On 2/17/07, Timwi <timwi(a)gmx.net> wrote:
There is very little analogy between your suggestion
and SETI@home (or
Folding@home or
distributed.net or any other distributed computing
project). Those distribute only CPU usage (and possibly RAM), but not
bandwidth usage.
You're right in that they operate differently, but I think a similar
interface would be useful (e.g. you download a program that runs in
the system tray or as a daemon.
Your idea necessitates that users (who are trying to
read an article)
would be redirected to some random volunteer computer that is running an
HTTP daemon. But what do you do when it goes down? The central server
that does the redirecting would take a while to determine that you are
down, and until then, would continue to redirect requests to it.
Wikipedia would become very unreliable.
Even if the central server had to ping the volunteers after every
single request to check status, that would still be a fraction of the
bandwidth taken up by sending wiki page.