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The Vanishing Desktop
BonThomme writes: "/.'s post on
Mobility is missing the cool story. The real news is a company called 2cComputing that has licensed SplitBridge and LongView technology from Mobility and Avocent (formerly Cybex + Apex) respectively to create this.
Their C-Link product will run at 1.3 Gbps over Cat5, bridging up to 100 meters between the CPU chassis and the Cstation which houses a bunch of USB ports and connections for I/O devices on the user's desktop. Meaning, all the CPU's are co-located for admin via KVM, and are much cheaper to wire together for gEthernet or FibreChannel. Best of all, you don't have to pull cable through the whole building (again)."
It is not one PCI backplane. It is a PCI extender. Converting PCI into network.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
Also, if you can run the bus over hundreds of feet of CAT 5 networks, that suggests that the bus is probably not running as fast as it should.
Save some money and get hardware and software that are designed for remote accessibility.
an NC connected to an application terminal server mainframe made out of a cluster of inexpensive PC's.
try { do() || do_not(); } catch (JediException err) { yoda(err); }
Could someone explain the benefit of "stretching" a pc to make the technology now be in two places instead of one? So now a MIS guy has to figure out if the desktop has a problem or the cpu in the closet? Any how many organizations have closets big enough to keep equipment for all of their employees instead of using desk space?
Complete machines and or Thin client and servers are still hard to beat.
(the dog ate my cute, witty tag line)
Now stick fast parallelserial converters on the chopped ends of the buss, run the serial throug LVDM drivers. In the case of C-Link they may be doing a multi-level modulation scheme to get several bits into every symbol (bits vs. bauds, right?)
So the PC with its disks and RAM sits in a locked up, air conditioned room where the cleaning crew can't bang into it, and the just-fired employee can't give it a swift kick.
On the desktop is the other end of the buss, a box with PCI slots and the standard PCI-interfacing I/O chips for slow I/O. No smarts, just the serialparallel converts and a PCI interface plus whatever cards you stick into the local backplane.
Do a little math : take the width of the PCI buss in total signals - data+address+some handshaking - and divide that into the 1.3 Gbps of the serial interface. That's the distant PCI buss speed in buss cycle per second. Now, the CPU, RAM, and disk are all on the standard full tilt buss so they run fast; keyboards and mice and serial ports aren't going to notice the reduced buss speed, it's just the video that might suffer.
My computer's just asked for a different floppy, I'll be back in about 10 minutes...
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Doesn't Clearcube already have a product similar to this?
Will it solve everyone's problems... No. Not IT product ever does. But this is useful in certain situations. I even took a set home. I used to be jealous of the quiet iMacs. Well now, I have the ultimate quiet computer. I put my PC in the garage, and used the Extender to connect my bedroom. Now my wife doesn't care if the PC is left on all night.
Another problem though is the cost. The last time I checked, the Extenders were about $400. I wouldn't buy them myself at that price... but spending company money, I didn't mind. :)
Here we go again.
Centralized. Distributed. Centralized. Distributed. Centralized.
Mainframes. PCs. Thin clients. Fat clients. Whatever they call this new one.
You get the picture.
Tim Somero
IMHO, this thing has no place in standalone systems (unless you want to run up to the attic and code away while still connected to your computer). I like having my monstrous full-tower right beside the monitor, opened up in all its glory.
"Ancillary does not mean you get to rule the world." --U.S. Circuit Judge Harry Edwards, speaking to the FCC's lawyer
Sound, Video, Other Joe Shmoe Lovelies.
The management is really where Joe Shmoe CPU and Storage is.
And the idea of revolutionary blah blah blah - reinventing the terminal is not bad. Terminals used to have printers, tablettes, digital input and lots of other stuff. Take a look at an old Textronics catalogue for examples.
So all the stuff is well known. Just the speeds are new.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
This would truly rock, ;)
play Quake III on the toilet
Before you email me, remember: "There is no god!"
Please (for Windows users) provide a remote reset button.
I don't know about you, but the goals of IT managers and (l)users seldom are the same. This is just a press release for a company that has discovered X windows, or a M$ equivalent, and is using existing cat 5 cable at high speeds.
It harkens back to the days of putting all the mainframes in a single room, and allowing the lusers access to only terminals.
And I'm wondering if they are doing 1Gbps over a single 4 wire cat5 installation, or does this require a pair of cat5 cables to achieve 1Gbps, which is what all the other GigE implementations use?
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
You'll have to just take a smoke break. New security protocol only alows IT to touch the mainfr^H^H^H^H^H PC's in the closet. If central resources does not have your floppy, I'm afraid that application is not supported. Thank You.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.