I've done A LOT of research and experimentation in this space over the course of the last 5-ish years, mainly out of sheer curiosity. This sounds very, very similar to something I prototyped a while back using x264 + Broadway.js (HTML5 video streaming with low latency is a non-starter).
I'm extremely curious, has Paperspace actually developed an entirely new video codec, encoder, and efficient JS decoder for this?
I'm a little confused by the statements so far (and the comments are flowing in, so apologies if this was addressed while I was typing): "we are using a video stream", "using a JS renderer", "building a streaming protocol", "using GPU tech originally developed for video game streaming", "a remote desktop protocol that could stream HD video"
So, is just the streaming protocol you've developed and not the codec? In my expiriments, simply pushing out h264 NAL units over websockets and passing them to the decoder was a pretty solid start. Add a tiny layer of buffering over that and I imagine it'd be fairly stable. Ultimately, I backed away from h264 for licensing and performance issues.
Also, what's the transport into the browser? Websockets? WebRTC data channels? Have you encountered performance issues with Firefox not being able to handle websockets or data channels in web workers? (Which is seemingly coming in FF37.)
awesome questions! There will be tech blog deep dive that goes into more detail, but just to clarify things a bit we are using h264 as the underlying codec but the protocol is a combination things -- h264 packets over websockets is where we started too!
Usually you want a "reliable" transport (tcp) for handshake, some transfer, etc and then you can get away with a more fire-and-forget (udp) stream for everything else. We broker different connections for different scenarios. The web version is naturally limited to either webrtc or websockets but for the paperweight it didn't make sense to force a web paradigm (or full webbrowser just to access limited socket types) so we interface directly with the hardware.
Haven't encountered big problems with firefox, but browser inconsistencies are definitely something we spend a lot of time working through
Because Paperweight is the black circle hardware device they made to stream from Paperspace. There's no point to using a browser on it, just stream directly through the wifi/ethernet port using TCP/IP.
Shameless plug: check out jsmpeg[1] - it's an MPEG1 decoder written in JavaScript that's capable of low latency streaming via WebSockets, weighs only ~25kb gzipped, offloads part of the decoding to the GPU via WebGL and runs smoothly on an iPhone4.
Of course it has some drawbacks, as MPEG1 is a pretty old codec. The data rate is fairly high and it struggles with high resolution streams. 720p still decodes nicely in realtime on most mobile devices, though.
Thanks for sharing! I've definitely bumped into jsmpeg a number of times when researching JS decoders. Did you ever pursue an emscripten/ asm.js version?
I'm curious what performance issues you were seeing in Firefox. I'm doing quite a bit of work with the same stack, and have been able to get sub-10ms decode times with Broadway.JS in all the major browsers. As long as you use transferable objects to pass data around, I haven't had any problems using web workers as decode threads either.
I'm sorry, I actually mixed up two different experiments regarding the performance issues (I've been playing with this stuff for a looongg time and have many different prototypes). Allow my to clarify. :)
The performance issues with using Broadway.js were more "general", in that the experience varied wildly, from amazing to unusable depending on the browser/device/etc)... Not necessarily related to Websockets + Webworkers.
The Websocket issue on the other hand, was for a more recent experiment where I was playing with the idea of bridging NoVNC over WebRTC data channels.
It's not so much a performance "issue" as much as a "possible area for optimization"... Though, every time I'm playing with noVNC or Broadway.js in a FF tab on my i7 laptop, it pretty much renders FF pretty laggy in all other tabs. I imagine offloading as much of the processing to workers as possible would be the best approach to lessen the effect — though, I'm not much of a frontend / JS dev.
Yes its like renting a VPS with VNC or rdesktop. That's not the interesting part. The magic they claim is a low latency video transport to show you the screen on the remote.
You can web browse on a remote computer with VNC but you sure can't use photoshop. Even on 1GB/s with the remote right next to you. Its not the network in that case, VNC is just too slow with its screen scraping and reassembling. Rdesktop is better but it still hurts to use something like photoshop. Forget games.
Their entire product hinges on delivering that low latency video feed of the remote screen. None of the other features matter in comparison. They win if I can't tell its remote. Anything lesser...
I don’t know what these guys are using, but there is remote desktop technology out there that is fast enough to let me play games and watch videos on the server with minimal lag (so useable in fact, that I’ve been using my Mac mini that way through a Windows laptop for over a year now). I’m talking about NX¹ (specifically, I use NoMachine²).
Looks like yet another endless FOSS forking contest. NX > FreeNX > X2Go. Hopefully X2Go sticks. Looks good so far, it has the NX back-end but they have their own clients, Windows too.
When I was in school (not all that long ago), we had a couple large centos servers, and a ton of cheap workstations that did nothing but server as NX Clients for the most part. Everyone just logged on to their account on the cent servers for anything Computer Science related.
Is there a free or cheap way to run NX/NoMachine on just a couple of my own machines, to have a look? Their "enterprisey" server products have enterprisey prices.
