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Thought 51: The Cloud

I have a vision of a tablet and a desktop working together as monitor and workhorse. A tablet as just an extension of a PC. The PC acts as a rendering engine, compiler, digital library, the tablet as a screen an input device. When the tablet returns to be near to the PC it become a second monitor for that PC.

Ok, I am in the market for a new PC at the moment and have dabbled a bit with early tablets (think in 2003). And for the most part the tablet part of that old laptop worked pretty well and the technology has merely been catapulted by capacitance and battery bad-assary. But the tablet still lack the true power of a desktop to compile complex code or render 3D graphics. Why can't we have both? A tablet that can dock to a PC and have the PC just use the screen. Then run off with just the tablet part and go read, take notes, etc. It seams useful. I think 'they' are starting to catch up with my ideas, given the Asus Transformer and the phone-laptop hybrid thing. So, here's my next push: Phone slots into tablet to provide GPS and internet everywhere, sync's email. The Tablet slot into a PC to provide the features of the phone + a screen with touch input. And the PC provides the power for games and true work power for those of us that need it.

So here's how I'm doing to do it.
Step one a PC desktop multi-core processor, running Linux with VNC and Synergy. The tablet runs a version of Linux (Possibly Android) with Synergy and an X-Server. The tablet runs a virtual desktop and X applications from the main server box, with VNC as a backup for interacting with the desktop. When the Tablet is 'docked' synergy kicks in with the keyboard in mouse input coming from the server. The best part is that synchronization can occur easily when the tablet is docked in the USB port to recharge. The phone should not matter, but should allow tethering to the tablet. Then you just take whatever resources you need with you. Of course this is just the first part of the plan, the second is to utilize RPC based apps that can load balance computing power across all three of the devices using each to boost the performance of the system as a whole. Why waste the tablet and phone processor that could be used as (slow) extensions of the desktop? This could be done via and RPC or agent-chalkboard processing scheme (i.e. post a program and resource requirements, who ever can handle the job runs it).

I think I'll just have to give this a try and see where we get to. Now, to find the right combination of tablet/pc that'll let me pull this off before google or apple become aware of this idea and release some thing far more awesome than I could create in a month or two of tinkering.
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