Thanks you all for your comments!

I will try answering what i can:

@Artpearl: Yeah now in the earliest beta phase i still dont ahve a software that controls the resource usage on your computer, but i plan at a later phase to have the rendering threads adjusted so they will NEVER steal CPU power from your other applications by making the rendercow thread lowest priority of all processes, so it will only get CPU power if the CPU has true idle time. You can however be a passive tester if you want, right now i am at work, so in these times it is also okay to have a "larger" test render processing if you want to.
There might be users that drive their processor at 100% load for around 95% of all the time, but from my research (I interviewed some "hobbiist" artists) this is a rare occassion and while many people have days where the render 24/7 there are "usual" also times when the CPU is idle (i.e. the phase when you create scenes, do postwork or just need a creative break).

@Rutra: Generally you can save a scene with all textures included, there ARE Cornucopia3D objects that you can buy "protected" or "unprotected". If you buy the protected version it unfortunately cant be helped. All professional renderfarms will also have this problem, only exception is Ranch computing, it is rumoured they got a special version by e-onsoftware that ignores the protected flags and can "access everything" regardless of the serial. I dont expect to get that version for obvious reasons, but this is a quite small limit that should also occur in your network at home. If you have a rendercow installed on some random laptop in your home network or some user of OpenVue in lets say asia it should not be a difference. A cow is a cow is a cow. I think with byuing protected content you are willingly buying such problems - but i have not yet had the chance to test this to confirm it is really impossible to render this. I challenge you to just try it out, my node is waiting for you.  smile  =)

About security: rendercow has NO known exploits, meaning it is safer then about every other internet related software. As the rendercow and what it does is quite simple compared to programs like winamp, emule, other p2p software etc i think it is very unlikely that exploits appear as the accepted data is very very limited, i yet have not found any handle for exploits and think it is unlikely one will appear.

For the rendercow version we try to have the same version (latest 6.60) for all nodes in the beginning to make testing easier. This version is reported to be stable for most users and seems to be widely accepted, so for pure testing this should be okay. Later on i might implement a version control in the management module, so Vue 6.1 users will only render to 6.1 cows. Maybe there is also another solution, but we will care about that at a later point, we have to care for the basics first.

@jonj1611: Well maybe you have some times here or there where you dont drive your computer to 100% cpu load, i initially thought my own computer has the same workload, being ALWAYS in use, but de facto it is not utilizing the CPU over a constant 100% when i really measure it. I might also add a feature that only "offers" your cpu if your screen saver is running and the CPU load is below a set threshold (like under 50%). unless your computer is a pure renderfarm node it is very unlikely that your cpu is really at 100% "all the time" (For a desktop you'd probably have problems if this is the case).

Right now i need testers! Torture my node with your test renders! Try to not overdo it too excessive, but right now you can also send files that take long to render. better a very busy node then having noone testing at all! And it would be awesome cool if we could get another rendercow node for testing! crossing fingers

Vue content creator
www.renderarmy.com