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Sun Discovers Dumb Terminals
Yahoo has a story about how Sun is practicing a sort of floating workforce - many employees have no permanent desks, they just come in and log on to a dumb terminal, err, thin client. Besides being a sneaky way to encourage employees to arrive ever earlier at work, it probably is cheaper to run the business off a few large Sun servers - at least for Sun.
All those things you mentioned only serve to contribute to workplace clutter. An efficient workplace requires one terminal, one chair, and some sort of desk.. perhaps a small table to hold the terminal. Everything should be able to be done on the terminal and require no paper or anything that would even require a file cabinet.
I used to enjoy working at Sun. But, little by little, the job moved from "You are a respected professional" to "Sit down, shut up, plug in."
When they took my Ultra 10 (when I was in the other side of the globe working for then in Singapore, yeas actually working on my machine) and replaced it with a SunRay, that was the last straw. I was at another company within a month.
Sun used to be cool. It's too bad those days are forgotten in wistful memories of paper billions never realized. I was there when NeXt was cool and happening. I was there when Sun was cool and happening. I was there when Linux was cool and happening.
At least mac OS X and the TiBook are still cool and happening. Sun sure isn't.
BTW, IBM just fuloughed me as well on Friday. Gotta make some fat pasty white men in suits a little richer, you know. Fsck the economy, the inerrelated nature of money flow, and the stability of our society. I freakin hate supposed tech managers.
A friend of mine works at Sun and gave me a tour a little while back. The building itself was an interesting structure, and of course the computer systems were an experience in themselves.
The server rooms, conference rooms, and most offices had 24" monitors connected to Sun Ray 1 machines. My friend showed me how he could put his smart card in, and then it would ask him for his password, and he was logged into the exact same desktop that he had in his office. So whatever he was working on "followed" him around. Granted, it was just a remote X terminal, but I thought it was cool.
And I'm sure there's those of you who say, "it's been done before" or "that's old tech" but as servers get more powerful, and workstations become smaller, quieter, and dumber, it was cool to see this "old tech" being put to (damn) good use.
While my friend did have his own office, as did everyone else at that particular campus, it could be an interesting management experiment (if you want to call it that) to rotate people's desks around... maybe every month. That way, if people have a problem with coworkers, you can separate them, and that way everyone can get to know everyone else... and the new people don't feel so alienated. Of course, when you have roaming profiles, or dumb terminals, that makes things that much easier.
If you're interested in what happened, people working out of the trunks of their car, check out this overview.
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Wacky Stuff
Chiat/Day Experiment
First they are not dumb ternimals, far from it. It is called a SunRay. If you want to know more about them, try http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/. Amongst other things you can take your SunRay card, pull it from your terminal and go put it in another. As long as the SunRay is on the same system you get your exact desktop back. With SunRay you also dont waste the vast amount of computing resources in your workplace. Don't take my word for it, go ask distribted.net. And that is just for wasted CPU cycles.
Second it is called Flexable Field Office. This means that you do NOT have to go into to the office to work. It is BECAUSE of this meany of the Sun workers were NOT in the World Trade Center Last September 11. You also do not have to be in your home town to go to an office to do work. Where it made sense, some employes kept their offices.
Ever wish you could telecommute?Yes Sun even pays for its workers home office equipment and Internet access so they can work.
And Sun saved money doing it.
The terminals are called 'Sun Ray', and consist of either a 17" CRT or 15" LCD or a headless cpu, all of which contain a card reader.
They have dedicated motherboards with built-in ethernet and USB. They have no floppy or HD. They do have video (RCA) out and audio I/O (headphones).
I'm sure you can get the unit price down much lower when negotiating multiple units and a server. No one would buy just one of these things.
One server can drive hundreds of these. You simply use your smart card to logon, and your current saved desktop is delivered to your screen. There are no costs involved in administrating a stand alone cpu, and you never have to upgrade.
Not even close. The login process for each dumb terminal (with the swipe card) automatically sets your default printer to the nearest printer. It even routes your phone number automatically to the handset on your desk.
The brilliant bit is that you can pull your swipe card out, move to a different desk, put the card back in, and your entire desktop reappears without a single application lost. And your phone moved with you!
You just click on the username and it shows the floorplan with John's current desk location highlighted.
But it isn't! On a normal day you tend to work on dozens of projects. This system lets you move all the people in a specific project together, so you are sitting right next to the people you are working with. Two hours later you move to the next project on your list so you move near the people working on that project.
You're always sitting in close proximity to the people you're working with. A traditional desk-per-user system means you're always walking up/down stairs or between buildings. This new system means your desktop moves with you.
The downside is that your pens and manuals don't move with you. In practise this encourages people to work out of their briefcases, which is convenient for techs who spend most of their time onsite. It does away with the "damn, I left the important list of instructions on my desk back at work".
