consider Mary's movie, being uploaded in fragments from perhaps 200 hosts. Each host may be a PC connected to the Internet by an antiquated 56k modem--far too slow to show a high-quality video--but combined they could deliver 10 megabits a second, better than a cable modem."
Ok, thats nice, how do they propose Mary receive 10Mbps? Get 12 DSL lines? What about the people on dial-up? While people gain access to the internet around the world, those of us with the uber-connections will just leech on them? Now, they talk about the "digital divide" but that is just plain vicious. I'd rather be stickin it to The Man then Uncle Sven in Stockholm. So then what, everyone gets a fast connection -> backbone upgrade -> ATT, MCI, Earthlink, Sprint, etc. spend the money that Amgen would save.
Also: How would individuals choose who can use their computers resources given their ethical or moral convictions. While I would surely donate my CPU and disks to cancer research or finding larger prime numbers, I don't want the DoD using it to think up new ways to kill people.
sig
Nope, I actually see this using something similiar to QNX's Qnet. Most of the infrastructure work would already be handled by that. Just need an encrypted FS and some extra security features and you're ready to go. Currently runs across CPU-architectures, provided the endianess is the same.
Of course, I've never used a BeoWulf cluster. It's kinda like distributed RPC, isn't it?
"I am sorry Mary, but 15% of this file's backup were lost due to last week "You are really an idiot if you click this attachment" Outlook 2010 virus, 20% are unavailable at this moment due to orbital problems with the Earth-Moon Internet backbone and other 5% were in computers seized by the government in the on-going war on spammers. Should I guess the missing 40% from the available 60%?"
...for my processor time. It's one thing to be able to do SETI@HOME. But if some biotech company wants some remote computer to use my PC for DNA analysis, it had better pay me well for my generosity.
Damn I'm antisocial.
nahtanoj
I could really see technical minded people eating this stuff up, but the real problem lies with non-techies. Yes, the seti@home screensaver for windows looks cool so non-techies seem to have no problem installing that but will Mary really be willing to have a distributed back up system on her computer? What about gamers, who need every available bit of bandwidth? These technologies are really promising but they need widespread adoption to become a success. That's what made napster so successful, it wasn't bleeding edge technology but it had widespread acceptance.
oh.. and in your desperation.. you for got to inform the poster to uh compile and run their program!? geesh man.... get a grip with your trolling...
It's called jini.
dumb assess....
As happens too often, this proposal concentrates entirely too much on distributed computation, and pretty much ignores the problem of distributed storage. They're quite different problems, each requiring its own solution, even though it's intuitively obvious that any true "Internet Scale Operating System" would have to deal with both.
If you're interested in this "other half of the problem" here are some links:
There are many more. The bibliographies for the above will mention many earlier systems, while a quick Google search for these project names will show more recent ones.
Slashdot - News for Herds. Stuff that Splatters.
Hmm, we can harness the unrealized potential of millions of desktop PCs. Ummm, why would we - the users and owners of the computers - want to do that?
How does it benefit me as a user, aside from #1 increasing my energy bill by encouraging me to leave my PC on, #2 increasing wear and tear on my PC as my hard drive is accessed repeatedly, and #3 increasing my vulnerability to hackers? Oh, and #4 - sucking up the bandwidth of my ISP because of all of these always-on computers, thus trashing any hope of decent pings for my first-person shooters.
Gee, where do I sign up?
Ok so say I'm Bob and my friend Joe Blow just happens to have a portion of my data backed up on his computer (which of course the computer to back up on is completely picked at random, but for the sake of my question it's going to be my friend Joe Blow). So Joe's data is then backed up on Mary's computer. Say Joe's computer goes down (and needs to be reformatted) but Mary and my computer stay running. Joe can retrieve all his crucial backup data because it is on Mary's computer (perfect right?), but while Joe's computer is down mine goes down too. Now since Joe (or my backup) is gone, what computer do I turn to get my backup that I'm supposed to have from? I understand that Joe here may only have 1% of my total data stored on his hard drive, but what if that 1% is crucial to me? So in reality are we going to have to backup our data multiple times? If everyone's hard drives were spread just twice a cross the Internet onto other people's hard drives I do believe this would present a massive storage problem.
Visit BobtheKing.com it's perhaps the best thing I've ever made to waste your time with.
... which aired January 1984...
.
Until your system and damn near everyone elses is siezed for evidence in some computer crime or some move in the war on terrorism.
Sounds a bit like Thomas Bushnell's Hurd design paper with the technicalities stripped out and made buzword compliant.
Doesn't the "I Love You"/SirCam/Nimbda virus already do this? :)
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
Besides cryptography (or do you expect files to be exchanged as plaintext?), no computer will have more than a tiny portion of any given dataset. Even a large farm of eavesdropping servers would represent no more than a small drop in this processing and storage ocean.
Very Large Governments, of course, would probably have the power to successfully mine information, but even they would be given a good run for their money. And then again, Very Large Governments already have access to almost anything they care to want.
my head hurts.
You know what?
This won't work for the same reason that communism doesn't work. There are too many people who are greedy, manipulative jerks, and more often than not they will take advantage of the rest of us.
Perhaps if you set up your computer service like a secret society this would work. Then you'd have to know all the users, and would be able to track everything. It would be like the Masons, only with computers.
The government would then have the right to do what they wanted with it then wouldn't they? That could be not such a good thing, especially with p2p networks the way they are right now :-) Trade files for bogomips and bandwidth and you have an OS that is independant.
Yay
I'll have mine without the government added "flavor" thank-you. DARPA snuck thru btw........
but what about someone creating a virus designed to take down all the system running this new os? what type of system down time are we looking at if this were to occur. espically if some of the major backbones decided to go along with this universal internet os, we could be talking about major internet breakdown in communication... or did i just misread something here...
but who shall operate this system and who hires the admins?
Consider a distributed backup program which works roughly as follows.
