There's talk about web-served applications being the coming thing. For example, the hoopla about Google serving word processing functionality. But what if you just ran a server with, say, KDE on it, and let people connect via NX or something? You could have your customers create an account, and then you give them a bit /home space and voila: portable desktop! Now you have word processing, IM, email, GIMP, xgalaga... you name it!
Well, someone did just that. A place called CosmoPOD.com is serving up free KDE desktops with 1GB of storage space. http://dot.kde.org/1130593003/ It uses customized menus and KDE's "kiosk" mode to disable certain functions. You can get pretty much any type of application you want, but the person says that he's not going to install multiple applications that do the same thing. The business model is currently to serve up AdWords on the side of the window. I'm one of those people that can't stand to be wasting screen real estate on anything but the application I'm using. I always maximize windows, and oftentimes I configure the app to not have any panes that aren't necessary. However, I'm going to give this a try, just to see what it's like. It'd be nice (but overkill) to have a whole desktop available at work. File coordination might be kind of tricky. That's what this is supposed to fix, but there's no way I'm giving up my home desktop, and I'm not storing sensitive files on a computer outside of my total control. There's a new kernel out! Yippee! Features include FUSE and DCCP support. DCCP is like UDP with congestion control, which I've seen wished for on various projects I've followed. FUSE is like LUFS. It allows one to blend various resources into the filesystem. For example, you can mount a remote filesystem at some point in your local filesystem using SFTP. There are a couple of encrypted filesystems using FUSE, and even a WikipediaFS that treats Wikipedia articles like files. (Gotta try that one.) http://fuse.sourceforge.net -todd -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-list