Give vnc a try. Its not the fastest or most secure thing, but it has served me very well. You assign an X screen number when starting the server and connect with :. When you disconnect, the session stays alive until the vncserver is shut down. You can connect to it from anywhere you have vncviewer.
I work with Suns every day - 420s, 880s, 4800s, 6800s, ... They are not fast at CPU intensive tasks. We are talking desktop apps here, not web servers and so on. I understand the difference between single CPU PCs and multiple CPU, high I/O capacity servers.
UltraSPARCs are not computationally very powerful. You're correct that you can't compare the clock speeds, but they still are not that fast -overall-, which is what matters, not efficiency (Mac PPC advocates make the same mistake). An UltraSPARC II at 480 is slow! Even a copper USIII at 750-900 MHz is not that fast. Yes, I believe a 1G UIII has a higher specfp than a P4 at 2GHz (correct me if I'm wrong), but it's slower at integer ops which are the basis of most desktop apps. And you can get P4s at 2.4GHz now. (IBM's Power4 is far superior to USIII, btw) But Sun servers are for server loads, which typically have higher I/O requirements than Excel, or even my developer tools (though admittedly IDE drives suck and I wish I had SCSI at work like I do at home).
A quad setup is something you'd use for balancing server loads with lots of concurrent activity, not desktop apps which are "bursty" and benefit more from fast (dedicated) single processors. A 450 is a very small USII based system with a backplane that has less memory bandwidth than a current PC! Most of the Java server software I work on is deployed to 6800s. When you're talking about large shared Sun systems, there is a lot of scheduling overhead - something you don't want for interactive desktop apps even though the total amount of work a decent Sun system can do is much higher. The workload is just different.
-Kevin
Sun has how many thousands of employees? Chances are good that, in the traditional style, you DON'T know where he is located (especially if you are new on the job). In Sun's new style, chances are that, if you're working with "John", then he's sitting next to you (and the printer is just outside the group of cubicles you're in).
If it's important to the job, then Sun should be supplying it either online or in a nearby library. If you need to refer to the reference manual every minute of the day, then maybe you aren't as good a programmer as you think you are. Or, if you are, then your manager should certainly see to it that the manual is there when you need it.
This isn't Windows we're talking about. If you need a particular version of Unix, simply telnet to the server that has that version of Unix. If it's important to the project you're working on, then there will be such a server around.
Many of us, for example, use a VNC viewer running on a PC on our desks to display our Unix environments which are running on a large server in the machine room downstairs.
I do something pretty similar except I stay in the *nix environment unless on my laptop. Sure, vnc can be used like a "pcanywhere" tool, but it is much more.
I never have an X desktop on a server since I rarely have a monitor and mouse attached. But, I do have a video card in the server, usually a cheap S3. I configure XFree86 for the video card and use vncserver to create virtual X screens. Often, I will have two different vncservers running, one in kde, another in windowmaker. I start and stop these as needed via ssh. The virtual X sessions are not displayed anywhere on the server. Each instance of vncviewer, on whatever platform, can display a virtual screen. According to the docs, you can even have multiple vncviewers displaying on the same screen. However, this I have never had a need to try. That might just push me over the edge.
"Sun is acting like they invented the roaming profile."
Umm, they practically did. The Network Is The Computer, Unix workstations, NFS, etc etc.
Actually I have seen it the way you discuss. I was at Iowa State University and spent 4 years working with Project Vincent(a distributed environment based off the Project Athena work from MIT).
Windows has evolved to the point that it is manageable in a very similar manner. With the introduction of Windows 2000, I could distribute applications to an end user on a needed basis.
One of the fundamental problems that the Unix model you talk about has is that the files needed to run the application all reside on file servers. This results in two things. First, high network utilization, and second, decreased client performance.
You can mitigate these issues slightly, but you never really solve them until you install the application files on the local client. You mention engineers, but don't seem to understand that these are the users who would be most impacted by this as many advanced applications consume large amounts of storage for their binary files.
While at ISU our biggest issue in this regard was a GIS package from ESRI called Arc/Info. The binaries for this app consumed about 500 Megs of drive space all totaled. There was a considerable difference between loading this from local disk versus over a network drive. i.e. like 5 seconds versus 60 seconds on a DEC Alpha station. As such it made sense to install the application to local disk to maintain good performance.
I guess I should also point out that the Windows world also used this same model with all apps residing on the file server back in the era of Windows 3.1. But again the network utilization and performance impact became signifigant constraints. With harddrive prices falling over time it became economically infeasible to continue to maintain this type of environment and the world switched at around the time of Win95/NT4.
The point being it is not much better than it is in Windows, your solution happens to have some severe limitations which makes it impractical and inefficient.
The Windows 2000 model whereby the desktops get a standard set of applications to start with and additional applications are pulled down on an as needed basis is really quite better.