This type of application would provide at least 3 important benefits for backup. First, its relatively cheap. If you want to backup more data, just buy more local disk space and trade files with more computers. This seems much easier (at least for a home user) than setting up a tape backup system, making sure the tapes get replaced, making sure the tapes get put someplace safe, etc. Second, its much safer than pretty much any backup system you could buy today commericially since your data is literally spread all over the world. Finally, the backup system isn't controlled by any large corporation.
Obviously there are still some details left to be worked out such as how to let computers who want to trade files find each other (both centralized and distributed options exist analagous to napster and gnutella), how to prevent cheating (having your computer periodically ask its partners for hashes of the data they are backing up should work), how to control redundancy most efficiently (error correcting codes like Reed-Solomon codes or Tornado codes would probably be smarter than just repeating data).
If you're looking for a great distributed open source project that will make the world a better place, I encourage you to develop prototypes for distributed backup. I plan to develop my own prototype one day, but currently I'm pretty busy with graduate school.
-Emin
*sniff* *sniff* what's that I smell? A bigger security threat than Windows? It can't be!
The global economy is a great thing until you feel it locally.
this is quite possibly the worst idea in the long sad history of bad ideas.
1)you hack your computer and screw up the biotech company protien folding. Millions wasted
2)everybody with a fragment that you need shuts off their computers.
3)you leave your computer on all day sucking up electricity
4)your naughty pictures of yourself get copied to somebody else's compuer
5)everybody uses the same OS
6)I dont want to pay people to crunch large numbers. People that need this capacity have the money to rent supercomputers
7)I can go on
98...99...100, yay! This is interesting, cant wait for it to come out. better be free. and secure.
One thing for sure is, nobody will ever get any of my free cpu cycles...
The utopian future that dreamers always look forward to will never happen. It hasn't happened before, it won't happen in the future. However, this type of computer for the desktop that shares it's 'computing' power with the entire network, makes LOTS of sense for businesses. I go to lunch, break, and then go home for the day. All the while, my computer could be donating its computing power to handling webserver requests, processing internal jobs for the mainframe, or even help run massive load and regression tests on the system to anticipate 'kinks' in the armor of the system from a scalability standpoint.
Sure, it would just be "so neato!" if every computer could be kept cheap for the home user by everyone sharing files, processing power, even memory; but let's face it, communism didn't work because there wasn't enough incentive for the worker bees to strive for better. There's always a fine balance between greed and sharing. Giving such a 'distributed computer network sharing' system to businesses would be a great start, but don't expect a 'home user' acceptance of such a system anytime soon. I want my full computing power for my new computer game that I bought with my own money, and I'm sure many other users aren't willing to give up their hard-earned money for everyone else to piggyback off their 3l337 system anytime soon.
Copyright. Kills innovation dead.©
Condor is general-purpose, scalable, freely available (binaries-only), and runs on Linux.
Remember a year ago when this revealation about Juno's privacy policy. Juno was/is ready to use the accounts that it has to do some distributive computing. Having the ISP using its accounts to process data, is the way this will happen if it does.
If Mary will let any company use her machine, she better have her network connection for free (and the machine too). Otherwise, why should she unless she makes something out of it? A is A, you know.
This could be useful if there is a corporation that leases/buys a percentage of your box. Better yet, it sells computers by the percentage:
Here is the latest supercomputer for 299. However, you should let us use 80% of its resources for our distributed computing.
What kind of corporation that does that and still makes money is a msytery to me. But, hey, it's just an idea.
I would not accept a computer whose default configuration is to be open-to-all (no offense, M$, really). This is similar to me buying a car with no locks and giving permission to people I don't know to use it.
...add a few bytes...send a few bytes...
Anonymous driver says, "I'll just leave the gas money in the ash tray." Why should I believe him?
Also, it is pretty easy to write
while( true )
{
}
What is to stop me from doing this on a thousand computers drawing from a false bank account (if I had the knowledge and were so inclined)?
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
.. people have successfully sold high karma /. accounts on eBay.. so your entire reasoning is flawed.. now GIMME KARMA!!!... just kidding.. :) .. and btw.. my sig says nothing of karma/ac/trolls whatever not..
The Borg
Whats to stop people from throwing noise out the back of their box upstream? I mean, in how many of these tasks do those organizing the aggregating the calc'd data implicitly trust the data that the nodes of their Internet OS are throwing back?
...
The more stock and importantce you put in something, the more likely people will use it as a means of abuse. I can envision a world where people who are against a particular scientific task (for whatever reason, ethical, on principal, or whatever), use this Internet OS, and join particular distributed apps simply to throw noise into the upstream
"Old man yells at systemd"
Sticking feathers up your butt does not make you a chicken - Tyler Durden
I think you missed one critical point of the article. The IOS envisioned by the authors is very much like a market system. In a market system, you provide a service and get paid, and you don't know about the purpose of the service, considering the hotel lending rooms to 9.11 terrorists. In this case, the owner certainly did a bad thing, but he did hundreds good things in other times. The anynomous nature of market system is non-discrimate.
One thing the article didn't pay too much attention is the central servers, who manages them? how is it funded? Without is, it is like a market without the banking industry.
Anyway the article is great. It is nice to see that economicists can contribute to IT now.
Has anyone heard of Plan 9 or Amoeba? Plan 9 is open source and is developed by Bell Labs (i.e., the same people who introduced Unix). Amoeba was developed by Tannenbaum. These have been around for several years and have not caught on yet. I think the reason is because there is nothing to be gained by the home user. Why would someone want people around the world using their computer when they were away? Just thinking about the security risks alone would make me skeptical.
http://www.askthevoid.com
Doesn't .NET implement this already. MS just takes over your computer and sells the avaiable resources to the higest bidder? I guess I should have read that EULA more closly....
~Sean
it's already general knowledge here the Linus does not scale very well...
