A little rant about this new thingy ..
So, in the beginning there was the web. Then came the desktop. Then the web became web 2.0. Now, behold of the desktop 2.0.
You've already heard of it. Google Crome OS. Software-as-a-service. Cloud. Virtual computers. Virtual desktop. Have you tried it ?
Ghost Inc. provides you with a virtual desktop. That's a full-screen web 2.0 flash application that mimics a desktop. There are about just those applications you use during a week: Web brower, email client, media player, office suite, and storage space.
Wait. This sounds just like your average work terminal server .. and yes: Ghost is in practice a citrix clone that runs inside your browser. You treat it as your desktop-away-from-home. You've already got one for work. Now you get one for your private use. I'd imagine it being great for those travelling and using different computers every day.
Actually, Ghost call this application a virtual computer, but hold your horses. You won't get an internet adress. There are no background processes. You spend your own CPU. And the network traffic travels between your own interface and your target network.
So, this seems to be more of a virtual pseudo operating system running combined inside of your browser and on the cloud. What goes where is hard to tell, but certainly the storage space is in the cloud, since it's provided by Amazon S3. A lot of the applications available at the desktop may be using Cloud Power (tm).
Mobile access is supported. You can access a downsized and stripped version of your desktop, with mobile-enabled versions of some applications. Neat.
So, whats the downsides? Applications will probably be your major pain. You can't apt-get install your favourite vim edition. There is no nethack! Just like your strictly managed work citrix terminal ..
Privacy? I would not bet on it, but they claim it. I've yet to enter any external credentials. Me might be paranoid.
Availability? Best effort.
And then there's this thing called shared files, which lets any ghost user access the file. This directory can be searched, so there's this small search engine thingy inside of your desktop. It turns up some really interesting executables. Take care. Your invulnerable virtual desktop may bring death and destruction to your hardware platform.
There is of course a whole lot of copyrighted material shared. How can you avoid that kind of abuse? Let's see who is being punished ..
Lastly, there are some cool features to be mentioned: Google Drive lets you use your gmail account file system for additional storage. (Just like gmailfs for linux). OpenSAM provides SSO with all of your web applications. FTP access to your slice of S3.
Enough ramble. Time to go fishing. Cheers!
