This would be more cool if the portion of profits went to those who contributed cycles.
Wouldn't work. As soon as you move the incentive to the world of financial norms people start wondering why they are bothering for a couple bucks a year. They will get more people doing it to be part of a community if they can keep that community seeming "cool" in some way.
Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
61–70 of 156 posts
Re: Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
#62This reminds me of http://www.pluraprocessing.com/
Re: Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
#63Seems that that small set of computers and IP addresses could be used to do the ill deeds of a bad actor.
"Run anything"
"Get SSH root access to each Linux instance."
So exactly what is to prevent someone from spamming here and how would gridspot even know that was happening? To mention only one possibility.
Re: Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
#64Will you be charged for pre-credit card instances after you add a card? Also, it's very unclear as to how you end a running instance.
Yes, though I suppose you could just create another account. : ) You can stop a running instance by shutting down the OS. If it's something people really want we can add an API/UI mechanism to do it.
Re: Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
#65"Thus, we decided to only run computations when the outdoor temperature near the user is below a certain level (currently 16 degrees Celcius). When it's that cold outside, we assume that the computer's room is being heated anyway. All of the electricity used to do computations gets turned into heat, according to the laws of physics. So the heat generated by the computations displaces the need for heat generated by a…
Re: Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
#66Consumers don't care about $2/month but a business would care about getting paid $2/month thousands of times.
Edit: If a VM is too big to download all at once with a freeware product, you just install the seed software. Then, over the next few days, the seed software downloads the VM and slowly sets it up so there's no disruption to the customer's activity on the computer.
I would also suggest you reserve the space needed on the disk with an empty file, roughly the size of the VM file. This way it's clear just how much space this newly installed software is taking on the customer's computer.
This is all based on the idea that the customer agreed to this during the installation. To what extent "agreed" is left up to you to decide. I'd suggest a dedicated page during the installation with a prechecked box that explains what this is and what it's about to do.
Re: Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
#67This is brilliant...I am glad someone finally ran with it. I wrote a blog post about this almost 2 years ago - http://marcgayle.com/2010/01/08/a-legal-botnet-billion-dolla... There are many applications for this - including fighting DDOS attacks. There are still huge technical challenges with that particular application, but as I understand it...the only way to fight a DDOS is to a) get bigger guns, or b) lie down an…
> including fighting DDOS attacks Or cheaply launching them. For a mere $100 you get 100,000 machines for an hour, that's more than enough to cause problems for a sad number of websites out there. Edit: Or not, given that all traffic goes through a centralized node.
Re: Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
#68Re: Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
#69Earlier quoted context omitted.
So we're supposed to trust these people with our data?
No, it says it right on the page. It's for non-privacy-sensitive applications.
Re: Show HN: Gridspot, 10x cheaper cloud compute using distributed computing
#70So the customer pays Gridspot and Gridspot does not pay anything to the person whose computer is actually doing the work? Great business model if you can make it work.
reminds me of skype, but the differnce is that with skype I only want one good connection, so find the best one through the forest... but this one?