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EDIT: Why do you need NFC chip for this? IMHO feels kind of pointless to me. Why not just use BT or USB?

You need the NFC to encrypt the virtual machine. If you don't have this, and say you're keeping banking or work related files, then a malicious owner could retain whatever files you download. Encryption is necessary to prevent this.
 
Sun's (now Ocacle's) SunRay workstations have a feature like that. Rumor has it that Sun engineers working on this system were not given their own desk. They were told to find any available SunRay workstation and just log in. And then there home desktop would appear along with all their files and so on.

That's VDI and is also available from Citrix, VMware and others. You're basically just controlling the screen of af virtual computer running on a server somewhere.
 
The only thing I can think of, being a college student myself, is the ability to just carry around my iPhone instead of my MBP everywhere around campus so I can sit down at any of the campus Macs and have it be my "Home" computer instead of the standard set-up on the campus computers.

Other than a college setting, I can't think of where people would use this feature on any sort of a regular basis. However, just because I might not need it doesn't mean it isn't a cool feature I would still like to have... :D

Well anywhere you have a similar demand situation as a college campus. Lots of people who need a bit a of computer power all the time but lots of grunt for short period on a regular basis. Sounds like apple might be getting serious about post-pc enterprise not just laptops and mobile but touchdown workstations.

I guess it could work around the home so your phone / tablet let's you move between home and work seamlessly.
 
I wonder how long it would take to download all your apps on a guest machine and how good will it me at using the machine... plus if I created alot of files, were are they stored in the mean time??? my iPhone??? Lots to think about when it comes to this... For this most part, I really dont need it right now.... if I'm going to an editing lab on campus, all the computers will have editing software because basically all ill be doing is editing...

dont need to swap apps... just files for now
 
Wow! Another purported use for NFC that would be done better by every other technology that's already on the iPhone! :eek:

I'm sooo very convinced that NFC is a useful technology!
 
You need the NFC to encrypt the virtual machine. If you don't have this, and say you're keeping banking or work related files, then a malicious owner could retain whatever files you download. Encryption is necessary to prevent this.

NFC makes lot of sense in payment systems with its 10 cm (4 inch) transmission distance, zero config and passive capabilities (uses the power from payment device). Home on iPhone is a very different feature and I wouldn't want it to be running all the time and it doesn't require universal zero config. Encrypting itself doesn't require NFC chips with active devices especially if you are not expecting payments standards based zero config. In any situation one would be expected to enter a password for "Home on iPhone" and then you would use the Mac so the situation is different from payments in which you only need to operate your phone.

NFC demo video
 
You need the NFC to encrypt the virtual machine. If you don't have this, and say you're keeping banking or work related files, then a malicious owner could retain whatever files you download. Encryption is necessary to prevent this.

Encryption is certainly necessary, but has nothing to do with NFC.
Virtual machines also have nothing to do with this.
 
Wow! Another purported use for NFC that would be done better by every other technology that's already on the iPhone! :eek:

I'm sooo very convinced that NFC is a useful technology!

+1 There are at times developments that seemingly have limited or no use to people.
Once out in the wild plenty of creative developers will figure out all the things one can do with it.

That's when Johnny Q. dissing it now figures out that he can't live without it:)
 
Old News

ok this is somthing we should already know apple has filed for patents on this. so maby this was the source of this news. No suprise to me
 
Too complicated.
This requires:
Macintosh
iPhone
Internet connection
MobileMe

This makes the system highly failure prone.
User Occam's razor - Eliminate the last two items on that list.
 
Wouldn't this require that an NFC receiver be built into every Mac you wanted to use?

Kind of useless until a couple years from now (if even that soon) since most people aren't going to have NFC enable Macs, unless this is something that can be added with a USB dongle.

I wonder if Apple will update the magic trackpad to include an NFC receiver. This would also allow existing Mac owners to gain the functionality.

Tapping on the trackpad seems to me the only reasonable way to provide NFC on desktop Macs - especially the Mac Pro, given that many people have the tower under a desk etc.
 
...

This feature would be useless to me but probobly great for alot of university students. Of course it would mean every university would need all new macs which probobly won't happen for awhile. Overall it seems cool but as someone said if I could just login with my email and password it would be just as easy and wouldn't require every university to update all of their computer labs in a reccession (aka slow adoption, then forgotten about)
 
Agreed! Not only does this feature sound completely pointless, but there is zero reason why it would/should have anything to do with NFC.

