Borrowing Computing Power

[Derek Broughton]

das wrote:

> On Thu, 2007-06-21 at 10:00 -0300, Derek Broughton wrote:
>> I imagine it will become so, eventually.  I still don't
>> know if it will ever become desirable for the average home user.
> 
> I would be interested to know why this occurred to you: what may be the
> not-desirable part? Too much complexity of execution?

Complexity is certainly the problem at this time.  I would expect that over
time the complexity will decrease.  I'm just trying to extrapolate the way
something like this could work, and it seems to me that just on a local
level, it's probably more likely that all our end-use computing products
will get smaller, and they'll use a single in-home server to do all their
actual computing (However, I regularly change my position on the value of
peer-to-peer vs client server apps - these days I'm back to believing in
the relatively massive server).  

On a larger level, if you need short-term access to greater computing power
than is available at home, you could probably rent some resources from your
ISP, or even somewhere else on the Internet, but that would definitely be
pay-per-use - it's the only economic model that makes sense to me.

That sort of system would only rarely be useful to a home user, but would be
of immense value to business, so home users could, and occasionally would,
take advantage.
-- 
derek