Just the other day, I was pondering how there's very little interesting tech news that isn't already covered in depth by the major players. There really isn't much benefit to me, or my three point five readers, if I just parrot stuff from Ars or Gizmodo. Or Slashdot, god forbid - they're doing a swell enough job parroting themselves.
But I digress. Just the other day, I ran across this outfit, Plura Processing. Business plan? Sell cluster CPU cycles. Whose CPU cycles? Yours.
Plura offers code that can be embedded in or alongside various web content; mainly flash games and similar. Said code requests work units from Plura, computes whatever needs to be computed and submits the result. Sure, they don't pay a whole lot - $2.60 per CPU month - but it's a rather cute business model nonetheless.
It's going to be quite interesting to see what reception it will get once it hits the mainstream press; especially seeing that it's quite easy to draw a parallel between this thing and P2P. If this would have been bandwidth, would people see it in the same way as when it's about CPU? Is it OK to 'donate' to the site operator, or will they be seen as stealing your resources, hogging your CPU and kicking your cat?
Given a friendly reception, it's not at all inconceivable that we'll be seeing this sort of setup in streaming media services in the future. It'd be a match that makes business sense: The server streams the content, the client takes the content, offloads it to the GPU and uses the CPU cycles to pay for some of it. Sure, it won't pay for bandwidth (yet), but could be a nice little side revenue.
On the technical side, I'm not too sure that I like it - but then again, if stuff like this makes the case for 'free' content on the Internet a bit sweeter, it might not be entirely bad.
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