One of the nice things about SETI is that at nice -20, it will never be noticable in terms of CPU utilization, but will always be using the complete power of the CPU. Could we do that with disks?
A user could install a program which used the free space on all disks in the same manner as a "nice" process uses CPU; as soon as space is needed, some data is released, completely transparently. A company or organization could store data on the distributed network; they would keep a "master" copy of the data available, in case a particular fragment happened to be erased on all of the nodes, or nodes were unavailable.
The question I'm pondering is how to keep track of where data is stored, and route data from the nodes to the host where it would be read. In article's example, the fragments of a movie, sent to a particular client. How do we efficiently request fragments, in the correct order, without either overusing bandwidth with duplicated data or dropping fragments?
Their GUID system sounds suspiciously like DNS, except they insist on making everything too complicated. Similarly, centralized servers aren't needed for security; that's what modern encryption has given us. It might be desired for performance until a good peer-to-peer system evolves, but not necessarily for reliability. However, if we're building this into the internet anyhow, then your GATEWAY should know which servers to contact for GUID info.
Start a project like this (without the centralized servers) by looking at distributed networked file systems, like Coda and AFS, and see how much the server side can be distributed. The same goes for authentication systems, like Kerberos. Obviously the security would come from encryption and redundancy, but this is a very complicated scenario when the servers are distributed.
In fact, distributing even as much as has been outlined in the article onto the clients would be difficult, and would likely kill network thoroughput if not done very carefully. If distributed as suggested in the article, it would place a massive load on the internet, by making thousands of requests for bits and pieces of files where there should be one request.
However, with a centralized system, the problem is already solved, essentially. Any large-scale university (like MIT) has already developed the kinds of network file sharing and authentication technologies required herein. The distributed applications have already been written, and would merely contact these central servers for information instead of their own central servers. The economic framework is interesting, but already done, and the payment services exist as well.
pb Reply or e-mail; don't vaguely moderate.
I'm sure most of us have old PC's that aren't used for anything. Perhaps an interesting way to start something like this is to use older hardware that does nothing but act as a node. It wouldn't solve the power and noise problems, but it's an interesting start, a decent proof of concept and a use for otherwise useless computers.
But here is what I don't like about this particular instance:
"We advocate two basic principles in our ISOS design: a minimal core operating system and control by central servers."
It continues to say: "Centralization runs against the egalitarian approach popular in some peer-to-peer systems, but central servers are needed to ensure privacy of sensitive data, such as accounting data and other information about the resource hosts. "
These guys have obviously not been following any of the recent Napster cases to see the flaws of a "centralized system" paradigm. Privacy can be easily implemented in a P2P system. Look at Freenet. (dude, it called PKI) These guys want to have a central system from some other alterior motives - resource hogging, political advanatage, profits all come to mind
I like the vision of my buying a $500 PC and having over 20 pentabytes of storage available as soon as I plug it into the net. But no one - NOT even any government should have any control over such a system. There is just way too much chance to abuse that power.
This
Windows WD
First, if everyone in the world is going to be using my system for their own use (personal, business, hacking, cracking, benevolent, nefarious) then, I want compensation for what they use. Say, a quarter of a penny per clock cycle. Ithink that's fair.
Second, on a humerous note, if some luser opens an Outlook virus attachment, does everyone then get it even if they don't open it? Does the global OS become infected?
A lot of concerns voiced in this discussion are dealt with adequately in the article.
That being said, "Sign me up!". The security, privacy, availability issues are going to be solved. As in the article, you get to determine when, how, etc your computer is used, and you get to set the price.
What this means in reality, though, is that there will be people who will set up farms of computers and underbid their processing power/storage space/bandwidth, and you will get very little, if any, money. Imagine a few cents a month, maybe.
This system would be of great use to big business (who will really make savings) but will have little effect on the consumer except, perhaps, faster access to products and services sold by big business.
The problem being that the only resource the average user may possibly use from such a system is backup. Your network connection isn't going to be fast enough to buy a cheap computer and buy processing power online for your game. MMORPGs, however, may take on a whole new meaning when they start being able to handle millions of simultaneously connected players, and a fully interactive virtual 3d world may come to fruition through such a distributed system.
So, as many research products go, this will enable businesses to lower their costs and compete more effectively with each other, which, surprise, surprise, will (eventually) mean a cost reduction for our services and products.
I'll start building my slow storage rack now. Shouldn't cost more than a few hundred for a terrabyte of near-line and on-line data.
-Adam
An excellent textbook I read during college was, Distributed Systems, Concepts and Design by George Coulouris, et al. This book has an excellent insight to the basic concepts of a distributed system. It gives several real-world examples, and algorithms for solving problems such as mutual exclusion, distributed deadlocking, and transaction recovery. Overall, I highly recommend this book to anyone who has none to intermediate experience in distributed systems.
http://www.askthevoid.com
"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 hacker in Norway who just figured out how to crack DVD encryption and he loosely encrypts his data.
Along comes the MPAA scanner bot and sees this data on Mary's HD and automails her a subpoena.
Meanwhile, a malicous script kiddie that Mary dumped last month decides to plant data on Mary's PC and deliberately leaves the data as plain text. He plants such data as false dates that Mary went in for an HIV test, false and made up bad credit letters from credit agencies, false data of Mary having to show in court, fake emails of her corresponding with terrorists, and false chat room data of her hanging out online with young boys and stating she wants to meet them.
Along comes the NSA Carnivore type scanner bot and DING DING DING...
Mary is now having to answer to the Feds.
Lets think about this a little more before we toss our clock cycles and storage space to the wind eh?
It is my opinion that hardware is going to continue it's downward spiral of price dropping, and therefore the average home user will be able to continually afford sufficient personal hardware to meet his needs without having to join in on this "Borg Collective" type of server farm.
