Curious Blend of VPN, PDA and USB Drive

An anonymous reader writes "Realm Systems has developed a cellphone-sized mobile device that takes advantage of the hardware of a another PC by attaching via USB. It requires an Internet connection to connect to a backend system, but acts as a fully functional PC with dual PowerPC processors, a 20 GB drive and all your applications - if you can find someone who lets you connect to their PC. An interesting option especially for a price of $195 for the mobile device." So, for a $10,000 central server, a $1000 PC, and a $195 device, you can have the computing power of: a $1000 PC. It seems like there might be cheaper ways.

Comments

Overkill

[lachlan76]

How exactly does this do the job better than a Knoppix CD and VNC/X over SSH/rdesktop?

gah!

[torpor]

its awful, really .. to think that this whole thing is rendered useless by a USB-fob and a freebie operating system 'from those commies' ..

but, what bothers me most about this is that we are *forever and perpetually* trying to build better client/server computing systems. we want power, but we don't want to be near the computer ..

over and over, the same ol' problem. why don't we just make better, smaller, nicer, more comfy computers, and give up this whole 'beigebox' mentality?