and....?

"We got you, some bits of your hard drive have changed"

"yeah. and?"

"did you write files to that bit of your hard drive?"

"sure, that's what hard drives are for"

"so why aren't they there now?"

"because I wiped them with heidi erasor"

"why would you do a thing like that?"

"because I was going though US customs and its now our company policy to do so in case they (for example) decide to make a "backup copy" of all our valuable customer data"

"we wouldn't do that"

"so where did you get THAT backup from then?"

And how does this differ..

From the usual thin client desktop?

Citrix pretty much invented the concept of a mutiuser, remote terminal windows server (of course, unix had been doing that long before, but xwindows is hardly "thin desktop")

Over a decade ago, their winframe product was delivering complete desktops to wyse dedicated terminals (or dos based 386/486 machines running a client) using ICA to stream the display and keyboard/mouse events in each direction (plus share the local drives in the case of the dos machines). This is what eventually became the Terminal Services (RDP) app that comes with almost all windows servers now.

at the same time, DOS machines were pxe booting from and loading a complete win3.11 environment from netware servers, running applications (from the same servers) selectively depending on if they did (or didn't) have permissions to them at the netware level.

either way, I can recall this technology being in place a decade ago - ok, its a *lot* harder to just run modern software from a remote server; apps have got much, much bigger and rely on registry keys rather than easily-redirectable ini files, but I am not seeing anything new or novel here.