I do admit though, that this could be entertaining to watch if it did get implemented because it would most definitely end the concept of copyright.
what happens when excite at home goes offline and MILLIONS of broadband users are offline, or change hosts simultaneously.
I think that seti@home is about the most advanced thing that will ever emerge from this
of course there'd always be *some* geek who'd insist on programming "to the bare iron(s)".
Pretty good troll, but you posted too late. A good troll has to be earlier in the comments to get many bites.
I've been working on my own network "kernel" for about two months now, using the Ada Glade Distributed Systems Annex.
It's like everytime I think I've thought of something original, I find out that someone else has already thought of it.
Nonethless, I outta post up my project on sourceforge, if only for the novelty value.
Would anyone here be interested in working on a Distributed Systems kernel?
The article looks more like an excuse for implementing a micropayment system (Creates a direct connection between your wallet and our bank account!). Enthusiasm for micropayment systems seems to come from people who want to collect the payments, not from the people expected to pay them. It's very clear that what consumers want are flat-rate services; competitively, flat-rate wins over pay-per-use as soon as the prices get close.
If you want vast amounts of CPU time and are willing to pay, you'd probably be better off cutting a deal for off-peak time on hosting server farms. You get a uniform environment, good interconnect bandwidth, and a single organization to deal with.
Should I guess the missing 40% from the available 60%?
Yes! Error-correcting codes will make it possible to guess the whole file from fragments that add up to 50%. Mojo Nation already does this.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Isn't this the exact same idea MojoNation is implementing? Except MojoNation is an app, not an OS.
Still, it's a neet idea that will never work for millions of reasons you killer clowns have already stated.
-EvilMonkeyNinja
Mild Mannered Host by Day
Wild Hammered Programmer by Night
Just like raid, they'd -have- to distribute parity blocks as well.
If they didn't, your data would only last as long as Joe's 4 year old clicking Western Digital.
I can't see large companies adopting an internet-scale model due to privacy concerns, but on an Intranet level, some of the ideas could be interesting. File storage spread across the enterprise might be an interesting way of dealing with backups and disk failure issues, for example.
From: Greg Broiles
Subject: Re: Pricing spare resources and options?
At 01:44 PM 11/18/2001 -0500, dmolnar wrote:
>The recent comments on Mojo Nation prompted me to look at their site
>again. I don't see much guidance on how to set prices for network
>services. There's a mention someplace that business customers will build
>pricing schemes on top of Mojo Nation, but not much indication of what
>these schemes might be.
>
>So what is the "right" way to price resources? (Preferably beyond the
>obvious "supply and demand.")
Unfortunately, one of the evolutionary steps in Mojo Nation's development has been their abandonment, for the most part, of user-visible and user-configurable economics; they deliberately made it difficult to see how many Mojo are held by the local broker, and relatively unlikely that a broker will be able to earn significant Mojo by careful pricing - recent clients are configured such that the economic brakes on resource usage are sharply curtailed or removed entirely.
It's my impression that, given the changes in the venture capital and software markets, they've refocused their efforts away from P2P filesharing and towards speedy realtime content delivery, whereby people with limited net connections can maximize their incoming bandwidth by pulling (or getting pushes) from multiple other parties simultaneously, somewhat similar to what Morpheus/Kazaa are doing, or what Bram Cohen (a Mojo Nation alumnus) is doing with BitTorrent.
The economics seemed to attract people who wanted to experiment with pricing, etc., but that wasn't necessarily a market or constituency which is interesting to investors or businesspeople.
>A related question - I ran into a friend of mine who had just finished an
>internship in options trading. He suggested it might be worth looking at
>options on spare disk space or other resources, as a means of figuring out
>how to make Mojo-type systems eventually profitable in the real world. Now
>I have a copy of Natenberg's _Option Volatility and Pricing_ to look at...
It seems like there ought to be an interesting market here, but I know and worked with several people (with good financial backgrounds) who flogged this for awhile and never got anywhere. I guess a big part of the problem is that there's such a big difference in the perceived value of a megabyte/month of online storage .. if you're on the provider side, you
think that's pretty expensive, as you've got the investment & etc required
in building a data center, providing bandwidth to reach customers, paying
staff, etc - but if you're on the customer side, you look at an 80 Gb drive
at Fry's in the Sunday newspaper for $160 and think about a $500 1.5mb/s
frame relay connection, and wonder why the service guys want $3 per
Mb/month ..
and then the Mojo guys come along and make it sound like the people with the cheap frame relay connections and commodity PC hardware ought to be able to set up data centers in their back bedrooms or on their old laptops, but so far all of the business models proposed involve paying those guys up front for an indefinite period of storage, so there's no strong incentive to actually store the data for long, especially not if you can resell that same disk space 3 or 4 or 50 times.
Seems like the guys who really have hard data about options for bandwidth and disk usage are the disaster recovery guys. And that market hasn't been so great lately either, Comdisco declared bankruptcy and is their disaster recovery unit is getting swallowed up by Sungard, I think.
Anyway, yeah, the Enron guys thought there was something interesting to be done in bandwidth futures, too, but I don't know if they ever really got anything done before their demise beyond some demonstration projects.
--
Greg Broiles -- gbroiles@parrhesia.com -- PGP 0x26E4488c or 0x94245961
5000 dead in NYC? National tragedy.
1000 detained incommunicado without trial, expanded surveillance? National disgrace.
The fact that it is growing exponentially doesn't necessarily imply that it is growing fast. Hell, the contents of my bank account are growing exponentially, but I am very, very far from rich - and'll remain so indefinitely.
How many people do you know that are too scared to purchase anything online because they're afraid that some crazy cracker will intercept vital financial information? I know quite a few. We have to keep in mind that a relatively small portion of the overall population will actually see the benefit of this technology; and even fewer will trust it.
