X Windows dumb client for the modern age
Title says it all really. Nothing terribly new here. Move along.
Amazon Web Services has made a significant enhancement to its Workspaces desktop-as-a-service service, by allowing support for Teradici's PC-over-IP protocol and “zero clients” that run it. Workspaces is a US$35 a month service that offers Windows Server 2008 re-skinned with the Windows 7 UI. Until today, consuming the service …
Not really.
I have used and managed Teradici PCOIP zero clients for several years.
They are really very good devices - easy to manage, and perform well.
You can do remote 3D graphics easily on them, and they have some clever adaptive compression.
Also very secure - traffic is of course encrypted. You can also lock out any USB devices other than those you permit - so no danger of viruses being spread on USB sticks etc.if that is a concern.
That is pretty much "dumb terminal/X terminal" updated for the intervening decades of progress, isn't it? I understand it, and I do like the idea - so yes, the encryption is new, the graphics are much fancier and you get USB support, but which of those isn't an obvious feature of "modern version of X terminal"?
The centralisation has big advantages, and disadvantages too. That big powerful central box is cheaper to administer and secure than lots of little machines, but expensive to buy. For bursty loads like typical office (or indeed developer) work I imagine it could be a great advantage: you get the full attention of a handful of Xeon cores to compile or load your code, with all the applications already cached in RAM.
(I still remember when the more clued-in geeks at work would fire up Netscape Navigator on the big shared Sun box over X, because it was faster than cranking it to life on the diskless 486 Win3.1 machines we used at the time ... ah, nostalgia!)