distributive peer-to-peer se idea

[hudson]

Taking a page each from:

linux/dmoz/napster/siti

How about an open source, distributive peer-to-peer SE.

What got me going on this idea was all the noise about Florida, reading a bunch of threads about similar ideas, plus the realization that for next to nothing on a virtual host I got 15 gigs transfer, tier one bandwidth and 100 mb of space while I only get 300 hits a day (80% me, 3 from googlebot, 1 from ink, 1 tecoma and the rest lost surfers). So all this beautiful massive FreeBSD computational power is going to waste! Imagine...I can write a small script to do a million computations in a sec...so how about everyone donating a few gigs, a few mb, some processing time on the cpu and get someone to code up a distributive peer-to-peer se...would be very fun ;-)

[superpower]

I don't want to discourage your creative idea, but I think a p2p SE the size of google would be very very slow.

A full-sized SE's databases are like TBs and TBs of data--so a p2p system with say a gig each on avg would take thousands of computers linked together which would then have to be connected to and searched for each query. The more hosts, the slower it would be... And then talk about controlling reliability and gaming :)

[hudson]

Hi superpower, thanks for entertaining my creative ideas fueled by too much coffee.

Ahhh...so I was thinking of a full size SE database as more of a computational thing that could be distributed a la Seti at home, but it is a storage question, isn't it.

And the thought of p2p via some type of hierarchical structure just isn't doable since again we are dealing with databases and accessing storage.

controlling reliability and gaming

I thought it would be kind of neat if the lunatics control the asylum (that is, if you meant gaming the system by "gaming")