Things that should be considered:
- security of personal computers
- security of bank account
- additional power consumption from computer being left on
- cost to companies that use the technology
- cost, if any, for a persons' file backups
- value of the differences in speed/storage of individuals' computers
First of all, can the encryption be cracked? with massive distributed computing available your computers cpu cycles may very well be used to crack your own personal encryption scheme that was used to back up your files securely. What kind of bank account access will be given to allow pennies to trickle in? Without proper supervision, how would you know that the pennies trickling out are really legitimately earned? I beleive that there was a case not too many years ago where a programmer created 'bugs' in a banks software that allowed money to trickle into his own bank account unsolicited. Also, can the companies using your pc really pay enough to compensate for the additional power consumption costs of leaving your computer on more frequently? Wouldn't people be more inclined to leave their computers on more often so as to allow more pennies to trickle in? And last of all, how would the value of individuals' computers be judged? Would it truly be fair to allow someone with a Pentium 233MHz and a 3 Gig hard drive to get payed the same rate as someone with an Athlon XP 1900+ and 80 Gig hard drive? I think that it's a cool idea, but too difficult to implement any time soon, if ever.Strangely enough, I was thinking about something like this the other day. Now, I haven't read the article yet, so I don't know if they've found some resolution to this, but storage on a wide scale like this might be difficult.
I guess, as an idea, it sounds cool, but it just doesn't seem practical.
I suppose the manufacturer of the OS could provide giant mega-terabyte RAIDs, but then you come across the issue of ownership of the data contained therein.
As a novelist, I'm not sure I want to give Company X a percentage of my profits because I was using their Internet Operating System and had to store my file smeared across several different hard drives not owned by me...
The personal side of this is interesting too...if, say, Stephen King, has data stored on a hard drive in my house, purchased by me, do I get a partial royalty payment on that novel he's writing?
blog |
KARMA--BURN!!!!!!!!!!!
So if it twar so easy to lure other computer users to do MY research or compiling; then-I could fire plenty of REAL workers. Think about it, write a program and ask/beg millions of users to share thier "unused" computer cycles to MY CAUSE. Do you really know how easy it is to disquise a developement team as a college project?
This SIG pulled due to lack of funding. (This damn war is costing too much!)
THAT -- When they said "Communism Doesn't Work on Paper!", micro-computers had yet to be invented!
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
I see that across secure (VPN, etc..) connections or on private LANS/WANS how this could benefit for a company or group of companies. Let them distribute it to their desktops, laptops, etc.. Its their equipment, let them use it for their own gain. I beleive too many people will be scared that somene is looking at their PC, regarless if they are being paid to do it.
Or, are you going to claim that you will audit every bit of code they send down to make sure it's not surreptitiously decrypting Mitnick's hard drive?
Add to that the fact that when you start dealing with serious amounts of data (~1TB), making backups to tape or any other media starts to get really difficult. If the free disk space on people's computers (I've got around 30 or 40GB free on my home machines) could be put to use to store backups, I'm sure businesses would be willing to pay a significant amount of money for it.
-Esme
With a user ID# in the five hundred thousands, you might as well be anonymous. Shut the fuck up already, lamer. You're no real troll.
FreeNet does everything your talking about. It seems that the only thing that is keeping FreeNet from really being usable is a good key/searching mechanism. No way to really crawl the thing is there?
Probably not.
dinner: it's what's for beer
4. Therefore, you have incentive not to nuke them in the first place (lest you lose vital data).
3. A larger drive equals a larger chunk of the involved virtual economy. Having a smaller drive means you're used less (and are therefore worth-less.) Larger drives?? pay for themselves.
2. The operating system handles hardware swaps, same as a realtime USB wizard would. When you tell the OS to start initiating a hard drive upgrade (your new hardware in hand, ready to be swapped in) the OS promptly swaps out the data of the current HD to points elsewhere; you swap in the new drive; the new drive immediately goes to work handling, well, whatever is out there to be handled. This doesn't even require guesswork; why'd you mention it?
1. Why would the data disappear at random intervals? You claim that this system defeats the redundancy of the internet. Where was it EVER stated in this article that redundancy wouldn't be maintained?
. . .
Give me a break. This proposal rocks and there is no real argument against it; especially considering that current OS hosting applications such as distributed signal processing, distributed data processing, and distributed process processing are already up and running and become more ubiquitous with each passing processor generation.
"Stratigraphically the origin of agriculture and thermonuclear destruction will appear essentially simultaneous" -- Lee
Though if your usage of other folk's resources is greater than their usage of yours, you will be charged more. (And -- of course -- either way there will be service activation fees, administrative fees, tracking fees, licensing fees, and so on. Oh yeah, and taxes.)
Oh hell, I just have to say it:
...
Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these
--
E_NOSIG
Firstus postus, beeotchae!!
Kneel down and tremble before my rampant municipality!!!
pllleeeeease?!!!
Processors faster than 2GHz are dirt cheap today. High-bandwidth connections aren't cheap, and connections to home users are 3 orders of magnitude slower than an internal disk drive channel.
This kind of thing only seems to make sense for the most geek-oriented scientific types of calculations, and of those only the jobs that are trivially parallelized, like SETI. I don't see everyone changing their OS to support it.
KVMs exist solely to get around missing functionality in the underlying OS (DOS).
If you had transparent remote access, you wouldn't need a freakin' KVM or any crapware like PC Anywhere.
"Here's a nickel kid, go buy yourself a real computer."
...eerily remind me of "Skynet" from the Terminator movies?
How long before it becomes self-aware, realizes humans are the single biggest threat to its continued existence, and begins scheming to eradicate us?
MOO;IANAL.
There used to be a picture linked here.
We are assuming she has unlimited, always on connection (like DSL or Cable)
So you're limiting this architecture to highly urban areas of highly developed countries.
And her machine doesn't cost her anything except electricity
This can be significant. Most modern PC operating system kernels' idle loops execute wait instructions that halt the CPU until an interrupt occurs. The cost of electricity to run any instruction other than wait and the cost of cooling the machine can pile up.
and the wear on her hardware (constant disk access, etc.).