This was discussed in the last article on NFC... basically, all of the other radios in the iPhone are long range, and could allow for someone to capture the wi-fi/bt data as it's being streamed. Because NFC has a range of ~4cm, no one would be able to wirelessly hack the signal, unless they were standing on top of you.
 
Utterly useless technology with no appropriate place in society.

This is one of the many times where people have to stop and think...and realize this is something you DO NOT NEED, regardless of whether it's possible, or not..
 
I'm still skeptical but more and more I'm starting to believe this. Especially with the news of the new multi user remote ability in Lion. Imagine, home computer on, someone might be using it. You're at the library, set your phone down, and it auto remote access you're home computer so it feels exactly like your home comp. and whoever is at home using it doesn't even know you're accessing it! Sounds dangerous and creepy but very nice it if it all works out.
 
Utterly useless technology with no appropriate place in society.

This is one of the many times where people have to stop and think...and realize this is something you DO NOT NEED, regardless of whether it's possible, or not..

I'm guessing your not an entrepreneur. And that you're someone that likes how your computer was working 15 years ago. I say all technology march forward, and those with open minds will make good use of them. It's definitely an apple thing. I read somewhere the mentality is, no focus groups. They define what you want, so when you see the new thing, you didn't even know you needed, but now you do (not really need but want).
 
This was discussed in the last article on NFC... basically, all of the other radios in the iPhone are long range, and could allow for someone to capture the wi-fi/bt data as it's being streamed. Because NFC has a range of ~4cm, no one would be able to wirelessly hack the signal, unless they were standing on top of you.

Fast forward to iPhones being used as wallets, in crowded stores, and the criminal with a $20 pocket unit stealing people's payment info with little effort.

Sounds great. :confused:
 
I'm guessing your not an entrepreneur. And that you're someone that likes how your computer was working 15 years ago. I say all technology march forward, and those with open minds will make good use of them. It's definitely an apple thing. I read somewhere the mentality is, no focus groups. They define what you want, so when you see the new thing, you didn't even know you needed, but now you do (not really need but want).

You're the same kind that would clone dinosaurs if it were found to be possible. Did Ian Malcom teach us nothing?!
 
This was discussed in the last article on NFC... basically, all of the other radios in the iPhone are long range, and could allow for someone to capture the wi-fi/bt data as it's being streamed. Because NFC has a range of ~4cm, no one would be able to wirelessly hack the signal, unless they were standing on top of you.

Security through obscurity sucks. Make the transfer itself secure and then it becomes transfer technology agnostic. You could use USB, NFC, BT, WiFi, carrier pidgeons.

This is a great idea, it's just that tying it to NFC just seems to be a push to sell new hardware. This could be supported on any WiFi/BT/USB enabled devices that currently exist through a software update.

I'm still skeptical but more and more I'm starting to believe this. Especially with the news of the new multi user remote ability in Lion. Imagine, home computer on, someone might be using it. You're at the library, set your phone down, and it auto remote access you're home computer so it feels exactly like your home comp. and whoever is at home using it doesn't even know you're accessing it! Sounds dangerous and creepy but very nice it if it all works out.

Yeah, it's so nice living in 1984 when all this stuff started working. I'm so happy someone came up with the X Windows System so that I can log in to my Unix computer remotely and use my GUI applications.

Some of you guys sound like you've never heard of multi-user GUI systems with simultaneous acccess...
 
You're the same kind that would clone dinosaurs if it were found to be possible. Did Ian Malcom teach us nothing?!

I would, because that brings me one step closer to my evil plan. Clone my brain into a dinosaurs brain so that I can be a T-Rex and fulfill my dream of re-creating The Land Before Time.... 4.
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; U; CPU iPhone OS 4_2_1 like Mac OS X; en-us) AppleWebKit/533.17.9 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.0.2 Mobile/8C148 Safari/6533.18.5)

Download on demand? A horrible idea.

Let me open this file. Click. Wait 19 minutes. Session disconnected, sorry.

And this cloud-document nonsense too. I wonder what planet these dreamers live on.
 
Yeah, it's so nice living in 1984 when all this stuff started working. I'm so happy someone came up with the X Windows System so that I can log in to my Unix computer remotely and use my GUI applications.

Some of you guys sound like you've never heard of multi-user GUI systems with simultaneous acccess...

I have, but the idea is the ease of this in a mass market, with normal consumers. I did a paper in college on something to this extent. The gist of it was how ironic it was that we went from main-frame & terminal computer to the "pc" era, and now we find ourselves returning to a main-frame & terminal type of computing (remote access & cloud computing). It was more just history of computational power of computers (Comp. Arch. class).
 
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