Carnage
A few weeks ago I scooped a story on the recording industry's new weapon against those who trade music online. Well at least one website is leading the charge to fight back against the old fashioned plastic media we call CDs.

Jelly Bath
The reader who suggested this site wasn't quite sure whether it was a joke or not. All I can say is that if you first dip your head in a bowl of custard then dive into this stuff will it make you a trifle deaf?

Rent-A-Relative
Tired of your mother-in-law, feel like you might want another brother, sister or aunty? Hey -- this is the site for you!

Brits "Race Against Time" To Control Major TB Outbreak A community college in Britain appears to be the starting point for what health officials have described as a "major outbreak" of TB -- and now there's a "race against time" to contain it. First foot and mouth, now TB -- what's next for the disease-burdened nation? Find out more at 7amNews/ShockHorrorProbe...

Sell Your CPU Cycles
A long, long time ago (in computer terms), computers were rare and expensive devices. So expensive in fact that the vast majority of people who really needed a computer couldn't afford to buy one.

For most businesses, engineers and scientists, this meant that if you wanted to run a program you had to buy time on someone else's computer. The cost of buying cycles on someone else's CPU was pretty high -- but much cheaper than having to fork out for your own machine.

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Of course things have changed a lot since those dark days of 30 years ago, now everyone has a computer on their desktop and CPU cycles are cheap -- very cheap. In fact most PCs spend over 90 percent of their time spinning their virtual wheels, wasting CPU cycles for hour after hour.

So it's safe to assume that there's no money to be made from selling CPU cycles these days -- right?

Wrong!

First we had the SETI program and now we have one designed to fight cancer -- both systems designed to harness all the spare computing power on the hundreds of millions of personal computers scattered around the world.

Download a special screensaver program and install it on your PC then, instead of your computer just spinning its wheels when you're not using it, someone else can take advantage of all those CPU cycles that would otherwise go to waste.

SETI and the Cancer screensavers are both operated for altruistic reasons -- but you can already hear the cogs spinning in entrepreneur's heads as they realise that there's a huge business opportunity shaping up here.

While PC-grade machines are now very cheap, supercomputers of the type required to perform some of the most complex engineering and scientific calculations are still costly beasts -- so there's huge potential to harness the spare processor power of millions of PCs and on-sell it to anyone who needs supercomputing power without the super cost.

My prediction: look out for the arrival of companies that will soon offer to buy your spare CPU cycles. The money on offer will be very small and more likely provided by way of "prizes" than a per-hour basis.

"Win a million dollars" is a much better draw-card than "earn a cent a day" and it's probably cheaper for the processor-aggregation company as well.

Maybe that old 486 sitting in the corner is worth keeping after all?

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