This can be significant. I had a Macintosh Performa 6230CD computer's hard drive wear out on me in less than a year, and it wasn't even under heavy use.
Will I retire or break 10K?
It is true that cracking hundreds of machines isn't viable, so attackers will go for the higher level... Attack the ISOS components which do legitimate reconstruction of files from all of the sources by misrepresenting your file read/writes as legitimate traffic. That way, ISOS system istelf will take care of managing the many machines on which the data is stored.
If you are really lucky, it might even unencrypt the reassembled file for you as well if you can convince it that you are the rightful recipient.
Of course, I'm not saying this would be easy (hard to tell since the system doesn't exist yet!), but the distributed nature of the files wouldnt prevent subvertion at the level I've described.
Hell No! I take pride in my high speed equipment. I'm not going to willfully SLOW down my box when playing games, etc just so someone else will have access to my processing power. Screw that!
Then there's the question of data security, etc. Forget it.
It seems that the only thing that is keeping FreeNet from really being usable is a good key/searching mechanism. No way to really crawl the thing is there?
If somebody develops a way to publish web pages within Freenet, using URLs that link to other Freenet pages, you'll eventually see Google spider Freenet.
Will I retire or break 10K?
I would love to have a beowolf cluster of these
You could write a shell program for this in a matter of days in Perl or Java, or really any object oriented programming language would do.
I think Java has the advantage, but not by much.
Simple write a small program with a built in HTML browser ( easy with Swing ), have it hook to a master server to download/decide which programs you want to run. People write little applets that implement a certain interface which the shell program can use to start it computing, or display it's configuration screen, or display it's status.
Since Java is a VM, you don't have to worry about the thing formatting your drive if the shell put down a tight enough security model. Of course it could get hacked. The organization in control of
the shell would be reponsible for quality check.
Since Java classes are very tiny they could be sent in a matter of microseconds. The shell could check the main server for a new copy of the applets JAR on a schedule.
With the right security model you could even assign a small portion of your drive to each "applet" you could run a p2p file sharing client/server while calculating large primes, and cracking the latest encryption.
Each applet writer is responsbile for setting up their servers to collect the data. Although people could just as easily write applets that would distribute that problem.
Basically it is just an interface to a processor that is safe ( mostly ), decently fast, and runs on any OS with a Java VM.
After you got the Java stuff working you could easily integrate Perl or any other safe language into it and people could write in whatever language they wanted. Go one step further and standardize the protocol to get the apps and you can have a ton of different clients.
I bet this has already been done at some level. The only thing left is to get people to use it, and actually leave it on. Something as simple as an idle detector or built in scheduler could help there.
even if we have lots of unused processor time (which I'm sure we do), pumping the data in to and out of a remote procedure call can consume a lot of bandwidth and result in a huge lag time. Many problems don't distribute well, even when you have relatively high bandwidth connections to send the data over (like multi-GB memory busses), so the problem only gets worse when you use a measley network pipe or modem line. (processor memory bus bandwidth tends to be in the 5-10 Giga-bit range, even the best home internet access is only 10-100 Mega-bits)
the steady state of a hard drive is full. There just isn't going to be enough spare, on-line, storage space on folks' desktops to give any appreciable amount out to share. If you have to deal with the bloat of a self healing encoding, the problem only gets worse.
Consider the case of N users, each with one hard drive of size X. They share out half of their hard drive space, but a file takes three times as much space to store on the distributed system than it does purely locally (for the self-healing encoding). The total hard drive space available to the group is now N*X/2 + 1/3*N*X/2 = N*X*4/6, or just over half the actual total space on the network. The average space available to any single user is the total available space on the network divided by the number of users, or just over half the actual space on the individual user's local hard drive.
That doesn't sound like too good a deal to me. Admittedly, I will be getting some extra reliability, but given how many home user's back-up their data on a regular basis, I don't think reliability is worth much (at least to home users).
At first blush, it sounds like a nice idea, but I don't think the economics are going to support it. It will always be easier and cheaper for the folk that actually need more storage or processing power to just go out and buy it, especially while Moore's law is in effect. For anyone else, it just doesn't matter.
The article mentions distributed backup as a possible application, but in my mind distributed backup is the killer application.
While this is not directly mentioned by David Anderson in his article I know for a fact that this is something that United Devices is interested in because late last year Mojo Nation was in discussion with UD to provide just this sort of service to its users.
This sort of distributed backup is what the current private branch of the Mojo Nation codebase does, with a little taskbar app that sits in the background and distributed backed up files to peers within the enterprise. One major benefit that your post missed is that the majority of the data stored on hard drives within an enterprise is redundant data (e.g. multiple copies of MS Word, etc.) and with a distributed backup system you only need to keep a few copies of such files around for restores. You can back up 99% of your data while only needing 10-15% of the available space on individual PCs.
In what is turning out to be one of life's interesting ironies, the company that was most intrested in this UD/MojoNation pairing was Enron's bandwidth trading group (mostly for storing medical imaging data and distributed corporate backups.) When Skilling left Enron just before the whole accounting scandal started to blow up the Enron guys became "unavailable" so things never moved forward, but you can be certain that this sort of a distributed data storage and backup system will appear again.
Jim
As long as they start by killing the people who generate electricity, I think the planet will be OK after a brief science fiction interlude.
timothy
jrnl: http://tinyurl.com/c2l8yr / foes: http://tinyurl.com/ckjno5
A couple years ago, a friend sent me a link to a distributed computing (DC) website for cancer research (IIRC). When I looked at the fine print, the DC company was a for-profit service. The cancer research, non-profit, couldn't afford and did not have the technology to run its own DC setup, so signed on with the DC service. The fine print said that 1/5th of the work packets would be for the cancer research, while 4/5ths would be for "paying" customers, who subsidized the other 1/5th share. It did not say who the paying customers were.
