Project Dolpin

Zitat

Most of the Ars crowd is familiar with traditional distributed computing efforts, things like SETI and RC5. Well, there's a newcomer to the DC arena, and they don't want your CPU cycles... they want to count your keystrokes. Project Dolphin, perhaps the most unique newcomer to distributed computing in quite some time, has gained a small following amongst the Ars distributed computing crowd. Currently ranked 15, Team Smoked Bacon is in close competition with several other teams.

I run Project Dolphin alongside another traditional distributed computing project that uses CPU cycles. The Dolphin client is remarkably robust for such a new client, and its footprint is remarkably small. After running for nearly four days, the client is only using 5MB RAM, and only four minutes of CPU time: virtually negligable. Set the client to pulse hourly, daily, or manually, and it does its thing unobtrusively.

Does the project have any real world value? Not really, but I think it's a cool idea, and for some reason, knowing how many keys I type is appealing to me. Perhaps it's the geek factor. But then, I've been known to be interested in boringly trivial things before, so your interest may vary.

If you too are hopelessly transfixed by trivialities and want to help out the Ars team, go ahead and hop on over to the sign up page, enter your info, download the client, log in with the information you entered, and search for "Bacon". Unfortunately, the search is fickle; hitting enter does not work properly, you'll have to hit the Name button manually.

Team Smoked Bacon could use your keystrokes.