Hong Kongers have a reputation for working hard, eclipsing even New Yorkers in their hunger to exploit every last micro-opportunity. No doubt, if it were possible, Hong Kongers would sleep in a business-like manner, selling off their dreams and harnessing the power of their rapid eye movements to generate electricity.
But can you put your hand on your mouse and honestly say your computer gives 100 per cent 24/7 or even 70 per cent 8/5?
The truth about the average computer is that, as the British like to say, it is having a laugh. It may process the odd byte here and there, but most of the time it is coasting, barely flexing its awesome specs.
So it is good to know that there is a way to make these silicon slobs accomplish more, through a technique known as distributed processing. It may not sound glamorous but it is effective. All about strength in numbers, distributed computing means solving a large problem by feeding small parts of the problem to many computers and then marrying the many partial answers into a total solution.
The result is a kind of cheapskate's supercomputer: immense number-crunching prowess at minimal cost. The prime and most popular example of a distributed network in action is SETI@home (setiathome.ssl. berkeley.edu).
Based at the University of California at Berkeley, it enables users connected to the internet to donate their personal computer's spare central processing unit cycles to the exploration of extraterrestrial life in the universe. Its task is to sort, as well as possible, through the 1.4 billion potential signals picked up by the Arecibo telescope to find signals that repeat.