Did we forget that the faah bw to time ratio is absolutely minimal and cep2 is opt-in? A little project coaching and away boinc goes. Of course the one element that is inconvenient to some, and not necessarily,, it's about fighting aids. Might not be seen as welcome on the bb screensaver., but can be easily customized too.

you seem to think the infrastructure is not there. I only suggested they add Boinc to 10 to 15 computers per store. in the computer sales section, where the computers are ALREADY turned on, and ALREADY connected to the web for the browsing enjoyment of customers.

Other then that, you feel that Boinc does not offer enough services. OK. I agree, Boinc needs improvement before its ready for an implementation like this. That will happen. thats where Boinc works with the major corporations to give them a useable product.

Why not petition Microsoft, Google. Yahoo, Amazon, Rackspace, etc. to run it in their data centers? Microsoft alone has 1 million servers which is less than Google. 22,500 is nothing compared to that. See what reaction you get from the above.

So you are making a “recommendation” but yet don’t know the impact of that recommendation.

Those computers are not just sitting idle; they are actually doing something; to sell computers. Having a computer sit there with its fan spun up to expel heat. That would put many consumers off as they would think that is “normal” for that computer sitting there and doing nothing. Sure you could put signs up but the average consumer wouldn’t actually understand. Depending on the CPU, at load it can consume 60% more power. Take a system with an i5-4670; 79 watts at idle and 132 watts at load for a difference if 53 watts. 15 computers across all of their stores is 22,500 computers in total; 53 * 22,500 = 1,192,500 additional watts or 1,192.5 kilowatts of electricity. Electricity rates vary across the country and Best Buy would get a commercial rate which could be as low as a $0.01 but as high as $0.06. Let’s use $0.02, which would result in $572.40. Would you want to pay that? Oh, that is per day too, per year it is over $200,000. In the summer all that additional heat produced by the computers, yep, they need to pay more to cool the stores. There are many retailers that the holiday season is when they make their money and the other three quarters of the year they just get by. Shall we look at the Q4 2013 earnings for Best Buy? Net loss of $377 million; which is better than the $405 million net loss Q4 2012 though. Do you really think a company struggling will be willing to spend over $16,000 per month per store? If Best Buy actually cared about their image, they wouldn’t be known for what they are known for. Also with retailer feeling the pressure from on-line sales, paying higher overhead does little to offset the cost disadvantage. Apple has the highest profit margin on their products but image is everything to them. They would not want computer sitting there pumping out heat, getting hot and fans spinning up; they want to show how quiet their machines are. Running BOINC on them would be counterproductive in that. So the display machines on the floor are doing exactly what they are intended to do, sell machines, not cure disease.
For Microsoft to run that software in their data centers it would cost them around $5 million in electricity costs alone, not to mention the cooling cost required. You also have only so much power to each rack; that would be over 4 additional kilowatts per rack. Other issues would be the generators on-site may not be capable of providing all those additional watts or possibly even the feed from the power company. If they had 1000 racks of servers, that would be over 4 megawatts of additional electrical power. Care to guess how many homes that can run?

Microsoft already uses their data centers for DC applications when they can spin it to their favor. MS Prime Numbers Search I'm sure if you could make a strong enough case, they would do it for WCG as well.