Slashdot Mirror
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."
← Back to Stories (view on slashdot.org)
Seems they would have a hard time guaranteeing security.
They should donate the time to something like the SETI@home project (http://setiathome.berkeley.edu) or the protein folding project (http://folding.stanford.edu), both of which use distributed computing and neither of which need to be concerned with security.
"It's the crazy backwards universe, where up is down and boy bands play instruments." -Tino, The Weekenders
I heard about export limitations concerning computers...
Now, if Gateway starts selling CPU cycles, how can they guarantee that this won't be used by organisations located in these embargo'ed countries ?
Otherwise, if they can control this, this means they are selling some spyware... the CPU cycles are just a Trojan.
Trolling using another account since 2005.
I'd understood Gateway's stated business goal as being "get back to the basics" of what made them popular: targeting the consumer, and focusing on direct sales. I'm not clear how either seeling cycles to corporate clients or continuing its stores fits into that. Perhaps this is a way to subsidize their stores.
I'd think it'd be more interesting to see them do some serious research into exploiting this type of service. Lord knows that hardware R&D is dead.
Like, what about selling this as an on-demand service to consumers? What about this as a distinguishing factor for people into video editing or rendering? Those aren't necessarily lossless applications, IMIO (in my ignorant opinion). It'd be cool to be able to have an on-demand render farm for small-budget indie movie releases, no?
Why not just run the Cancer agent on them? The publicity generated from this will certainly be worth more for Gateway than selling processor time, simply considering how much money (and time) it would cost to set up the network.
mayby they can also split the data into small chunks that aren't worth it alone. (like in a packet switched network)
;)
one would somehow have to sniff their whole network and access to just one machine wouldn't be enough anymore.
this whole asking the saleguy thing remembers me of us going to our local computer dealer in win3.11-times for the fun of 'format c:'. They found ways to stop us pretty fast
The corporation I work for has 110,000 desktop PCs. Never mind the servers.
Any corporation or even small business I've known has no problem getting CPU power, you're right. If things are desperate, they can hook up a bunch of old monitor-less pentium 1's and 2's as a Beowulf cluster and use that. Aside from those processing weather and DNA data, what the world is truly hungry for is bandwidth.Does anyone know any technical details about this projects.
Do they indent to do LAM/MPI style communications or will it push the client code and execute it independe3ntly (ie. a SETI type project).
It's really an issue of weather or not all the nodes are equals on the network or not..
This would seem like a great idea for those who are looking to cut costs and may not have a user for the required equipment once the current project is done. Sure you can try to resell stuff, but there is no promise of a sale, and it takes time and money to get rid of old equipment.
While this might not be a good idea for the mega-coorporations. It could work for smaller groups (and even local governments).
Though it is true that sensitive data couldn't be handled in this way.
Now you can hack Exxon just by going to Gateway Country!
Seriously, given the vulnerabilities of Windows and lack of security traditionally found on floor model PCs, not to mention the thought that hundreds of people a day have access to the PCs, I don't expect many companies will take up Gateways offer.
I've always thought that a PC manufacturer could use the thousand or so PCs that are in burn-in at any given time for render farms or other parallelized projects.
It's already been tried. Several companies have come and gone trying to sell distributed computing. The secret is: there's no market for it! None! It's been tried and has failed. Any company that needs serious crunch power already has it within their own organization. Hell, shitty little Intel chips can do much more than the average PC user will ever need 'em to do. Universities occasionally need more power for esoteric physics problems, but they can't afford to pay. Hell, even SETI@Home couldn't even get enough data in fast enough to be processed. I can't imagine that there's that much demand out there for something like this, if any.
If they were using their resources to do anything other than increase shareholder value, their shareholders would rightfully be pissed. The company's only duty is to increase shareholder value.
I used to think the same way until I took a class that dealt heavily with ethics. If what you say is true, then a company should illegally dump toxic waste if the increase in profit outweighs the potential loss if they get caught. Can you really argue that position? If so, I think you seriously need to examine your priorities.
I'm not saying that Gateway using their CPU cycles for profit rather than public gain is analogous to dumping toxic waste, but to say that the only duty of a company is to profit represents (to me) a good bit of what is wrong with the corporate world today.
-- "Complacency is a far more dangerous attitude than outrage." -Naomi Littlebear
I wonder if Gateway didn't think of charity. This way reactions are the company must be in some kind of trouble. If they would have donated the CPU-cycles to charity (I'm thinking of united devices or something like that) I guess publicity would have been on their hands.
/(bb|[^b]{2})/
A few years ago, there was a company named Jostens that examined their IT costs. Jostens is in the class ring business. If you've got a high school ring or college ring, chances are that you bought it from Jostens.
Anyway, somebody at Jostens took a look at their IT department and had a brilliant idea: everything these fools in IT did came out as a debit somewhere on the company spreadsheet, so why not try to turn that around? Make those slackers earn their keep? So, Jostens became a class ring AND consulting company.
I said this was to be a tale of woe and heartbreak, and I did not lie to you. Jostens found that the consulting business was MUCH different than the class ring business, and that they weren't any good at it. Jostens lost a lot of money, and their silliness was splashed across papers such as the Wall Street Journal. So, Jostens learned the hard way that sometimes what accountants like to call a debit really isn't such a thing at all. Many manager types learned for the first time that IT adds value to an organization and that domination of the class ring market doesn't automatically mean success in another market.
So what does this have to do with anything? It seems to me someone at Gateway took a look at their accounting spreadsheets, noticed that the company owns a lot of PC's that aren't being used for ANYTHING. All they do is sit in the stores, and cost money. Bright idea: let's actually USE those computers for something - make them earn their keep! The rest of the Gateway story doesn't need to be related here. Essentially Dell lives happily ever after.
If tits were wings it'd be flying around.
So when and where exactly would they install the software for this.
Would they leave it up to the technicians (ha! salespeople) at each retail outlet? Or would they include it as part of the disk image installed at the factory where the software runs automatically on bootup?
My guess would be the second option.
This would however mean that *every* Gateway computer sold includes the required software, and the end users who buy from Gateway may well end up as part of a distributed computing project without their explicit permission. All it needs is some obscure legal mumbo in fine print and users have no recourse should they find out.
A better business model for Gateway and companies that have access to a large amount of PCs idling might be to donate the spare cycles to a charity and take a tax break. There is not much downside to this and there are lots of upsides such as it does not acutally have to work very well to get the writeoff versus trying to make it profitable as well as being able to advertise how they are trying to make a difference.
How long before someone cracks their network and makes this into the largest DDoS tool ever?