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Arthur T Knackerbracket has found the following story:
Amazon Web Services' "Workspaces" desktop-as-a-service offering can now be paid for by the hour.
Workspaces are a cut of Windows Server 2008 with a Windows 7 skin and are consumed with a custom client application. Until today, the service was sold by the month for a fixed price that included storage.
That's now called the "Always On" mode. There's now also a new "AutoStop" mode in which desktops shut down after you disconnect for a certain amount of time. AWS promises that desktops will emerge from AutoStop in 90 seconds, complete with all data.
[...] The service still needs a device running Windows, Android, iOS, Amazon's own Fire or Chrome OS. There's still no Linux client, which seems an oversight as those considering Workspaces on a PC would surely like the chance to run them without having to worry about Windows licences. Nor is there a way to use Workspaces on a thin client or Raspberry Pi, arrangements that look like matches made in cloud desktop heaven.
But why grump about such things on the day that slightly slow and weird desktops became something that can be rented by the hour? Truly we live in an age of wonders .... ®
(Score: 2) by Scruffy Beard 2 on Saturday August 20 2016, @07:14PM
If it is not on your desk, it is not a desktop.
Thin clients seem to go in and out of fashion every few years.
The big issue here is control. I would not really trust Amazon to store my private keys for me.
Of course, Microsoft just made the Windows Ecosystem behave a lot more like the "cloud".
I was OK with google docs until a forced upgrade meant I could not access them anymore.
The same happened to an online game I was addicted to for a while (Ogame): but that was the result of a cat-and mouse backlash over aggressive ads. (The real reason I quit was they made it pay to win with seemingly small bonuses being the equivalent of 2 years of play time for me.)