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I don't know of anything that does what OnLinve does, although Remote Desktop (tsclient/rdesktop) or Live Mesh (now available for Mac, http://mesh.com/ might work well enough to try. RD can save bandwidth by just sending the draw commands (rather than the rendered frames) over the network, which is a big advantage when working remotely on a slow connection. You actually can use this technique for gaming, but it uses the client's video card, which negates the purpose. For gaming on a fast LAN, though, it might be able to push rendered frames rather than draw commands, using the server's GPU to do the work.

OnLive uses lossy compression to provide the video stream, which of course neither of the services I've mentioned above do (they're designed for working remotely, and having your documents blurred by compression artifacts wouldn't go over well). It would be an interesting project, though.

You should try Live Mesh.

Not a troll! I am serious -- I use it all the time. I use it to sync files between several computers AND Microsoft's servers, so I have a backup of anything important "in the cloud," accessible by Web browser if I ever need it.

I've been doing that with dropbox on my ubuntu box

You should try Live Mesh.

Not a troll! I am serious -- I use it all the time. I use it to sync files between several computers AND Microsoft's servers, so I have a backup of anything important "in the cloud," accessible by Web browser if I ever need it.

I know Microsoft has a bad rep on here but Live mesh is a very usfull product you can store u[ to the 2GB online (which it then syncs with) or sync P2P if you whant.
It handels conflicts by showing an error icon on the side of the screen(it adds a small pane to the side of synced folders in explorer) in folder view and lets you chose which file to keep, it suports windows, mac (no P2P) and windows mobile.

It works on Macs, Windows PCs, and mobile devices, (apparently, but I do use it on the first two happily). Could you not share your desktop folders on your devices, and get MS to sync it all for you? Alas, Linux is excluded. 5Gb space online last time I looked.

Windows Live Mesh
https://www.mesh.com/

"With Live Mesh, you can synchronize files with all of your devices, so you always have the latest versions handy. Access your files from any device or from the web, easily share them with others, and get notified whenever someone changes a file.

Working on one computer, but need a program from another? No problem. Use Live Mesh to connect to your other computer and access its desktop as if you were sitting right in front of it. "

Check out windows live mesh ( http://www.mesh.com/ ) . It works with Macs and windows mobile phones (no linux support :( ) and you get 5GB of cloud storage too.

That's not the issue at hand here. The site linked from the summary, Live Mesh (Beta), supports sharing and discussing documents. It does not do it in real-time, but, realistically, the real-time part of Google Wave's colloborative document editing is not that important.

The real issues are design and openness. I am a bit confused about where Ray Ozzie is coming from: I think he means that the problem with Google Wave is that it is too simple and web-like, not that it is too complex. That is, Google Wave has a lot of potiential, but much of that potiential depends on people writing gadgets/add-ons for it, as opposed to its features being limited to those Google/Microsoft can think up but already layed out in a structured way. The same issue is often referenced as one of the web's greatest strengths -- and weaknesses.

There is another large issue related to openness: privacy. With Google Wave, you can get all of the features running it on your own server, fully controling the software and hardware. Live Mesh is just yet another web service like Dropbox, etc. which depends on Microsoft's Live Mesh servers. Then again, Microsoft may plan on making it part of Windows Server, which gets rid of the privacy issue.

I think the web has shown quite clearly that leaving a protocol open allows for wide-ranged, unexpected innovations to be based on it. Google has shown off some of its ideas on what Wave is useful for. The Wave groups and various blogs have plenty more. Most likely, if Wave actually catches on, at least some of the common/mainstream uses 5 years from now will bare only passing resemblance to the ideas being thrown around today.

Oh, yeah, skydrive...
but isn't that a bit like Office Live
but isn't that a bit like Live Mesh

Can anyone say "Confused Product Strategy" three time backwards?

http://www.mesh.com/Welcome/TourDeveloper.aspx