Man I loved OnLive. I used to use that (and Quake Live) on my netbook in between classes in college. Now we've gone backwards in time to needing gaming-class desktops again. Shame.
> The Professional tier is made for high-end 3D CAD, Creative Suite, GIS etc.
What I'd love is to use a virtual terminal that has every application possible pre-installed or available on demand and runs like a citrix application with payment by time/cpu or whatever makes sense.
So I want to use AutoCAD, I find it in the catalog of apps, use it for 20 minutes, pay 2 dollars or whatever. I want Visual Studio 2013, I find it in the catalog, use it for 2 hours, pay a dollar fifty.
Then all I need is a cheap laptop with a nice screen and I'm good for years and years.
Paperspace founder here. One of the things we are most excited about is rapidly evolving cloud licensing models. Adobe (among others) has paved the way for a more on-demand version like what you are describing. I think a lot of other companies will move in this direction as well. We definitely share your vision and hope to offer pre-configured machines as well as on-demand apps in the future. Also, you can clone a VM and distribute it really easily which could be interesting (a dumber approach to what you're talking about).
What about sharing - heavy - files with coworkers not using this app? What about uploading files? It feels to me like working in a bubble... but maybe I'm wrong.
How about some sort of dropbox like syncing? Put your files in a shared dropbox folder, sync dropbox folder on remote VM, save your work on remote VM when done, changes get synced back to shared dropbox folder.
Obviously not perfect and obviously problematic if lots of people try working on the same file at the same time, but should solve at least some of the problems.
No company can provide this because the kind of service you want needs to be licensed by the software creators: Microsoft, Autodesk, etc. I don't think it would be an easy job to convince these big companies.
The copy on your website ranges for me from confusing to offputting. I'm not even sure exactly what you're selling after having looked at your site for two minutes. Maybe you sell virtual machines in a data center, accessible with vnc or rdp implemented in JS? And maybe an additional mini computer preconfigured to access that?
Note: The answers to that do not matter. What matters is that your website doesn't answer them and is in fact so vague that it triggers all of my mental fraud bells.
Edit:
Also small footnote. This is probably honest and well-meant, but it reads like snake-oil: "Your desktop is managed in a secure data center and we send you a fully-encrypted feed." Which data center? What does secure mean? What guarantee do i have about that security? What encryption are you using? What about the data i put on my VM, are you backing it up? Is it encrypted by default or can any paperspace employee read my diary on my cloud computer?
You need to answer them in that sentence but without links and/or footnotes to further explanations it's just meaningless and amounts to "Just trust us, ok?"
Apologies for the confusion (and yes, the website needs some love). To answer the questions, we are primarily building a streaming protocol that makes remote desktops usable for a broader range of applications (namely "media-rich" use cases like photoshop, CAD/CAM, etc)
Behind the scenes we are using GPU tech originally developed for video game streaming, but using it primarily as a way to send a vanilla desktop.
We are currently delivering this desktop to any webbrowser using a JS renderer. That said, we didn't want you to have to have an old machine to use this one, so thats where the paperweight comes in.
VDI/remote desktops have been around for a while but they are usually really poor quality/hard to setup/etc. So we are trying to wrap that all in a simple package.
Thanks for clarifying. This is a much better explanation than the copy on the website. I could see this being useful for me as a developer, especially if you make it as easy to spin up an isolated virtual Windows/Linux desktop as it is to spin up a server on something like Digital Ocean.
I think you guys might be doing yourselves a bit of a disservice by promoting the hardware before you are in a position to really provide clear information about the actual service and the pricing. It creates a lot of confusion about what it is that you actually offer.
Especially considering the fact that the site recommends a minimum of >20mbps download speed... I suspect that anybody with that kind of connectivity already has a computer.
One more question: how are you handling the Windows licensing?
> Maybe you sell virtual machines in a data center, accessible with vnc or rdp implemented in JS? And maybe an additional mini computer preconfigured to access that?
Maybe it's just that I'm not interested in whether it's any of those things, but I have no problem with the copy on the website. The site says to me: we will sell you a computer, keep it at our place, and let you use it from yours. And it's secure.
Don't take this the wrong way but you might be coming at it from a too-technical, less consumer-based focus.
Which OS do you support? Some screenshots or demo videos of the workspace would be nice.
Edit: Also, a comment on the video - it started off well with the woman having issues with an old slow computer (which is what I have and so I could relate). But then later on all the actual use is shown on fancy macbooks and iMacs which kind of defeats the puropose for me.
In the video you claim that it is "secure". I understand that as "nobody else can see my files or what I do, guaranteed".
Well, you could place a bug between the VNC and the VPS parts. Or your government might force you to do it. How can you reassure me that isn't the case?
We take privacy and security really seriously and have designed the brokering process (the part that connects you to your remote computer) to support this claim by following industry best practices.
We are still in a limited pilot program, but one of primary things we are testing is how to ensure that your computer is not compromised in any way.
