Introducing sharpening@home

I got this idea from an excellent project called Folding@home. A brief explanation of this worthwhile project follows:

What does Folding@Home do? Folding@Home is a distributed computing project which studies protein folding, misfolding, aggregation, and related diseases. We use novel computational methods and large scale distributed computing, to simulate timescales thousands to millions of times longer than previously achieved. This has allowed us to simulate folding for the first time, and to now direct our approach to examine folding related disease.

You can help our project by downloading and running our client software. Our algorithms are designed such that for every computer that joins the project, we get a commensurate increase in simulation speed.


I'm now working on recruiting programmers and other support people for creating the sharpening@home client application. Once completed, we will host it for downloading here on thalo.net. We'll have versions for OS 9, Lisa, XP, Linux, and (of course) OS X. At first it will be a separate application that runs in the background but we plan to do a full-fledged screensaver in the near future. You will be able to create teams, much like seti@home or folding@home, and the hope is that we'll put together a strong enough team at thalo.net to kick MFI's ass.

What is sharpening@home?

While not strictly legal (and certainly unethical), sharpening@home uses a little-known security hole in Darwin (upon which OS X is based) to detect and benignly access Macintoshes running OS X whether they are on the internet or on an office network. Sharpening@home uses very little bandwidth so there should be a minimum of disruptions or interference.

What does sharpening@home do?

Sharpening@home uses advanced AI and OCR techniques combined with highly optimized unsharp masking algorithms. The program searches the host computer for graphics, text and interface elements that fall below a certain sharpness level and then provides on-the-fly sharpening of these elements. The more computers that take part in the sharpening@home project the more and faster these elements on OS X Macs can be sharpened. It's a very computationally intensive task so if you have an old unused computer sitting around here's the perfect chance to give an old machine new life.

Why did you create sharpening@home?

Eye strain is still a severe problem and leads to billions of dollars in lost productivity and insurance claims each year. Although sharpening@home is not a complete cure, it is a first step toward an effective treatment.

This project is in its very early stages so be sure to check this web page often for updated information. Thanks in advance for your support.