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Summary: C O V E R F E A T U R E
0018-9162/06/$20.00 © 2006 IEEE46 Computer Published by the IEEE Computer Society
clients offer a good computing experience. As network
quality degrades, interactive performance suffers.
It is latency--not bandwidth--that is the greater chal-
lenge. Tightly coupled tasks such as graphics editing suf-
fer more than loosely coupled tasks such as Web
browsing. The combination of worst anticipated net-
work quality and most tightly coupled tasks will deter-
mine whether a thin-client approach is satisfactory for
an organization.
Stateless thick clients, an alternative to thin-client
computing, preserve many of the benefits of thin-client
computing but eliminate its acute sensitivity to network
latency. This alternative approach achieves this improve-
ment by asynchronously transferring more runtime state
to a client and executing from that state on a local
processor.
TIME-SHARING REDUX
In his 1983 classic, "Hints for Computer System
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