I think the main "leap of technology" here is the use of multiple video cards and keyboards with a single computer. That is a large step above simple serial terminals or remote sessions. While the idea certainly isn't new, the methodology and the features are much more advanced. For most office work a 500MHz machine is fine. Once the general overhead of the OS is accounted for each user only takes up a fraction of the CPU power for their application and the I/O involved. By using independent video cards they can take more load off the CPU by not needing to compress and send display info for a remote session, which would also clog the network with multiple users having simultaneous access.
I like their idea, but I think it's something that could be added in to Linux fairly easily with PCI video cards and USB devices. Once you work out a frame work of assigning particular groups of I/O to each other, start an X session for that group and off they go...
Jon.
On 12/13/06, Jonathan Hutchins hutchins@tarcanfel.org wrote:
Somewhere, buried in a box on the back porch, I have a ~ten port serial expansion module intended for just this sort of arrangement. It had terminals running off of a PC. Obviously, no sound or USB, we're talking pre-Windows hardware here. _______________________________________________ Kclug mailing list Kclug@kclug.org http://kclug.org/mailman/listinfo/kclug