We think that if we can achieve the technical goals then arguably, having a remote machine is more secure than one that someone can take from your house/car/etc.
That said, it is a really hard technical problem to manage a computer for someone without having any access to it and that is something we are designing out now.
That comment is really not reassuring.
I'm happy that you take privacy and security very seriously, that's great to hear.
However industry best practices is a little vague and 'to ensure that your computer is not compromised in any way' makes it sound like you want to do the job even the best antiviruses have trouble doing.
Furthermore I'd argue that if someone steals your machine from your house/car/etc, getting the keys to any remote machine should be trivial just by looking at the stored passwords and configuration.
But maybe I misunderstood what you were saying, sorry if that's the case.
'Industry Best Practice' in this case amounts to 'we will hand all of your data over to the government' if required.
Abdicating responsibility for personal security to ANY 3rd party makes one less secure, period.
Now, when the government comes knocking, instead of handing over some files or access records, you'll be able turn over the user entire computer. That's the exact opposite of security to me.
Looks a lot like the old workspot [0] which I really loved (when it worked) so that's cool.
But why don't you lead with the Paperweight offering and just cut out all the other stuff? Just throw the lady's computer on the floor, and then give her the Paperweight. For me, that's the attractive bit. I could definitely sell that to clients because it implies 2FA security.
What do you get for the pre-order? The link takes me directly to a credit card page. Do you get a paperweight + 0 months of service? Or does it include a few months to get started?
This looks really interesting. I'd like to know more about network lag. Even with a better protocol, you can't get past the physical speed of a network. How laggy is paperspace in practice?
Thanks for stopping by to answer questions. My question is about privacy...
Since you must sign-in to use Paperspace (and everything you do is saved or performed online), do you track user activity in any way? For example, apps used, tasks performed, sites visited.
If you do track, what kind of data do you collect? Is the tracking data tied to individual accounts? Or disassociated from them? How long do you keep this data? Is it anonymised?
Do you have an option to start up with a clean and fully patched system each time and not retain state? Can users have a library of machines for different purposes? I am thinking that something like this could be valuable as a secure and disposable space for someone living or traveling in a risky location.
Have you tested it on a phone with an external display?
I want something touchable about latency (I tried lots of remote working but it doesn't work "coz" latency). Something like, the usual remote networking app runs on 10 frames per second, we run on 60. Or, given the connection is the same, we are 10-20-50 times better/faster...
Let me guess, you're using webrtc to deliver a screencast of a headless VM to my browser plus JS to capture I/O events and deliver them over a websocket to the server essentially replicating the functionality of a "zero client" using modern web technologies, no?
Do you have any information to share on how much it will cost to use the service (with/without a Paperweight)? Is there a monthly subscription option, or is it pay-as-you-go?
"...but support for other operating systems, including Mac OS X, are planned." – Techcrunch
How feasible do you think supporting OS X will be? Wouldn't Apple be hesitant (more than hesitant) to cooperate since hardware is their source of profit? Unless you are thinking about reverse engineering the Cocoa WindowServer?
Is the paperweight optional? I'd like buy the paperweight for my father, but then be able to access his paperspace from my computer when he needs help on something.
The paperweight is completely optional. In your case, it would make sense for him to use one and then you could access his desktop through your web browser. One of neat things about streaming desktops is that you get screen sharing built in
We did a lot of prototyping on AWS and still use them a lot, but really we are pretty agnostic as to where the VM lives. We need nvidia GRID cards (which is what we use to scrape the remote desktop really fast and which AWS has for prototyping) but the rest is pretty off the shelf. So currently its a pretty hybrid system
Hopefully it'll scale down gracefully when not doing graphics-intensive work. RDP is quite usable even with 100ms latency and only a few Mbps. OTOH I guess nothing's stopping you from renting a machine from Amazon now.
I'd just be worried if they use H.264 that there's not lossless compression on most UI elements. RDP falls back to lossy video-compression like behaviour under pressure, and it looks terrible and quite unusable. For Photoshop and graphics apps, sure. But for text and most UI elements, ouch.
Not just a problem with developing countries. I have 100 Mb at home so that's not a problem, but the main use case I see for this for me is to able to use it while traveling. Even in countries with a great high speed internet in general, getting great high speed internet in a hotel room or conference center is almost impossible.
So, a thin client connecting to a virtual machine under some other company's control? No, thanks.
The fact is, computers are plenty fast now, and can handle 90% of peoples' usage patterns (browsing reddit, watching cat videos) with ease. The last thing I want is to have a remote desktop that lags out whenever there's a network hiccup.
I'm sorry, is this a running joke on HN? The first reply is always some bland, obvious attack on whatever is posted. I mean, the fact that a streaming computer in the cloud is sensitive to network hiccups is so obvious to anyone who sees this it's not even a valid criticism.
Actually, I wasn't the first reply. TBH I was expecting this to be buried since I was so late to the party.
