> Well, in the octopus you have a fixed part, the pc, but all other
> machines come and go. The feeling is very much that your stuff is in
> the cloud.

i was going to mention this.  to me the current view of cloud
computing as evidence by papers like this[1] are basically hardware
infrastructure capable of running vm pools each of which would do
exactly what a dedicated server would do.  the main benefits being low
administration cost and elasticity.  networking, authentication and
authorization remain as they are now.  they are still not addressing
what octopus and rangboom are trying to address: how to seamlessly and
automatically make resources accessible.  if you read what ken said it
appears to be this view of cloud computing; he said "some framework to
allow many loosely-coupled Plan9 systems to emulate a single system
that would be larger and more reliable".  in all virtualization
systems i've seen the vm has to be smaller than the environment it
runs on.  if vmware or xen were ever to give you a vm that was larger
than any given real machine it ran on, they'd have to solve the same
problem.

[1] http://www.eecs.berkeley.edu/Pubs/TechRpts/2009/EECS-2009-28.pdf