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Yochai Benkler: Open-source economics

Category: OpenSource
Posted on: April 26, 2008 11:07 PM, by Greg Laden

Law professor Yochai Benkler explains how collaborative projects like Wikipedia and Linux represent the next stage of human organization. By disrupting traditional economic production, copyright law and established competition, they're paving the way for a new set of economic laws, where empowered individuals are put on a level playing field with industry giants.

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Comments

He mentions seti@home as a supercomputer, but actually seti is less than half the total BOINC projects. And there are over a hundred distributed computing projects.

Greg, since you like open source and news about robots so much, i'm surprised that you don't mention BOINC more often. Since there are only a few million computers participating, from the estimated total of over two billions computers connected to the internet, the distributed computing projects could always use a little more publicity.

I haven't found a project that's directly related to anthropology, but you could try looking at MindModeling@home or ArtificialInteligence@home. Hope you post something about the boinc system and some projects.

Posted by: Paladin | April 27, 2008 2:43 AM

Paladin -

I used the BOINC software/screen saver for a long time to run calculations for a project measuring proteome folding, and was happy to lend a hand for it; the problem was that the resources were so memory intensive that I often had to re-boot my pc in order to come out of it. Unless they have improved it, I am hesitant to load it again.

One of the things I feel a bit guilty about is that I leave my computers running so that they can perform their maintenance routines while I am not using the computer (a good concept for a Mac Vs PC commercial?) and I would like to at least have it be productive.

Let me know if BOINC has been fixed.

Posted by: Mike Haubrich, FCD | April 27, 2008 5:45 PM

Mike, I'd say it's a mixed bag on improvement. The PS3 needs rebooting; the Mac doesn't. I don't know whether the difference is in platform or project, since they're running different ones.

Posted by: Stephanie Z | April 27, 2008 7:10 PM

Mike
Memory requirements vary with the project, it was not a boinc problem. Most of the projects have minimum requirements posted, visit the site and check them.

For example, i have an old P3 with 256 MB RAM that runs Debian and is used as a router and printserver, and it crunches happily WCG's Help Conquer Cancer project. But there are others much more memory intensive.

See [link:http://boincstats.com/index.php?list=full&or=0]here[/link] and [link:http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Distributed_computing_projects]here[/link] lists with most of the projects.

Posted by: Paladin | April 28, 2008 2:22 AM

Sorry, links weren't posted as i expected, just go to boincstats.com , see the full list of projects, select a few that seem interesting and active, and check out the minimum requirements.

Posted by: Paladin | April 28, 2008 2:36 AM