The Death of the PC

[soybean]

Well, not quite yet. But among corporate customers, the future is beginning to look very uncertain. 

Throughout the computer industry companies of all sizes, from garage startups to Microsoft, are bracing for the possibility that their future will be in the hands of people like Sean Whetstone.

The head of computer operations for Reed Specialist Recruitment, an employment service with operations on three continents, Whetstone recently upgraded his company's 6,000 desktop computers. Chief information officers order new Dells or HPs all the time. But the computers Whetstone brought in for his employees aren't the traditional metal boxes that sit next to desks or under monitors. They are "virtual" computers. Each employee has a keyboard and a screen, but the processors making the calculations and deciding what color goes in each pixel are far away, inside a big computer at Reed's main data center in London.

Continued at http://www.forbes.com/forbes/2009/1228/technology-virtualization-vmware-wyse.html

[michaewlewis]

How is this different from Terminal Services?

[Geek-9pm]

How is this different from Terminal Services?

How is a skate board different from a mother cycle?

[michaewlewis]

never heard of a mother cycle......
But seriously, how's it different. Either way, you have to remote into a different machine to access an operating system.
I guess a better question is how is it better than Terminal Services? With terminal services, you have one os, one install of all supporting programs, one os to update. With virtual desktops, you still have to manage all of the licenses required for physical machines and you have to patch each one individually.

[Geek-9pm]

michaewlewis,
  The more critical issue, IMO, is bandwidth. Right now, with the wimpy  DSL connection I have, watching a movie  online is not so good.

But once most of use have optical connections, and the internet gets cleaned up, we can have real "cloud computing". That will be  way beyond terminal services.
In the future, IMO, we could rent our software like we rent videos. The cost would be like a long distance cell phone call. You might pay ten cents a minute to play a powerful, interactive first person adventure game with stunning graphical effects beyond even the best effects in current Sci-Fi  flicks.

By then, we will put our  PCs into the Local Museum, ...
- Next to the old 45 RPM vinyl collection. 

[BC_Programmer]

no seriously- this is just Sun's idea of a "net-PC" revisited, which was itself a revisitation of the whole "time-shared" computing system, where terminals were just- well, terminals, and the actual processing occured on a mini-computer. VAX-VMS, for example.

[rthompson80819]

One big impact of this move, no playing solitaire at work.

A lot of business, even small ones, already have optical connections with the total speed governed by what they are willing to pay for.

Optical connections to the home are another matter.  There are a few thousand out there now but it is still in an experimental mode and not cost effective.

[Geek-9pm]

One big impact of this move, no playing solitaire at work.

A lot of business, even small ones, already have optical connections with the total speed governed by what they are willing to pay for.

Optical connections to the home are another matter.  There are a few thousand out there now but it is still in an experimental mode and not cost effective.

100 feet of good optical cable is less that the cost of a wireless router. And a whole lot more bandwidth than anything else.

[rthompson80819]

100 feet of good optical cable is less that the cost of a wireless router. And a whole lot more bandwidth than anything else.

True, but what are you going to connect that 100' of fiber to?  That's where the real cost comes in.

[michaewlewis]

michaewlewis,
  The more critical issue, IMO, is bandwidth. Right now, with the wimpy  DSL connection I have, watching a movie  online is not so good.

But once most of use have optical connections, and the internet gets cleaned up, we can have real "cloud computing". That will be  way beyond terminal services.
In the future, IMO, we could rent our software like we rent videos. The cost would be like a long distance cell phone call. You might pay ten cents a minute to play a powerful, interactive first person adventure game with stunning graphical effects beyond even the best effects in current Sci-Fi  flicks.

By then, we will put our  PCs into the Local Museum, ...
- Next to the old 45 RPM vinyl collection. 

Still sounds like terminal services. Or at least Microsoft's latest implementation of it. In Server 2008, you can lauch a single app without launching an entire desktop via mstsc. It's pretty cool, I use it frequently at work. And of course files are always stored on a server..... so I don't see how that's so different from using "The Cloud".
Obviously the internals are different, but the usability is pretty close to the same.