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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. "
Although, Kazaa hid it from the users, and kept the profits for themselves...
your PC just sitting there is not worth $150/year. If it were, then the company would just buy one for $450, and depreciate it over 3 years.
I dont have spare cycles, i have mp3s to encode.
Aren't the vast majority of people still on 56k dial-up connections? Is it really possible to do "distributed computing" using computers that are constantly being turned on and off at irregular and unpredictable intervals?
No, it wasn't /.ed after 4 posts...
http://www.thehonestthief.com/ is the correct URL.
I confess I don't understand the business model here. It seems like Honest Thief is offering to pay record companies from the proceeds from an arguably untested business model, which would generate an unknown amount of money that would be divided among an unknown number of people in an unknown number of ways.
It seems to make more sense to offer the CPU cycles directly to sound production studios for post-production audio, to transform tomorrow's raspy-voiced bimbo into the sultry songbird that studios want and crave.
Just the 2003 version of an ad-driven "free" ISP service, I'm afraid.
Barring these concerns, I would see this as possibly viable...
IBM had PL/1, with syntax worse than JOSS,
And everywhere the language went, it was a total loss...
Aww, man. I only have a Celeron 500. Does that mean I'm going to get stuck with "The Best of Perry Como"?
Just yesterday Eminem was wondering where he could get some spare CPU cycles to do his computations with. Good thing they thought of this!
Geek perspective: If you let me dl your music (something I want), I'll let you have my unused cycles (something that is surely valuable).
Evaluation: Fair trade
RIAA perspective: You want to drive to my house, take my stuff, and drive away. In exchange for me allowing you to rob me blind (yes, this is the way the RIAA thinks, despite absence of evidence), you're offering to let me borrow your shitty old car while you're not using it??
Evaluation: You're still a god damned thief, geek boy. Go to hell!
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
Ie, trojan horse?
Unless such an endeavour was open source, why would you trust it?
Frankly, these guys are asking for more trust than most people would extend their next-door neighbours. And abusing that trust would be far too easy.
Yes, SETI, distributed.net have shown the altruistic potential of such software but we're not talking about non-profit organisations here, we're talking about corporations, and the only language that corporations know is the language of money. And people interested in making money don't always put other people's (data) security high up on their list of priorities.
To be honest, I'd rather spend some hard cash buying music online or in the local record store. At least that way I know I'll never wake up one day to find that my system's been hacked by a script kiddie who was given the keys to my virtual front door by a "harmless" piece of software.
A touch paranoid, perhaps, but better safe than sorry is my motto.
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
I highly doubt this will be a viable revenue stream for the music industries. Think about how much they get for an average CD as far as profit goes. Now compare that to your average MP3 downloader. Computer processing power is cheap. If your average person downloads an album a month (a SEVERELY conservative estimate) that is a $15-20 album that isn't sold. Over the course of a year, you are seeing $180-$240 given out in free downloads (that is the album cost @ 1 album/month). You may as well just BUY a board and chip and case for that price and network it locally. You can get a middle of the road AMD or Intel processor and board for that cost, and possibly fit in the case cost. If it has onboard lan, just pop some memory in and you're good to go. Use network booting, maybe a MOSIX cluster or something.
Don't forget to add in the salaries of all the people who have to run this "P2P for cycles" system. Development costs. Administration. Those are people that could just be running the purchased cluster, instead of trying to milk P2P somehow. I think this is just a shot in the dark. Or a conspiracy to fingerprint downloads, as someone else mentioned.
-- Having a Creationist Museum is like having an Atheist place of worship
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.
This seems sort of ridiculous, only because of the power of our processors. Do you really thank that one x86 processor which is connected by no more than a 256 kb/s connectionis going to be worth more than $5 a year or so to the ILM? I think not. They want huge Sun servers with gigabytes of memory which can crush numbers that rival that of the bloat of your Mozilla installation which you use to download the software. The money that you'll be earning will not be enough to buy more than one CD every couple of months, let alone the massive quantities of anything you can get your hands on needed to fill that 200 gigabyte quota you need to get onto that amazing DC++ hub you'll be downloading.