I'm not sure this is a new idea, but here it is:

Someone could make a piece of software which would allow users to render an
image or animation on someone else's computer (I mean over the internet)
running the same piece of software. The software could be somewhat similar
to popular file sharing stuff, basicly sending a (PoV) source file to the
other machine and receiving the final image.

Uses:
People could leave their computers on and connected when they leave for work
etc (I think today more and more people have some sort of non dial-up
connection). Artists could focus on creativity more, not having to wait so
long for a render to finish. (For example, having several renders going on
on different distant computers.)
Artists could make use of a much faster PC in many cases.
If we could get these individual programs to work simultaniously on an image
(render small portions), with a joint effort we could render extremely
compute-intensive images or animations quite easily and quickly.
Supercomputers could kiss our... :)

I am not a programmer, but I don't think this idea was impossible to
implement. For example I myself have created a CGI based web page, on which
visitors could modify the source of a POV file, and could have a look at the
resulting image in their browsers, rendered on my machine. The page is not
up right now...

Time to sleep now though. I understand that this may not be entirely
on-topic, sorry.

Cheers,
Gergely

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