by Christopher Mims, Technology Review
You’re not actually running Windows on the iPad, just streaming a continuous video feed of Windows directly to your iPad. So you have to be on a reasonably fast connection (wifi, not 3G) for it to work. Windows and its apps run in “the cloud,” or in this case OnLive’s remote servers. This is an interesting application of a much larger trend: offloading some, or in this case nearly all, of the processing for an application into the cloud. For example, processor-intensive tasks like face recognition are better accomplished by remote servers, and everything from location services like Skyhook to your cell phone’s email client represent a series of trade-offs between server and client side processing. AJAX, Web 2.0, etc. are also part of this trend of re-balancing which parts of the application are best chewed through locally or somewhere else.
http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27476/?p1=blogs
Share on Facebook