http://www.mainframe2.com/
Basically, you can run any application in a browser, given that your connection is faster than 3Mbps. So, every photo editor (e.g. Creative Cloud programmes), video renderers, 3D simulators, even Paint! The processing is done in the cloud, then it streams an image back to your screen. Basically, what this does, or rather, has the potential to do, is to remove the need for desktop computing. No more need to buy HDDs, RAM, CPUs, GPUs etc, because everything is done in the cloud.
Any views on this? Will it change the ways PC's are used?
Obvious issues would be connectivity, security and responsiveness, but they definitely work with those issues already.
- Connectivity is primarily your own problem.
- Security, I don't quite know how they solve.
- Responsiveness is solved by deploying an array of server farms across the US and EU (at the moment they use Amazon's EC2), so you connect to the closest one, thus eliminating high latencies. They claim to have latency down to less than 100ms, regardless of where you are.
Personally I think this is where we'll end up eventually, with the possibility to e.g. render really complex animations with your smartphone, connected to some WiFi (not sure why anyone would do that, but just pointing out that it can be done).
Only downside at the moment is that it does not include any form of high end gaming. That's basically what http://www.onlive.co.uk/ does though. Another example of cloud processing.