After thinking about it, I decided against it. I had no idea who was paying for the other 4 work packets- big tobacco, Iraqi agents doing bio weapons research, Chinese nuclear weapons development. If they had said right out who it was for, I might have still signed up, I really didn't like the way I had to poke through the fine print to figure this out.
-- If god wanted me to have a sig, he'd have given me a sense of humor.
Essentially what they are trying to do is get rid of the inefficiencies of our currently distributed hardware. The fictional "Mary" simply has too much generalized computing power on her desktop. She doesn't need it... centralized servers are a far more efficient method.
Which is more efficient:
- Purchasing a couple grand worth of computing power, having it sit on my desktop, and letting it go idle (or trying to sell it back to the rest of the world for pennies...)
- ... or buying the cheapest, dedicated, dumb terminal I can find and buying the computing power from the central repository if/when I need it... and let the fictional biotech company go to the same repository.
Simply put most consumers do not NEED computers which are powerful enough to make this system worthwhile... of course we all do here but we're the minority. And if perhaps you don't believe me... how many of your computer illiterate friends have hotmail accounts that they can access from any web-browser. Now how many of your non-computer illiterate friends.... hmmmm.....-- Chris
I'm not so worried about the technical side of things, but more along the lines of intended use...
Could someone queue a job to crack a encrypted password file, or a document stolen from the government? I imagine that with 150 million computers using their spare cycles, this job could be done with relative ease. This is definitely an issue that the authors have failed to address in their proposal.
The legal rammifications alone makes this prohibitive. Is a person who's computer did 0.1% of an illegal activity just as liable as someone who did 10%, 25%, 50% or as liable as the person who submitted the job? Can you even fully control what kind of jobs your system is doing using this proposed infrastructure?
It may be a great idea for say X machines inside a large corporation, but there is already some alternatives to fill that need. I just don't see how they can work out the logistics of issues such as the one I present above, when they have to also worry about technical and financial issues that such a system would bring with it.
Just don't name it "Skynet".
Heh, what happens if you need to reboot? or Reinstall:D
Reboot Internet (Y/N)?
----- Whats wrong with this picture? http://www.revoh.org:1234/whatswrong
Recently one of my friends, a computer wizard, paid me a visit. As we were
E lO E5IOCC98D444AA08E324
talking I mentioned that I had recently installed Windows XP on my PC. I
told him how happy I was with this operating system and showed him the
Windows XP CD. To my surprise he threw it into my microwave oven and turned
it on.
Instantly I got very upset, because the CD had become precious to me, but
he said: 'Do not worry, it is unharmed.'
After a few minutes he took the CD out, gave it to me and said: 'Take a
close look at it.'
To my surprise the CD was quite cold to hold and it seemed to be heavier
than before. At first I could not see anything, but on the inner edge of
the central hole I saw an inscription, an inscription finer than anything I
had ever seen before. The inscription shone piercingly bright, and yet
remote, as if out of a great depth:
12413AEB2ED4FA5E6F7D78E78BEDE820945092OF923A40E
'I cannot understand the fiery letters,' I said in a timid voice.
'No but I can,' he said. 'The letters are Hex, of an ancient mode, but the
language is that of Microsoft, which I shall not utter here. But in common
English this is what it says:
One OS to rule them all,
One OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all
and in the darkness bind them.
It is only two lines from a verse long known in System lore:
"Three OS's from corporate kings in their towers of glass,
Seven from valley lords where orchards used to grow,
Nine from dotcoms doomed to die,
One from the Dark Lord Gates on his dark throne
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie.
One OS to rule them all, one OS to find them,
One OS to bring them all and in the darkness bind them,
In the Land of Redmond where the Shadows lie."
One could construct a computer model where there are N_x users of type X. The user model would include local usage patterns, down-time, CPU power, disk space, network connection, services requested, and budget. Users could include:
- "home users" who have cable access and primarily evening usage. Many of these will turn off their computers periodically, experience crashes (if their using Windows), etc. Their service needs would be backups and downloads.
- "business PCs" representing individual company/school-owned computers used mostly in the day and are always on, often with faster internet connections.
- Business power-users who heavily rely on internet resources such as database retrieval and storage. These are the major consumers in the economic model.
- Educational/research power-users like SETI, particle physics, and gene research. These have nearly unlimited needs in terms of both CPU and storage, but very little money. Perhaps users, acting as service-providers, could select which of these activities they would be willing to "sponsor".
Questions can then be asked of the model. What are the bandwidth requirements? Do the economics work out under any realistic configuration? By that I mean do companies save money over purchasing and maintaining server farms, and can home users afford their internet connection and services? If so, how "stable" is the "solution"?If I weren't busy enough as it is, I would be tempted to work on such a model myself. Sounds like a lot of fun. It might be a good project for a CS major, except that it focuses on practical skills such as model building and analysis.
An interesting idea, for those that wish to opt into it. For those of us who don't, or who participate in distributed computing on a case-by-case basis (e.g., SETI at Home), then not in this lifetime.
Max
My god carries a hammer. Your god died nailed to a tree. Any questions?
To me this whole idea doesn't even look too good on paper. I can see the benefits of merging many computers into one coherent system, but to merge ALL of them? Why would anybody want to do that?
The dog ate my
Sharing bandwidth, computer processor power, etc... Wouldn't that sort of nullify the point of paying more for a computer, bandwidth, etc? Talk about ignoring everything modern economics has taught us! Sheesh. The ONLY way this could be efficient is if used in the home/workplace under very CLOSED circumstances with no access allowed to outside processes. "If I'm paying for it, I'm using it. Get your own!" has always been the decree of the free economy. Do they honestly expect that to change overnight? Please...
What happen to the Plan 9 OS. From what I read about it a couple of years ago it was trying to do something like what these guys what.
