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.
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...