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Swapping Clock Cycles for Free Music?
droopus writes "USA Today is reporting on an innovative business model for the music business. Free music for your spare CPU cycles.
Honest Thief says the firm has developed software, to be available in the second quarter of this year, that will enable file-sharing providers to capitalize on the unused CPU cycles of their members. That in turn would allow them to raise money to compensate artists for the use of their material.
Honest Thief said the software, known as ThankYou 2.0, enables a peer-to-peer file-sharing client to turn the computers of digital music fans into nodes in a distributed net.
By leasing out the processor power on distributed nets to research facilities the firm could generate revenues that would be distributed back to the musicians.
Some very smart people have suggested this before, but this seems like the first real implementation. "
No, it wasn't /.ed after 4 posts...
http://www.thehonestthief.com/ is the correct URL.
Kazaa really f'd its users over with its adware, and that other thing as was mentioned in that slashdot article.
this is the exact reason that i use kazaa lite (caution, popups)
"You had this look that of an angel, it was such a bad disguise" --Dishwalla
Yes, it is. Folding@Home, and possibly SETI, I can't remember, check for a connection before transmitting a packet of crunched numbers. I think Folding will even dial, transmit, downoad and disconnect, if you want it to, IRRC. Been awhile since that machine died though, so I could be mistaken.
You are not the customer.
I've only glanced at the first 20 or so replies to this article and already about a third of them are talking about KaZaA.
If you don't like KaZaA's constant pop-up windows and warning messages and prompts to install the latest Flash plug-in etc... use something else!
I just discovered the eMule Project about a week ago. Open source. No ads. And it looks a lot nicer than the spamware that I've been using for the past year or so too. Yes, it took me a while to get used to it (I had to actually READ THE HELP FILES to figure out how to get it past my router!) but it works really well now.
Karma: NaN
The man behind this corporation doesn't have a very good name in the Netherlands. (Pieter Plass). He has already been trying to hype his 'honest thief' service on various occasions (the last years). Without releasing one single byte.
He has also shown in the past that he had no real knowledge about P2P, he just follows the buzzwords. Just look the silly honest thief site...
Just some weirdo who desperately wants to become rich and who thinks he is very cool. I think this service will utterly fail.. (unless perhaps he convinced some skillfull developers with his peptalks, but I hope they are smarter...).
There are some fundamental problems with this proposed business model, but I won't get into those. My problem with this is that spare CPU cycles that they intend to use simply aren't worth very much because of the slow and unreliable nature of the network connectivity that most users will have. While SETI@home and distributed.net work on "embarassingly parallel" problems that require very little communication, many, many problems that people are interesting in paying money to solve require regular communication between nodes and thus some guarantee on the quality of network service. Some amount X of spare CPU cycles on machines using 56K modem connections (or even cable or DSL modems) just isn't worth nearly as much as an equivalent amount of spare CPU cyles on machines connected by something like gigabit ethernet... or even switched fast ethernet.
kazaalite.com is a evil villain pretending to be the real KaZaA Lite site. Why evil? They act like they are the real site, and give no credit to the real people behind it. They also run anti-ad-blocker.
For reference, the real site is here. KaZaA Lite 2.1.0 is an excellent client. Now if only they had error checking/correction...
The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
--Aristotle