But regardless, my criticism is that slow speed in the hardware is rarely a problem these days. Almost every "slow computer" problem I've diagnosed in recent times (that hasn't been due to McAffee) has in fact just been a slow internet connection or a misconfigured router. When you're not a computer expert, it's hard to know why your Youtube video stutters.
So yes, they will probably get a lot of sign ups with a mantra of "faster", but IMO this isn't solving the actual problem that users tend to have with computer "slowness". In fact, it will only exacerbate it, although that might be good for pushing towards greater bandwidth.
I'm also not too keen on putting even more of my data on someone else's system.
General computers are undoubtedly getting fast enough for a lot people. However, hosted computers (VDI, DaaS, etc) can do things that regular computers can't.
I hate having to upgrade a physical computer (which isn't even an option on laptops usually) and with a VM that is no longer a concern. If you need more power (which admittedly not everyone does) its really is a click away.
Transferring large files is also something that is still not easy to do with existing cloud storage options because the model is flipped (both parties have to upload and download over a single connection). By contrast, when using two hosted paperspace machines, you can transfer files nearly instantaneously. Effectively you trade one type of network transfer (the remote desktop image) for another (a big file you might be collaborating on with someone) and in some cases thats a huge win.
I see people complaining about the hassles of maintaining a computer. Seriously? It's been like... how many years since basically everyone introduced that "revert to when this was working" state?
And even if it weren't for that, if maintaining a computer is so much of a hassle, how exactly is this supposed to be accessed? With browsers running on the holodeck? "From a consumer-level device, like a tablet"? Yes, I can't wait to use AutoCAD with a pointing device that has a precision of ughhh about my thumb's size.
And let's not get into the whole privacy thing. A 1 TB drive is, what, fifty bucks today -- and people would rather store their files in a datacenter across the ocean?
You’re thinking about how people are currently using their devices instead of thinking about how they will be. You could access your computer from any internet connected device, anywhere.
Hook up your oculus rift to their paperweight and have a full powered computer anywhere (with internet access).
While they are mentioning you can use AutoCad, I'd say that is merely to show that it can handle intensive applications. The majority wants to be able to surf the internet, and with this, you would never need to buy another computer again. For the random times you need to run Photoshop it can do it and will scale up to it, other times it scales down to handle your reddit addiction.
Look at how many people use Dropbox, iCloud, Google drive, etc etc. Everyone is already ok with storing their files in a datacenter. Privacy issues or not, people have accepted it is fact and the high majority already do it. That's not to say it is right, but it's a given that people want convenience over privacy.
Buying a Macbook air costs around 1k. And most people seem to upgrade ever 4-6 years. This costs $10/month. The cost savings are blatant. I know I’m comparing it with a mac and they are overpriced and you could do so much better, blah blah blah.
The fact is that if latency problems can be overcome, there is really no reason beside privacy that one needs to own and maintain their own computer. Rented space that you pay monthly for is cheaper, and will adapt to fit your specific needs. It works much better for a internet connected society to share several supercomputers then for individuals to each own their own.
If data provides competitive advantage, while compute is commoditized, there is no need for a false dichotomy between cloud and local. Future hybrid architecture can fluidly move the line between local and distributed compute, including other-peoples-algorithms, fusing local (secure, private, competitive, licensed) data/algos with public data/algos.
Local storage and local compute continue to fall in cost.
As long as humans remain sensitive to subsecond latency of repeated stimulus, and the speed of light remains unchanged, local user interfaces will offer competititve advantages.
> Future hybrid architecture can fluidly move the line between local and distributed compute, including other-peoples-algorithms, fusing local (secure, private, competitive, licensed) data/algos with public data/algos.
At the risk of sounding like a grumpy graybeard, it's impressive how all of these things have been implemented at least in Plan 9 for almost twenty years now.
Thanks for the pointer. Could you recommend any Plan9 docs on these features? Are Plan9 users mostly running on bare-metal or VMs? If the latter, would you recommend VMware, Xen or something else?
The Plan 9 documentation is pretty good, but 9front's introductory documents ( https://code.google.com/p/plan9front/wiki/fqa ) are probably a little better to get your feet wet with.
> Are Plan9 users mostly running on bare-metal or VMs? If the latter, would you recommend VMware, Xen or something else?
Both, I guess... VirtualBox is the only one I tried it on. Its distributed nature makes it fairly easy to run it on a server and connect to that from a system running Plan 9 from User Space (see http://swtch.com/plan9port/ ), so that you also get a... well, a functional desktop, I guess.
I can access my computer (computers, actually, all at home) now, from any internet connected device, anywhere. My "laptop" is an iPad with a keyboard, and with that, I can do remotely what I can do locally. It's just as convenient [1], no recurring charge and if the government (or law enforcement) ever becomes interested in my data, I'll have a chance to know about it, since my data resides at my house, not some company half a continent away.
[1] Nearly so---for me, there's no true replacement for an IBM model M keyboard.
I disagree with the "Dropbox, iCloud, Google drive" thing. Nobody is using them as a platform to work their files on, but more as a quick way of sharing files. not reliable to store or else.
