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20060123 Monday January 23, 2006

 Thin clients in the news again..

This isn't really my area, but I'm interested in it.

These two chaps...



Mark Hall and Frank Hayes set up a nice little debate (one side and the other) on 'thin client' and where it might be headed in 2006. Now, obviously, Sun has a vested interest in TC's as we produce the SunRay technology and you might expect us to be in favour of it...

I found Mark's (in favour of TCs) arguments quite good and he presented a number of them. I found Frank's (not in favour of TCs) a bit odd. He only had one point, which was that 'users won't like it'. He cites that users need to be able to install bits of software and that this is crucial for them to be able to do their job.

Two thoughts on this.

I bet the vast majority of '3rd Party Software' on users laptops isn't in the 'business critical' category. More likely it's iTunes, Bittorrent and children's 'educational' software.

One assumes that these users are using company supplied equipment. What gives users the right to install other software on their company laptop? You can't go out and modify your company car can you? It's sort of assumed that you just do. If I was in charge of these companies I would ban users owning the root/admin passwords immediately. My own work laptop has nothing on it but Sun supplied software. I have taken the novel step of having my own personal laptop for my stuff (not counting the fact my own laptop is way better than the work supplied one!)

I think they both missed the two real reason TCs haven't yet taken off properly. They need to be wireless (we'd need vpns and WWAN coverage too), and have a laptop form factor. Without the disk drive dragging down the power consumption, laptop style TCs would last for hours longer, be more secure and still be cool enough for users/executives to use on the train to impress everyone else...



( Jan 23 2006, 05:28:15 PM GMT / Jan 23 2006, 05:16:08 PM GMT ) Permalink Comments [4]
Trackback: http://blogs.sun.com/Drew/entry/thin_clients_in_the_news

Comments:

Have you seen the Tadpole Comets? Basically Sun Ray 1gs in laptop form factor with 802.11 built in.

Posted by Christopher Saul on January 23, 2006 at 05:27 PM GMT #

There's a slight misconception when Hall says you can't install software on a thin client. On a Sun Ray installation running on Solaris or Linux, you can install whatever you want in $HOME/bin. You just can't install anything that has any effect on any other user. I'd say that's a good thing! This whole 'can't install software' idea derives from the Windows practice of permanently modifying the operating system setup for every new version of 'hello world' that comes along.

Posted by Greg Trasuk on January 23, 2006 at 09:07 PM GMT #

Hmmm. Except that if I don't have root access on my (non-Windows) laptop, I can't stop/start the network connections, which - when I need to do it - is a lot neater than rebooting the machine.

Posted by Robin Wilton on January 26, 2006 at 10:21 AM GMT #

Ah... but *nix has the ability for some commands to be set up to be run by a user with root privileges, without giving them root access to the whole system... the so called 'sticky bit'!

Posted by Drew on January 26, 2006 at 01:45 PM GMT #

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