Scott Balneaves wrote:
On Sun, Apr 02, 2006 at 11:41:57AM -0300, Timothy Legge wrote:
Arno Teigseth wrote:
I think I will try a setup. The only thing that strikes me as
"difficult" would be the booting, as many of the homes have a
router/firewall box with integrated DHCP server (=our enemy). But people
would use PII's with a hard drive that could get some boot things
written to it. Or some smart thin clients...
Etherboot includes support for downloading a kernel via http and I
believe has dns support. If required you could hard code the
ip/hostname in Etherboot so it should not be hugely difficult...
This dream of a home Cable modem/DSL based LTSP client has popped up on
this list on and off since it's inception. A quick search through the
archives will verify this.
Several problems with it exist:
1) First of all, assuming you're going to provide storage space + some
kind of local devices access, how much space are you going to give them?
The "$400 PC" probably comes with an 80 or 120 gig drive. How much
space/user are you realistically going to be able to offer them?
2) Neither "cheap" Cable or DSL services offer any kind of guarenteed
bandwidth provisions. Grandma isn't going to be too pleased with the
service when the network slows down to 21.2 Kilobytes/sec because every
15 year old kid on the block's P2P'ing the latest 50 cent album.
3) Most Cable/DSL services have a monthly Gigabyte transfer limit before
you start getting charged extra. If every byte of screen info's gonna
rack up your charges, it's not going to take too many sessions of
looking at the gradkids latest 1600x1200 pictures before Grandma's
monthly charges get pretty high.
Things to think about before you go out and get the small business loan.
:)
The other question is: if ownership and control are synonymous, then who
owns your data? What happens when you miss a subscription payment for
your computer service? Local client/server systems work because the sys
admin is a trusted user, but that's not neccessarily the case with some
"WebTV on steroids" product run by Megacorp Inc. . One answer might be
encrypted filesystems, but that puts the burden of maintenance back on
the user. Or have the data stored locally and the OS and apps are
remote, but that really doesn't change anything because you need the
apps to use the data, so the service provider still owns the data. I
think the bandwidth and diskspace issues are minor problems compared to
the trust issue.
J. Toman
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