Definitely not "nobody". I've had several clients where the dropbox folder was where work got done. For all of my non-git and non-movie projects, dropbox is where the files live and are worked on.
When a friend had his laptop stolen he said that it wasn't a big deal other than the money lost, as 90% of his files were in dropbox or Google drive.
In my world at least, this is the way the wind is blowing.
> And let's not get into the whole privacy thing. A 1 TB drive is, what, fifty bucks today -- and people would rather store their files in a datacenter across the ocean?
People would rather have convenience of access across their devices. Despite the fact that people tend to have home networks and go around with a wifi-enabled device in their pocket, syncing tools remain atrocious.
That's the pain that dropbox addresses, not the cost of storage.
> And let's not get into the whole privacy thing. A 1 TB drive is, what, fifty bucks today -- and people would rather store their files in a datacenter across the ocean?
Yep. Fact is, HNers are much more concerned with privacy than your average consumer is. Most people care much more about convenience than privacy. I don't really know if that's a good or a bad thing, but it's a truth.
This is not about the cost of hardware or software, it's about the price (and hassle) of maintaining them. Also, it's not about browsing reddit and accessing gmail; it's more about 'real' office applications and the like.
In certain non-tech-savvy environments, such a thing has a very good chance of adoption.
Also, it's a nice venue for renting heavyweight applications (like CAD, graphics, finance, etc) for a limited time, with a full guarantee against violating the policy by users.
And having to find out that some obscure feature you were using is now gone, and some other semi-obscure feature you were using is now in a different location and you have to rework your entire workflow yet again. It gets tiresome after twenty years.
I can easily create a Windows or Linux desktop machine in the cloud at Digital Ocean or Vultr.com for very little money and access it with rdesktop and/or a VPN. Amazon has a slightly more "enterprise" desktop-in-cloud offering that's basically the same idea.
A lot of the underlying technology for paperspace certainly exists today and its best to think of what we are doing as providing a layer on top of it all (and polishing the pieces that didn't work so great before):
To give an analogy, cloud storage was definitely around long before dropbox and google drive. It was simple, I uploaded a file to FTP, you opened your FTP client, and we could share files. The reality was that less tech-savvy people might never get past the install step.
What dropbox/google drive/box did was take an existing (and increasingly commodity) offering and wrapped it in a layer that made it accessible to a whole new class of users.
Digital Ocean is amazing and we are shooting for the same simplicity for full desktop computers.
I very much like Browserstack for doing this as it allows for easy testing. I just don't like Browserstack's pricing as no shop I've worked in, and my own company, has ever needed it continuously. Rather, we need sorta pay-as-you-go minutes like cheap cell phones
I'm having a weird issue where my modem keeps restarting. I'll fix it, but it's not bad enough to worry about. With paperspace, I get to break into a cold sweat because I can't access my shit!
yo dawg I heard you need a computer to use your computer. Jokes aside, tablets/phones are carried with us everywhere and for on the go can accomplish most of what one may do when they are away from a dedicated pc. I can ssh into any one of my computers and do whatever is needed from my phone for the most part.
I'm really curious as to what the main use case would be ? I think this would make big strides in saving licensing costs if it were possible for certain cases where a shared computer may make sense.
I thought OnLive and other thin client gaming services took a shot at latency, made some great achievements, but hit walls.[1-4] It seems hard to put a few miles between the game and the screen and keep response times natural.
Maybe 99.9% of computing doesn't need latency as low as FPS and fighters though. Maybe this is just taking OnLive[5] tech and making a really smooth remote desktop out of it. If so, I guess this kind of a shoot for the stars, land on the moon technology. I guess that's still pretty cool.
I am very excited about this, however I found the copy on the website to be extremely confusing. Here is what I think is going on, would love confirmation/clarification:
* Paperspace is running some sort of super low-latency system to serve me a VM in my web browser
* The paperweight is a computer that runs such a web browser so I can attach it anywhere I have a monitor (like a raspberry pi?)
We are updating the site to be more clear, so thanks for the feedback!
And you are correct. We provide you a desktop OS that we deliver directly to a web browser. Unlike traditional remote desktop protocols (i.e. maybe you have VPNed into your work computer from home, for example) we are developing a high-performance streaming protocol that makes this machine feel like its right in front of you.
I might just be dumb, but I was having trouble understanding what the purpose of the Paperweight was. The above comment sorted me out, but I didn't get that understanding from your site.
Paperspace founder here. So sorry that the copy is confusing--we've been really struggling with this but that's exactly what is going on. Paperweight is just a really cheap/dumb computer that connects with our servers that do all the heavy lifting. We prototyped a lot on the Pi, very similar setup. Any ideas on how to improve the copy would be appreciated...
What are the advantages to this over something like Amazon Workspaces? With that I can use a thin client, ipad / android apps, desktop apps, etc.. We can use AD, NAT, images or none of it.
