What is it with Sony having good ideas lately? It’s getting harder to make fun of them. Apparently they’re having so much success with their Folding@Home project (which uses spare processing power on PS3′s to do computation-intensive protein folding simulations for the good of mankind) that Sony is exploring the idea of selling some of that unused computing power to corporations, who in return would give users points, or sponsor downloads of games and other media, or whatever.
Am I confused, or isn’t this one of those basically sound ideas that pretty much has to happen sooner or later? Australian SF writer Greg Egan’s unbelievably great novel Permutation City posited a very plausible 24-hour global computing-power marketplace, where users buy the horsepower they need at rates that fluctuate according to demand. (It also posited that the universe can function as a vast computer that will run AI simulations of deceased personalities.Which could totally happen too.)
