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We should investigate new types of screensavers which are network based instead of the old traditional single-computer screensavers. Probably the oldest example in the book is a network wide fish tank. Fishes swim to other computers, and the longer a computer remains idle, the larger its fish becomes. Fishes evolve into swarms, etc. If you want to go spore like, it could be that computers that idle longer, evolve into more refined communities which fight others. For the more G rated crowd, why not turn it into a computer lab full of "poker" player PC's. Or, even better, why not have a whole lab full of computers playing Doom. The faster the CPU, the better the computer performs in game.
Even old screensavers composed of bouncing cows or flying toasters, while nice, could be nicer if they were distributed in some form. Not great for a lab performing CPU clustering, but just makes things more polished overall, and shows ubuntu off as a OS for networking.
Lame I know, but still, its something which nobody else has done for anything other then scientific processing like folding at home. In a graphics lab though, it may be hard to convince them to burn CPU cycles on protein folding. But nobody minds watching computers take on a mind of their own
Never seen this on Windows or OSX. We would be ahead on this one. And it would make people actually want to leave their computer idling.
Special security precautions would be neccessary though, you would want a means of running the screensavers with barely any permissions.
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