80legs Web-Scale Apps Competition
challengepost.com
challengepost.com
Without a reasonable description of hardware, any ideas would be just hand waving.
Because of that, we don't know exact specs on the computers, but here are the limitations that 80Apps have: http://80legs.pbworks.com/80Apps#LimitationsonYourCode
http://setiathome.berkeley.edu/top_hosts.php
BTW, how do you ensure somebody is not submitting a malware (intentional or not) that can DDoS someone by crawling the same host at pretty much the same time?
80legs enforces throttles and rate limits on the sites that are crawled. We try to make a best guess at a rate limit for each site. Sometimes that best guess is too fast, so we take corrective action when we're notified by the webmaster. Users can't override the crawling rates.
It's fair to say that many people who are using these apps don't know that their machine is being given tasks to work on in the background.
Aside from the unknown bandwidth/cpu/throughput unknowns IMHO there is an ethical question of using this software. From what I can see there is no opt-out other than not to install the software the runtime is bundled with. And that assumes you even know it's being installed.
I'm somewhat conflicted as I have interests in a rival product in the twitter app space but IMHO it's not clear to your "average Joe" user what is going on. Further more, from my own experience, once you tell someone who's using an app that has Plura running what it is doing, people tend to be quite concerned and certainly not wanting to have it on their system.
JDRock: I also believe you work with/for 80legs but can't see any disclosure in your posts.
Not wanting to be a d*ck but if you are going to say that it's obvious and easy to turn off (and de-karma me for my comment) I think you should state whether that's from a NPOV or whether you're actually involved in the product.
If you try out the latest Digsby installation, you'll see that they've changed the install process. So while I suppose I am biased, it's also a fairly objective thing to observe. Lifehacker even posted a follow-up article applauding Digsby for the change, if I remember correctly.
What I've seen is that if people are told about Plura up-front and have the option to turn it off from the get-go, they have no qualms about it. Digsby didn't do an awesome job about this initially, but they've corrected it.
Also, I wasn't the only that d-ked you.
The problem with other languages is that they all make use of reflection to get themselves working, which Plura's security sandbox does not allow. If anyone knows a way around this, please share!