The next economy will allow you to make a living wage by buying a powerful (but affordable) computer. You plug it into the net, and people pay you to let them use its compute power.
-- dean, Feb 12 2000

Mojo Nation http://www.mojonation.net/whatitis.shtml
In the oven - bandwidth, cycles, disk space; cash or kind. [hello_c, Feb 12 2000, last modified Oct 04 2004]

It turns out that http://www.cargocult.com of course exists - it must of been down or a DNS error when I entered that link, as I looked for, and didn't see, it.
-- dean, Feb 23 2000


Baked. http://www.processtree.com/?sponsor=14020
-- ing, Apr 04 2000


This idea is definitely baked- Bill Gates mentioned it in a speech several months ago. The basic idea is that instead of buying expensive computers that would soon be obolete, consumers would lease the computing power of extremely powerful applications servers instead, and let those servers do all the work. Rather than spend thousands of dollars on software, you would just run MS Office or whatever off a huge group of cluster servers and pay for the time you used.
-- BigThor, Jul 26 2000


Greg Egan's novel "Permutation City" used a somewhat similar idea.
-- wiml, Sep 08 2000


Great idea, especially for scientific and medical experimentation where a huge amount of computing power is required.

You can already volunteer some of your computing power to medical research by going onto www.ud.com and downloading a screensaver. When you don't use your PC, this screensaver runs a series of tests and calculations on the effects of different proteins on human cells at molocule level. Whenever you are on the net, the results are uploaded onto the ud website.

You don't get paid for it but you are contributing towards cancer research...
-- mboxwell, Apr 03 2001


I like the (original) idea of having someone pay me a living wage for the use of something that is both freely available and affordable, but my bistromathematics aren't strong enough to make it work out.
-- Monkfish, Apr 05 2001


I have to doubt we'll ever see it happen. Many computers aren't even compatible with their own earlier models, let alone equipped the same as all other computers -- but even if we could implement such a setup, the consumers of computing time would look for only the fastest, latest machines, leaving the cyber-"landlords" stuck on the upgrade treadmill, where they'd be lucky to break even.
-- whatsbruin, Aug 31 2001


Yes, it's a baked idea, I think also Sun wanted to do that.
-- sartep, Apr 25 2003



random, halfbakery