http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/uk/science/article3689881.ece It'll be fast until Comcast and Bell Canada start restricting downloading speeds.
I know here in Alberta our backbone is fiber-optic, so I assume it could be implemented. Personally I'd be happy with the 'fast' internet the University's have.
Like everything else innovative, I would expect: prohibitively expensive at first (remember the old T1 lines?) and then moving gradually through affordable to perhaps even cheep! (sic)
"THE GRID!" Read about this about a year ago. Some goofballs working on it claim that after it takes hold, the most important component of your PC will be your network adapter. They also predict that ALL computing will be shared, meaning that when your PC is idle it will use it's clock cycles for other users. They claimed that in online games, faster PCs would do work to help slower PCs keep up their framerates. Personally, this last bit sounds like it will just piss off consumers and exacerbate the problem of powering all of our new shiny PCs.
Actually, were it a sort of giant cluster that did fair resource management (meaning, you are guaranteed at least the performance of your local machine), I doubt anyone would really whine too much, especially if it truly meant that, most of the time, you'd get better performance if you'd need it. However, we have a hard enough time doing good fair resource management as it is. I think this would be a long, long way off.
These two things are contradictory. The article talks about people PLAYING, not about some random idle users.
I have no intention of letting anyone use my computers CPU cycles. The are mine dammit. I'm just gonna unplug the computer when I'm not using it.
They're not contradictory if the faster computers actually have available unused resources. And, let's be honest here, my idea is way better .
Sharing computers? I'm going to plug in my trusty $25 Timex and get all the power of a supercomputer for next to nothing. I'm a commie that way...
Actually, it's The Internet then The Grid and then The Matrix. What we call the Web is simply a service that runs over the internet.
