I remember watching “Total Recall” when I was a young boy, and I remember the hologram, when Arnold Schwarzenegger projected a 3D image of himself to a different place using this device. While I was in class we watched a video where this guy does just that, I was amazed. First of all, I did not know what the video was about, so when this guy walks onto the stage when he is 14,000 miles away from it I was shocked. I almost had to leave my seat because I did not think it was real. Then about halfway through the video I started thinking about how much money a technology like this could save business people who have to travel for meetings and to give seminars. I have been reading a book by Robert Kiyosaki called “Rich Dad’s Prophecy” and there is a part when Robert is writing about the future, he was saying that in the information age that changes will be invisible. People had to travel by boat first and then by plane in the present, in the future they will use a technology such as this and they will not have to leave their home base. This will save time and money for everyone and not require people to have to take days off recuperating after a business trip. I was so excited about this that I showed it to my girlfriend and then we started talking more about it. Imagine what movies or computer games could be like. Business could have meetings just like in the movie “Resident Evil”, where the whole board is not actually there. Politicians could give speeches to every place at once and be as effective as if they were there in person, this would also reduce the risk of assassination. The world’s best teachers could teach classes to and from anywhere in the world. People of different cultures could meet almost in person and learn about each other, further flattening the world. The future is already here; we just don’t know it yet.
Distributed computing is a method of using many computers processor resources together over a network to bring about power that is similar to, or greater than, the power of a conventional super computer. In class we learned about the SETI@home project, which uses peoples computers to search for extraterrestrial life. This was the first time that I had heard of the concept of using people’s home computers in this manner, although I have read about Google’s “cloud computing” data center which uses a concept similar to distributed computing.
Being business minded, I suddenly had a spark go off in my mind, I thought if organizations need my processor then they have to pay me for it, I thought that this would be a great way to earn a little passive income, enough to pay for my coffee habit. I thought that there would be a ton of places capitalizing on this so I Googled it. Sure enough there were many results so I started going through my results and quickly realized that none of them were paying for this service. I also noticed that most of the information that I found was pretty old, from 2001, and that the new stuff was all by volunteer only. I emailed a few places and they all told me that they would pay me if I had 25 or more computers. Since I am a business minded individual, I was not easily discouraged, I searched various combinations of ‘distributed computed’ and ‘earn money’ together. I found a website that seemed promising called ‘ubero.com’ but could not register due to problems with their website. I eventually decided to donate my processing power to a good cause…
I ended up choosing a site called ‘Gstock.com’ they use my processing power to analyze the stock market and decide when the best time is to buy and sell selected stocks. I receive an email every time the status of a stock in my portfolio changes from buy to sell. In the end I hope to make a little bit of money with this system although it is not really passive income, the earning potential is endless. The fact that none of the other sites were paying now seems like a blessing in disguise.
