Though the patent has only surfaced now, Microsoft has been working on this concept for quite some time. As far back as 2009 similar systems have been discussed on various Microsoft blogs. There was also the Midori OS project that had bloggers buzzing about its post-Windows potential and integration with Microsoft’s cloud platform, Azure. Steve Ballmer himself has called Windows 8 Microsoft’s riskiest bet yet — could this streaming tech make make an appearance in the upcoming OS?
Shouldn’t PXE and/or remote desktop count as prior art? Maybe I missed something.
(Also, floppies? Who the hell uses floppies?)
I use floppies for old time sake sometimes
Actually, running a system from an nfs mount is probably as close to streaming an OS as you will get. Unless they have some other idea of what streaming is.
Even iSCSI as used by many virtual machine installations would be similair I guess.
I explained this concept in a public talk and published the Slide back in 2001.
http://johnsokol.blogspot.com/2011/07/amorphous-os-talk.html
Not only that, but PXE-booting over the internet already exists: http://boot.kernel.org/
Although that project is from 2009 as well.