A dumb question

[captainjrl]

People in here refer to some computers as cows. What makes a computer a cow?

[OuTpaTienT]

Oh boy. Here they come in droves now. About twelve of them will pounce on you and explain more than you ever wanted to know about it. And they'll attempt to recuit you as well. And turn your computer(s) into cows. Don't be afraid. You might like it.

A "cow" is a term used by Distributed Computing projects.

A bunch of PC's is a "herd", therefore, a single PC is a "cow".

That's my interpretation anyway.

You can make your's a cow by going here and downloading the ECC2 client.

[captainjrl]

I'm already scared because I think a lot of people around here will think I'm dumb because I don't know what it means. Oh well, life goes on.

[PresterJohn]

Originally posted by captainjrl
People in here refer to some computers as cows. What makes a computer a cow?

you should pay a visit to the Distributed Computing forum

a cow is a computer which runs something called a DC client.

there are various DC projects which members can join:

UD - which seeks to find a drug cure for cancer
ecc2 which is an encryption-cracking project

the list is quite extensive...

the client basically runs in the background (many participants have their machines running 24/7) and does some sort of 'crunching' whose results are then uploaded to the DC servers.

Originally posted by OuTpaTienT
About twelve of them will pounce on you and explain more than you ever wanted to know about it. And they'll attempt to recuit you as well.

/me thinks I'm being stereotypical . . . DAMN RIGHT!

[captainjrl]

So basically by making your machine a cow you are letting some use its capabilities to lessen loads on their own machines?

Not really like that.

It's just a way to provide your idle processing power to projects that need many, many, many PC's to complete.

ECC2 for instance, as stated by PresterJohn, is used to break encryption. After this project is over, they'll move onto harder encryption keys to break.

I don't know about the others, but you could land a cool $2500 if you find one of only two(2) "magic" points w/ the ECC2 project.

[Beemer]

And there are no dumb questions.

Sometimes though, there are dumb answers.

Cheers!

[littlebird]

Other people already explained what a cow is. Some other people change the name depending on the project. Our genome (another dc client that's is helping the human genome project) member nunyadam refers to his "cows" as "mowers".