What do you use your operating system for?

[Aren Jay]

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[Dr Caleb]

Games. CAD. Photo Manipulation.

I do many other things, 'offline' for which a browser would be useless.

[xopher]

I use MS Access on a daily basis for work, chucking of gigabytes of data around the world with distributed file servers, something that poor IE or Firefox or Safari would choke and die on.

[Jinx]

Another vote for games. I have yet to see a browser that will play Crysis. ;)

[Aren Jay]

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[offroadkarter]

Is there anything that you do, right now, that you couldn't do with a web browser and a special homepage website or multiple websites?


Watching you 24/7 and controlling robots to leave weird monitoring devices in your house...

And spill coffee on the wall :P

[Dr Caleb]

Just wondering if a browser alone could replace Windows or other OSes.

Have a game vault web page and other application web pages and have people log in like a terminal over the web. Given how much is done over the web now a days.

anyone think it would be viable?

There are several 'thin client' PC's out now. ASUS EePC is one. It runs just basic programs, like a browser mail client and work processing. All Linux based. ;)

It's a very useful machine, for just basic surfing and such.

[Aren Jay]

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[Dr Caleb]

Yeah Eee PC ish, only more so.

sound interesting?

Mmmmm, no. There is nothing out there that can match the bandwidth of a high end video card, such that it could be remote to the computer. And I wouldn't want to play Unreal 3 or Crysis on it. :) Even 4GB fibre meant for SAN storage couldn't match a local video card for pure bit throughput. And if it was all server side, you'd have to run a second machine as a server anyhow.

Same with CAD. Photo manipulation, perhaps, but video editing - no.

I like the idea of a stripped down single use machine, but I don't use my machine for any one thing. Windows is also not built to have only certain modules loaded, and most of the games I play don't run in any other OS. Which is the only reason I have a Windows install around at all.

I do have a VMWare server, that I have server images, workstation images and single purpose servers on. But they just can't handle some of the client side tasks as well as a proper workstation.

[Aren Jay]

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[Dr Caleb]

Redfly looks OK I guess. If you want a low-profile type PC. About the same as the others.

Like I said, I have some high end PCs, so to me it's just another gadget I don't need. ;)