It looks awesome, but I can't think of a recent time when I had access to a modern browser only. Does it have a good support for tablet access / extra controls?
great questions! amazon workspaces is conceptually very similar but implemented very differently. A few key differences: 1. they focus pretty exclusively on enterprise and the tooling around configuring, monitoring, and backing up AWS is not something you can jump right in to as a non-technical person. 2. we
With paperspace, we want to provide the power of cloud computing with a really foolproof access layer. i.e. you go to our website, click a button and a new machine is provisioned for you with all the tricky stuff worked out. In the case the paperweight, using it requires almost no configuration at all. you plug it in and it connects to your desktop in the cloud.
I love this idea. I'm very tempted to pre-order but the lack of a pricing page keeps away from pulling my wallet out.
Here is one use I'm really interested in. I'd love to get this for my father who is not very computer literate and needs a lot of help with it. He doesn't have strong security concerns because he only uses it for email and basic card games. Unfortunately I live hundreds of miles away and have a difficult time doing remote support for him. With this device+service it cleans up the clutter on his desk, and I hope allows for us both to connect to the VPS even though I don't have the paperweight. This way I can help him when he needs it and I can connect with ease.
I don't think doing that is pretty hard with today's technologies. I do the same to my father using a free version of TeamViewer and setting unattended access on his machine. I can access his machine whenever I want, fix things and close the session. I don't need anything more than that.
Who remembers Sun Microsystems (now Oracle) Sun Ray's [1]?
I worked for Sun (UK) in 2005 and they used them for all their employees.
I never understood why they didn't sell them to schools and enterprise. Maybe they tried but couldn't.
I really liked the true hot-desking. Find a desk anywhere (even another building) stick your badge into one of the thin clients and you had your entire desktop.
You could also use USB thumb drives and it would work as expected.
My manager had a Sun-ray in his house. He also used to go abroad to the other Sun offices and would just carry on with his session like nothing changed.
What if I muck up my space, can I go back to a fresh install? Which flavor of linux?
Where are my files stored? Say I want to take those files on the plane with me and work from my laptop, will I need something like Dropbox/OneDrive/SpiderOak?
Paperspace founder here. We offer an instant rollback to a safe state which is a neat thing that VMs can do that regular computers can't (or at least don't do very well). Everything is stored in the cloud so have your entire desktop available to you at all times meaning you wouldn't need to transfer your stuff to a cloud storage service. It's actually just like cloud storage but with the added benefit of having your whole operating system (apps, settings, shortcuts) on the go.
With minimum speed of 15mbps to access, it's like impossible for students in developing country which i think they more need service like this for study, research, etc.
For example in Indonesia, in my campus internet speed is only about 3-4mbps.
Scaling infrastructure is hard, i think the future of service similar to paperspace is not a bunch of feature that they offer, but it's more about how they can optimize data compression to deliver full of experience with low internet speed. That's the key to own big market.
I live in Silicon Valley and even I don't get 15mbps with my home Internet, which I pay $40/month for (which illustrates how bad the Internet situation is in the US as well).
Cool! I've worked with similar technologies in the past. Most common issues are with peripherals and web browsing (sticky frames) in enterprise environments. Ncomputing came closest to what I was looking for. Integrates perfectly with printers, scanners, barcode scanners, usb sticks, audio etc. Small-form factor with wiFi (not all models) and you are able to host the instances right in your DC or LAN.
Which is a full ssh client implemented in Javascript. It creates complete ssh sessions in the browser and then uses a TCP proxy on the server to connect to the target server.
This was kind of a tech demo as a first step to implementing a complete OS in the browser. I can see that you could have encrypted drive images that the browser would download and launch (based on a user supplied password which never hits the server). It seems like a neat idea, though I'm not exactly sure what the practical applications are! :)
Sure, I linked to a in browser Linux emulation too. But both I think Windows isn't really what you want, and the Linux emulation has no network access.
They both also rely on emulating an x86 system. I think what might be interesting is something that creates an in browser process model, possibly POSIX compliant. To which you could target applications, critically I think they'd need network access.
As much I understand, the service (not the device) is not generally available?
When will it be ready? When will it be possible to use it from other countries (other than US)?
The service as such is very interesting, for example, when I want to have quick access to a Linux/Windows desktop with a particular OS without the need to install on real iron.
Depends of course on the pricing. The idea sounds really neat!
I already use this with Splashtop. I have a beast computer connected to a 100Mbps network offsite and connect to it via my budget laptop.
Really neat, but not suitable for games due to the slight but noticable delay.
However, it kicks ass to have 2 computers at the same time, if one starts lagging I just go to the other one. Similarly, I can download heavy files or encode video on one of them while working on the other. I also can do all downloading on the offsite computer to keep my slower home network in top shape.
The good thing about Splashtop though is that it doesn't work like a video stream. Instead it only updates the parts of the screen that has changed. Meaning I can use Splashtop for chatting/surfing with almost no download bandwidth required locally. It also works great for HD streaming though.
Is this designed to compete with thin client offerings from the big boys when it comes to larger installs?
