Which programs should I run in niceness 20?

[Wallex]

After using oggasm, I understood the meaning of 'niceness' in Linux. I was thinking that there are many times when my computer is idle doing nothing, so I was wondering what programs would be useful to run in niceness 20 (if I am not mistaken, I will not even notice they are running because all other processes take priority over them, no?). One thing that should be considered is that I don't have a free internet account so I don't spend all my time online (unless I need to). Well... what do you recommend?

[demian]

Ever thought about signing up for a dc project?

[Wallex]

A dc project? Hmm... I dunno what's that. But I guess I can eventually find out... altough what I was wondering about is if there are any applications that I could run on the background that would benefit me or my computer... but I guess being part of a project that might benefit the rest of the world might not be that bad (except for the fact that I am not online that much... )

[demian]

dc - distributed computing

SETI might be the most known dc project. Basically all the DC projects have a need for enormous computing power. So they split up the data into small chunks, send it out over the internet and have people on their home PCs process the data. Then the results are send back to a central database and you fetch the next chunk of work.

Typically the amount of data transfered isn't that much (so there's not a lot of online time involved). All the clients I tried run per default with nice value 20 so you don't have a noticable decrease in performance.

There has once been an LNO distributed computing team but I think it has disintegrated. The Free-DC (http://www.free-dc.org) website has info on a number of ongoing DC projects.