bkil vs. programming

Crowd workers are not online Shakespeares, but Carnegie Mellon research shows they can write "(...) the research team led by Aniket Kittur, assistant professor in CMU's Human-Computer Interaction Institute (HCII), found that the crowdsourced articles compared favorably with articles written by a single author and with Simple English Wikipedia entries." Programming crowds "In the MIT researchers’ experiments, Soylent recruited turkers to perform two different tasks: one was to copyedit a document of roughly seven paragraphs; the other was to shorten a document. (...) the researchers found that $1.50 per paragraph would elicit good results within 20 minutes; the cost would go down to about 30 cents per paragraph if the user was willing to wait a couple hours." Mind you that the first research itself has a bit xkcd feel to it in the ingenious sense. These are milestones which are worth remembering, because it'll only get steeper in the coming years -...

How come so few donate their free resources to volunteer computing projects ? Depending on the exact computer configuration, the difference in system power consumption between using and near-idling the CPU (~35W-80W) or GPU (~30W-100W) can be reasonably small . The difference is usually smaller than the difference between a power efficient (25-60W) and a basic system (100-200W). Hence in my view, it usually worths it to put your free resources to use in some way if your daily work does not strain your machine continuously at 100%. There's an a project of special interest that has similar aim to what I have invented earlier: It is special in that any participant can freely use the communal grid for their own purposes . Prioritization is fair - it is based on previous record of contribution. This type of project is also useful for the selfish kind, as if you think it over, you can eventually get back the contributed CPU time and energy, but at a much faster pace. It would stil...