One big advantage for something like microsoft remote desktop services is ability to throw a beefy server into an existing infra with aging desktops and use them as thin clients/dumb terminals.
I can see an advantage of this as being able to take just that box when i travel, plug it into any random machine, and get an instant resume of my previous desktop session over VPN... but this makes it oh-so-close to Windows To Go?
Most importantly, what is the monthly cost of the actual VPC (not the hardware)? Its not listed anywhere on the site that i could find. What would you do better than Azure, Amazon VPC, rackspace, or multiple others?
So after reading the page I can buy your computer to keep at home which can then connect me to a virtual machine in the cloud? As I was reading I kept feeling like I had to buy that $50 machine to do this but it sounds like I don't.
(apologies for the confusion -- we are working now on reworking the homepage with more info)
just to clarify: the paperweight is completely optional. The primary interface for paperspace right now is a web browser but if you want an inexpensive device to act as a dedicated terminal, you can buy the paperweight.
Is it a USB boot drive or a little micro PC that plugs into a monitor?
It would be nice to have a cheap "disposable laptop" that works off a cloud-desktop that you don't need to worry about losing or breaking. People don't buy laptops because they're slow anymore, but because they're physically worn out!
The equivalent of a cheap Chromebook that's like a real desktop with lots of power and runs Windows games and real applications!
In the future, I wonder how you could implement a cloud-desktop that's zero-knowledge a la SpiderOak. That would be the ultimate secure workstation.
So 30+ years later, we've rediscovered the dumb terminal. Interesting.
It's a neat little service/gizmo. I'd like to see an honest assessment of Paperspace's weaknesses. I doubt it will handle most games at all well, for example. That's okay, not everyone needs or wants that, but it's still an important point. I see that they do mention sensitivity to connection speed, which is good ("For the best experience we recommend >15Mbps download speed and less than 60 ms of latency"), but that's going to affect a lot of people's use cases.
The loss of which I've bemoaned for about 30+ years. This, or something very like, it is exactly what I want going forward. My biggest concern would the fate of my virtual computer should the provider go belly up. Without providing for that contingency I'd be really hesitant to put all my eggs in the basket.
I'm awfully leery of giving someone else total control over my computer for any reason. Take the security concerns over Dropbox and cloud storage and multiply them by 10. Convenience is great, but I'm not sure it's worth the prospect of willingly handing someone else complete observation and control over my entire computer and everything I do with it.
You really should send vectors, not video stream. It'll allow to keep bandwidth requirements low for most of the office workflow. Of course watching video on youtube require sending video stream and that's where you embed H.264 stream, but not everywhere. AFAIK Windows RDP works closely with the operating system to allow it to send only vector primitives instead of raw bitmaps. You can't stream lossless 4k retina video and anything other is a compromise for many people.
Yea, so VNC is really versatile but not very performant. We set out to build a remote desktop protocol that could stream HD video streams and which would make doing things like high-end graphics and other media-rich applications possible.
On a more technical level, VNC sends block of pixels whereas we are using a video stream.
This would be useful in places with notoriously bad internet connections. When I was in China a couple years ago, even getting a reliable connection was a stretch, let alone being able to use it for something other than transfer of small plaintext.
I set up a box back at home and was able to use my 60MB connection by just transferring I/O via something like VNC or LogMeIn. I can see this being valuable for users in countries with subpar internet connectivity.
Thanks for the typo catch... Great use-case btw, it's surprising how well virtual desktops can perform on slow connections. I'm from the east coast but work in Mountain View now and I stream my desktop from Virginia everyday for work. Right now in fact haha.
I can definitely see this work in an office environment. Working remote, collaborating and sharing could be easier. But a lot of companies might actually demand on-premise setups though.
When I'm using AWS here in India, with my server there in the US, I face a clear lag. And that too in the terminal. I've seen browser testing tools like BrowserStack lag. I'm curious how Paperspace tackles this. And I sincerely hope they open source their wizardry!
It's pretty hard to get past the speed of light. I assume that as demand grows for their service internationally they'd have to distribute data centers around the world.
I used to work at Amazon Web Services, and before I left I worked on a demo for their Amazon AppStream product. It licensed the PC-over-IP protocol http://www.teradici.com/pcoip-technology
From what I know, Paperspace can't be successful without a heavy dose of similar technology.
Did they develop something meaningful? Or do they just assume that it's going to work without it?
I already use this with Splashtop. I have a beast computer connected to a 100Mbps network offsite and connects to it via my budget laptop.
Really neat, but not suitable for games due to the slight but noticable delay.
However, it kicks ass to have 2 computers at the same time, if one starts lagging I just go to the other. Similarly, I can download Heavy files on the offsite computer while keeping my laptop and slower home Connection free.
Been waiting for this and I'll sign up the second it's available. When might that be?
Use case: As I write this, my computer is rendering a 4 minute video in the background. For the next hour, my computer is near useless and I've got a hundred of these to go.
