5 ms·
It seems like the basic assumption behind this kind of thing no longer holds; when systems in the past couldn't do power management, the idle time processing po
by rbarooah 16y ago
It seems like the basic assumption behind this kind of thing no longer holds; when systems in the past couldn't do power management, the idle time processing power really was wasted and these kind of thing simply utilized that.
Many modern systems throttle back their power consumption when the load permits, saving battery life or ac consumption, so this really does pass a cost on to the end user.
It certainly will impact the user experience on a laptop by draining the battery if you hang around on sites that use it a lot. I'm not sure how they can avoid this.
It would be nicer if they made it visible on the sites and had a global opt-out
- JoachimSchipper 16y agoI really hate the idea of "we'll do something not-so-nice and allow people to opt out". Most people won't bother, it doesn't scale (how many things do I have to opt out of, again?), and it's passing your problem on to me. That said, "click here to donate your spare CPU cycles to awesomesite.com" would be just, well, awesome.
- rbarooah 16y agoI agree - that definitely makes it feel more ethical.
- blhack 16y agoI never did it, but the joke between my friends and I was always that we should put the spammers we were getting on our site to good use. We always wanted a way to make them contribute to folding@home while spamming the site, but we settled for putting them into an endless loop of recaptcha instead.