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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.
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.
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".
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.