I'd love to be able to set it to remote render on a super-computer and close the tab. And, I may never have to upgrade my computer again!
I think what you need is not a "fast streamed remote host" but a renderfarm subscription. Of course I'm not sure if there are video render farms out there.
I prefer to use Linux on my machines, but need to use a Windows machine for various tasks such as CAD/CAM. I'd pre-order now if I had some idea of monthly pricing. There's a big difference between £5/month for a Windows VPS that can run SolidWorks and £50/month.
Nicely done, very slick, you have nailed a lot of the pain points of VDI. Shameless plug but at leostreamdesktops.com and leostream.com we have been in the VDI market for over a decade with a MSP and enterprise focus. Good luck on the venture, these are exciting times for VDI!
I was using an aws GPU (nvidia grid) instance at spot pricing for a while to use as a remote desktop. It was nifty but ultimately the GPU instance would need to be an order of magnitude more powerful than my laptop to really make it worth while
Very interesting idea when I finally saw Paperweight in the video. I pre-ordered. But are you publicizing the tilt amount, how much you've raised of it, or what the timeline is on actually shipping out devices?
Will there be any way to connect local USB peripherals (like phones, audio interfaces, game controllers, etc.) either to the Paperweight (better named the Puck) or to a local computer for service by the remote one?
A suggestion, on the pop-up after clicking pre-order from the nav-bar, add somewhere what is to be pre-ordered. I was confused a bit, but then see it's on the CTA container. Awesome looking product, good luck!
This seems like a complete homerun for small to medium sized businesses like the one I'm working in now, provided that's a major focus and their specific needs are met (monitoring, backup, security).
Absolutely. If you are a very large company (lets say >500 people) then you can buy some expensive and complicated tools from the big guys to handle this kind of thing. We are trying to wrap the hard parts of administering desktops into a really easy interface so that i.e. redundant and regula backups are no longer a big worry
What is low monthly cost mean? $10/month would be low for someone, expensive for others. Why not at least give the figure or even ballpark figure? (or at least in comparative terms - a cup of coffee...)
Cute branding, but your market for the desktop thin-client will be companies looking for VDI and I doubt you'll get very far selling them something called a "paperweight".
Well, probably not any web browser: I'm thinking that elinks is definitely out, maybe conkeror will work and maybe it won't. It'd be interesting if surf did…
But if I have a browser, I have a computer. And if I have a computer.. can I not RDC/VNC? I am honestly trying to question the punchline and not being sarcastic.
Are you guys supporting multiple regions? Let's say I start my day in Asia then fly to the US, would I be able to access my stuff using the nearest server?
Somewhat off-topic, but it's kind of disappointing that the intro video doesn't play on my copy of Firefox nightly on Linux -- Kickstarter videos play fine, since it seems like they provide a webm video.
Error says:
Awww, snap!
This video can’t be played with your current setup.
I could open up Chrome or Opera to play the video, but that's too much friction for something I might not care too much about.
It _looks_ like Vimeo -- I wonder if they let you know how many people tried to view the video but couldn't.
so all of the obvious questions have been asked, but if I hear the video right, we're talking about $10/month?
Last I checked, Amazons own Workspaces product starts around $35/month, just no cool hardware interface, or fancy streaming optimization.
A Chromebook adjunct. A way to get Windows and its apps on the Chromebook. The lack (or difficulty) thereof is what stands between me and owning one.
I'm considering teaching, selling and supporting Chromebooks and the people using them in "old folks homes" (as we called them long, long ago) as an inexpensive and low skill entry to the internet. Some potential clients will have enough experience that they will require Windows access. If (and it is a bit hard to determine from the site) Windows machines with persistence can be created that problem is solved.
Have you looked at the issue of migration from an existing Windows home system into one of yours? Were that made relatively easy it would be a huge benefit. Perhaps a partnership with Laplink and their PCmover would benefit both you and them.
Does it say what the computer is full with? I would probably be not that interested if it is bees. In contrast, if it is dark chocolate, I would be very interested.
Paperspace founder here. You can take snapshots at any time and we offer an instant rollback to a safe state in the event something happened. One of the neat benefits of virtual machines over traditional desktops.
I'm extremely curious, has Paperspace actually developed an entirely new video codec, encoder, and efficient JS decoder for this?
I'm a little confused by the statements so far (and the comments are flowing in, so apologies if this was addressed while I was typing): "we are using a video stream", "using a JS renderer", "building a streaming protocol", "using GPU tech originally developed for video game streaming", "a remote desktop protocol that could stream HD video"
So, is just the streaming protocol you've developed and not the codec? In my expiriments, simply pushing out h264 NAL units over websockets and passing them to the decoder was a pretty solid start. Add a tiny layer of buffering over that and I imagine it'd be fairly stable. Ultimately, I backed away from h264 for licensing and performance issues.
Also, what's the transport into the browser? Websockets? WebRTC data channels? Have you encountered performance issues with Firefox not being able to handle websockets or data channels in web workers? (Which is seemingly coming in FF37.)