This Amazin' Idea Of Sorts

[IceHusky]

I got this flippin' awesome idea.

So, I was on Facebook and stuff, checking my feed, and I found Google's April Fools announcement for this year. After laughing at it for a moment, I thought about how cool it would be if it was real, especially on the social extent. Then I got the idea: what if you could run several standalone sessions on one computer? You could have multiple monitors or one monitor, depending on what you have, and what you can supply is the dependent factor on how many sessions you can run.

Then I realized, somebody could have the urge to troll everybody else on the one system and decide to play a hefty 3D game while the other sessions crash, etc. and ultimately piss everyone else off. The solution is to give everybody separate power allocation. For example, let's say your setup consists of ultimately 4 sessions. You have 2 monitors, and each monitor holds 2 sessions. Each of the 4 sessions would get 25% processing power, 25% of the RAM, and 25% of the graphics card, with an assumed leeway of about 5%. With this in place, if one session is running a hefty program, the other three remain unaffected.

Now, with that setup, you could argue, what if only one or two people were using a session, and they want to use more power? Well, there would be an option to close unused sessions, regaining monitor space and power.

Imagine how much money a school or business could save on computer labs. Instead of buying a computer for every single monitor, they could use one computer in equivalent to six when doing light tasks, or one to four if doing something that is power heavy.

The only problem with this idea is security. You would think privacy would be the culprit, but the biggest users would be public labs, not necessarily residential users. The problem is, even if the sessions have their own partitions (now when you think about it, it would probably require SSDs), hackers can still get into your partition and infect your session with homemade viruses. I guess Behavior detectors could work, but it would be a problem until antivirus adapted to the system.

Discuss.

[TheDoctor]

You fail to understand how opperating systems interact with computers. You might be able to do it with two VMs, or if you built your own os from scratch, but what you're thinking is alt tabbing between Windows... sessions... on a single computer. Again, virtulization.

[IceHusky]

You fail to understand how opperating systems interact with computers. You might be able to do it with two VMs, or if you built your own os from scratch, but what you're thinking is alt tabbing between Windows... sessions... on a single computer. Again, virtulization.

But rather, what if you had 4 monitors with 4 completely separate OSes and 4 completely different inputs into one computer? I could see how that could be achieved with virtulization, but a completely integrated system would most likely be more efficient. And anyway, the lab hosts most likely aren't that educated into virtulization, and Windows proves to be a prime example of how much money you can make off of something just by making it more user friendly.

[Cirevam]

This is an interesting idea but I think it would be much more efficient to use a cloud-based method, where each lab station (in your example) would be providing merely an interface for the user and computations would be handled by extremely powerful computers. You could have one supercomputer that handles computations it receives from every lab computer in a school. I think this is the route that some personal computers will eventually end up taking, with the disadvantage that you need an internet connection to do anything whatsoever.

[McJobless]

On the Hacker thing, they would probably just attack all open sessions at once by going after the Kernel, which I assume would be controlling all of this. Hell, they could probably take control of one session and use that to hack all other sessions, making all the other users think one person is hacking them.

Also, you'd need a monitor for every user. I don't see how you could attach more than 4 monitors to one computer, and you're proclaiming this for public labs, which would, at the VERY least, probably need 10.

It's a good idea, but it's flawed. I'd rather have my own, very loud PC right next to me, blasting heat in my face, than have to share power consumption with a couple other people.

[MSSSSM]

It's called multi seating, has been in use for quite a long time, even back in the time of large terminal servers.

It usually requires one graphics card per user though. (That solves the GPU allocation too).

For the virus problem, first don't use windows, but a modified linux distribution. To secure it, use Apparmor (Ubuntu standard) or SELinux.

You can also put every session in a separate VM that is started up and given resources on the fly (including dedicated GPU). It's entirely possible and already realized.