;)
Also something like this would be more dangrous then M$ Windows... As you would no longer have full control over your PC's usage. It might be because I'm reading 1984 at the moment, but the idea of all computers linked at an OS level doesn't appeal. As some else has already pointed out, its just ripe for a killer virus. Not only that you would also loss your privacy, as you know there's going to be Bugs
Do you get your cable/DSL internet for free? I say make them come out with that first, then we'll see about this other rabit coming out of the hat.
no text necessary
Glückwünsche, haben Sie Slashdot ermordet, indem Sie zum korporativen Druck beugten und Subskriptionen einlei
So let's say that i have lots of warez and child porno backuped to the "net"... Am i singley responsible, or is it me and a hundred other innocent peoples on the internet?
"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"
Just a few obvious questions:
Is Mary being paid for letting this private company use her computer?
Is Mary not concerned that someone working for this company might break into her computer, either to serve company interests or not?
Does Mary realize that if she gives over her computer without being paid then she is being exploited?
Why is it that these kinds of stupid ideas keep being so enthusiastically presented on Slashdot? Is it being run by teenagers or something??
"Its disk contains, in addition to Mary's own files, encrypted fragments of thousands of other files..."
Does she hold any legal liability for the assembled content those files represent?
No?
The k1dd13 pr0n lovers will like that, as well as the illegal MP3 (or what ever file format is in vogue..) collectors, not to mention the w4r3z dud3z.
And, as others have said, what do you do when little Mary buys a new box?
"...the pool is self-maintaining: when a computer breaks down, its owner eventually fixes or replaces it..."
Eventually? How long do I have to wait for "eventually"? Where's everybody's data in the meantime?
How fast will the "Worldwide OS" be able to pull off everyone's files when she types shutdown -h now or clicks Start/Shutdown/Shutdown now...
Or if there's nothing more uncommon than a power outage, of, say, 12 hours, that hoses both her computer *and* the DSL connection she's got?
Or...
Nuts..
These guys need to get out in the real world.
t_t_b
I'm on PJ's "enemies" list! Are you?
I can't wait to throw a party when someone hacks it.
This is nothing new.
Check out Legion:
http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~legion/
First off - lesson number one on the Internet is, "Trust No One." If you're going to be doing critical calculations, you'll want to do each calculation on at least three different machines, then accept the results if and only if all three agree. Thus if each calculation was worth $0.03, each provider would only be awarded $0.01 - and then only if all three providers returned the same value.
Secondly - for distributed backup to be useful, and resilient against nodes appearing and disappearing, you'd have to have multiple backups. If you only had 2 copies of all data on the ISOS file systems, you're still talking about having client machines that have 2/3 of their disk space dedicated to the distributed backup system - for other people's backups, not yours.
There is no means here for a provider to make a profit from this system fi they are also a consumer.
Thus the best place for this kind of system is where the provider is not aiming to make a profit, and has the extra disk space and processor time lying around unused. Large corporations with hundreds of PCs on desktops could benefit from this. Home users won't.
There certainly isn't any room to be hopeful of making a profit from the micropayment system proposed. There's a 3:1 ratio of expenditure to income, in the best case scenario of only having triple redundancy of calculations and storage. Certainly, if you're only providing services you might stand to make some small profit - but don't forget that you're still paying for the network traffic, electricity, and insurance for the processing capital.
Here in Australia, for example, I'd want to be paid $0.19/Mb for traffic generated (in both directions) by the ISOS system, otherwise I'd be losing money hand over fist. Electricity is about $0.08/kWh, which means a 300W machine would cost $5.76/day to run. Insurance on the hardware costs about $100/year, and this doesn't cover lightning or "Act of God."
I don't know how these costs compare to someone who is housing and feeding a mainframe, but I expect the economies of scale would ensure that a mainframe is cheaper per calculation than a home PC. If that is true, ISOS is (once again) really only of use to people who already have those PCs sitting on desks doing nothing.
You can access my cycles and gigs when you pry them from my cold, dead fingers.
Man, you have to try really hard to be more out to lunch than this--they're literally proposing an entirely new OS, instead of a set of services running on top of Linux, Windows, etc. Oh, yeah, that will be popular. And don't even get me started on the part that talks about the need for centralized servers, possibly run by the gov't.
Proposals like this are worse than useless--they actually do damage, since they make the CS crowd (for whom I have a lot of respect) look like a bunch of clueless ivy tower dwellers with no familiarity with the real world.
The more I think about this, the more convinced I am that it's yet another case of a beautiful theory that can't survive its first encounter with the real world.
Everyone said it was impossible, now some guy at MIT or whatever says the same idea and now its possible?
Hahaha
It would cost too much money, take too much work, and there would be no incentive for any company to do it.
If you use Linux, please help development of Autopac
vi
/ *(rw,no_root_squash)
:wq!
exportfs -a
Write a small script that finds out who your closest neighbors are pingwise. Establish multiple partnerships with multiple hosts so that in the event one host falls out of existance, you still have the ability to failover onto another host's provisions. Anyway, for the hosts it does find, crossmount the volumes across the network and keep the mirror structure hidden from the users by bundling a nice non-document-centric GUI, and bingo, all users now have access to all applications, and will use them in a manner best fitting their local network conditions. Speed of application delivery now depends on hardware infrastructure, not on what version of application X you happen to be running. If you typically get Application X from a T3 connection, you can still get Application X from another host outside of town, and you wouldn't know the difference anyway. Sure, it would take a network filesystem superior to NFS, and much, much wider pipes to deliver it, but its feasable today for the patient of mind.
Cheers,
Bowie J. Poag
I admire your Buddha-like stance, but I'm really just encouraging people to post something of substance, as most on-topic stuff is just "me-too" shite while the offtopic stuff is usually pretty funny. But that's just me.
Liberate your mind in two clicks or less.
What if some l33t h4x0r manages to report that they're processing more units than they really are... will they get paid for it?