How To Use Amazon EC2 as Your Desktop
I have been doing this for a year with a Linode small instance and it works like a charm - although I only use it through a Putty terminal.I had initially set it up to code small ruby scripts remotely that help me with my day job (mostly to scrape websites with the excellent Scrapi gem). Since IT would not let anyone install anything on their computers, but still left port 443 wide open, I gave it a try.The added benefit is that working on a linux box through Putty forces you to learn a real terminal text editor - in my case Emacs. I guess I can thank IT now ;)