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Gateway Puts Wasted Cycles to Work
f. liszt writes "Gateway will be offering for sale to corporations the processing power available from networked display PCs in their stores -- seems like a logical enough idea."
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Easy, use a model similar to seti. First, each packet is processed twice, by two different machines. If you get different results, go back and do some checking. That is also assuming everything is encrypted and the binary is somewhat secure also. If processing each one twice wastes too much power, do every 3 or whatever, and if you run into a problem re-analyze the machines past few packets to see where it started. And obviously if you get bad packets it should be fairly easy to track the machine down and correct it.
Your company payroll dependant on machines that shoppers can tinker with wihle on display at a store?
The user of a properly administered public kiosk (i.e. kiosk user is a normal user, not root) won't be able to affect any process that his account doesn't own.
Will I retire or break 10K?
Tell that to the poor tech in Georgia who was getting sued by his employer for doing the exact same thing:
m l
http://www.theregister.co.uk/content/6/23477.ht
It hurts nothing until it's your ass getting kicked.
// Agent Green (Ian / IU7 / KB1JQO)
// IEEE 802.3: All 10base Are Belong To Us
Some perspective is in order. While I don't think the article mentioned whose solution Gateway was using, most grid computing platforms running on untrusted machines are going to use encryption, most machines aren't going to look at enough of a job to be useful even if the encryption was broken, and each individual job is going to be run on multiple machines to ensure one machine doesn't (intentionally or not) return faulty data.
What data would people pay to have crunched in public ? Well, I can tell you that animation houses, financial shops and biotechnology companies are all crunching their data "in public".