Apple Patent Hints at Net-Booting Cloud Strategy 156
An anonymous reader writes "Apple has received a patent that hints at the intent of providing network computers that will boot through a 'net-booted environment.' It may seem that Apple is moving slowly into the cloud computing age and that it has many assets that are simply not leveraged in what could be a massive cloud environment that could cause more than just a headache for Google and Microsoft. However, it appears that Apple has been working for some time on an operating system, conceivably a version of a next-generation Mac OS or iOS, that could boot computers and other devices via an Internet connection."
Definitely possible (Score:5, Interesting)
Plan9 anybody? (Score:4, Interesting)
Anybody remember Plan9? A not fully developed idea in it was of an anonymous workstation. The workstation would behave like a caching terminal which could run applications. Since it merely cached from the file server, and the same apps ran on all hardware, you could move from station to station without an active sync.
The hierarchical storage mechanism in Plan9 was almost instantly recognizable in TimeMachine. Basically, all data from workstations dribbled towards file servers which snapshotted to optical storage. To go back to where you were yesterday, just involved mounting your workspace with a /yyyymmdd/ in the path.
That would make alot more sense than an internet wide bootp....