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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 story on NewsForge Secretaries use Linux, taxpayers save millions amost a year ago parallels this. I think the concept is a good idea, esp for those in the Bay area. My desk is nothing more than a junk pile anyway, I would be all for it.
Plus, it makes the IT departments job SOOOOOO much easier.
Think more along the lines of computer user. A worker can have his own desk, and his own thin client. If his thin client catches on fire, it takes like 5 minutes to restore it. If you need help on an application, just take your smartcard to your co-workers desk and ask him to look at it. Same for presentations.
And from an admin point, I just finished patching 20 boxes for known security holes. Wouldn't it be great to just patch one server?
I don't think the point of this tech it to get rid of your desk, just to get rid of the concept of "Bob's computer".
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
I've heard it called "hotelling". One implementation I heard about had a 'locker room' where you could store your personal effects. They got around having filing cabinets in each office by having a central bullpen for all the filing.
Here's a similar story, slightly off-topic, but illustrative of a similar corporate mindthink.
A few years back someone told me of how "Kal Kan", the american dog-food company, operates. The entire headquarters is run out of a large open space similar in size to a high-school gymnasium. There are no cubes and no offices. Desks were arranged class room style, in neat rows. Everyone, from the president on down, worked from identical desks and identical chairs. Everyone had a single 2 drawer filing cabinet in their desk. At night, the cleaners were instructed to throw away anything that was left on top of the desk. Fax machines, copiers, water coolers, and conference rooms were along the outside walls. Apparently everyone respected everyone's privacy and kept their voices down.
There is a certain comfort knowing that everyone at work is being treated equally. Hotelling is another way to bring that about.
I think it might be most useful for businesses where a lot of staff are always 'out of the office'. When I started out as a environmental consultant, I only had a couple of project files at any one time. A hotelling setup would have been ideal for us most of us were in the field half the time.
My father is a blogger.
its like low income housing as opposed to a nice apartment complex.
most people take care of a nice apartment (there are exceptions) but low income housing is almost always in shambles.
if you have your own workstation & cubicle/office you will have a sense of pride, like you would if you rented a nice apartment. you take care of it and it takes care of you. the people that had it before you more than likely took care of it and the management knew what was wrong with each unit and who the trouble makers were.
the first come first serve grab a PC would be like low income housing, you would have very little chance of knowing what kind of person was there before, much less the time before that, the management doesnt really care, or is off site and there is very little pride in where you live.
Thanks to file sharing, I purchase more CDs
Thanks to the RIAA, I buy them used...
Doesnt anyone remember the recent story about microbe levels on keyboards and mice? This will be a great victory for the common cold.
Personnally I cant stand it when other people use my terminal (I learned dvorak, and popped out all the keys on my keyboard primarily to prevent people from using my terminal)
Somehow, this idea seems stupid, especially wrt their programmers. I certainly wouldnt put up with that environment.
The last thing I need to see on a monday morning is a moniter covered in fingerprints in front of a coke-sticky keyboard next to the mouse with the retarded ball.
I interviewed at Sun in '98 these where everywhere
This is neither new nor interesting from a UNIX user's perspective. Only in the Windows world do you really really need a workstation of your own. The model they where using then was the JavaStaion these have been around since 1996 http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/9611/sunflas h.961114.html
A thin client (Oracle/Larry Ellison propaganda aside) is a jumped up X-Term with a disk drive and maybe a local hard drive or large removable media. If you have a really skilled SysAdmin staff (I imagine Sun does) you can run all your regular UNIX customization & Window Makers on this, Gnome, Enlightenment, and even play Quake where ever your at in the whole world. Your not tied to hardware with can be stolen or virus'd
So the workstation is $500 a pop, the CPU isn't just a local P-4 or something it's the front end for some big set of Mid-range or higher box like a Sunfire or SunCat or some other UNIX or even Microsoftie server.
when somebody tells me about how cool their new Dell is and how well it can crunch that Excel, I just smile, I can have screensavers that are actual Fractals in real time. Wine sessions that out run the latest P4
Ok, so the one you saw has got a little Grey Flannel Suit look to it, but you have to remember it's a company system. Sorry to be L33tist but if the bulk of your contact with a computer is 9-5 your going to have fish as your screensaver and a picture of your kids as your background.
As we progress with the routine technical advancement your going to see a things like SUN 450 Enterprise w/Quad 480Mhz processors showing up on Ebay for $500, Likely in about 18 months
Schools and small businesses are going to start wondering why they are being nibbled to death by Microsoft and Apple and the various shadowy and dodgy hardware vendors (Compaq, Dell, Packard Bell) and switch into where this setup is more common it will look more like the NAVI from Lain
Sorry about the writing. Robot fingers, you know? Cliff Steele in DOOM PATROL #23
it promotes flex time, which means that parents can go to soccer games and workers can go to the office nearest them when there is a problem with trying to commute.
Why can't people with dedicated offices work flex time? Or is the idea that Sun now has fewer terminals than employees (to save money), thus forcing people to work staggered shifts?
cpeterso
My university has employed the Sun Ray system for 2 years now. It is two things: User hell. The systems are really slow. Our university has two 16 processor servers running this system. At about, oh, 20 users it becomes nearly unusably slow. My PII 233 outpaces this system on single-threaded code. Management hell. When something goes wrong with this system, it goes really wrong. The boxes take 20 minutes to boot up, so when it's down, it's down for at least 30 minutes, and that means your whole computer system is down for those 30 minutes. We have redundancy at our university, but one of the boxes never worked right from the start. Some apps still won't run on it (Opera for one).
I have one thing positive to say about these computers: presentations. There's something cool about making your presentation and loading it all up and pulling out your smart card and then going to where your going to give your presentation and putting in the card and there it is ready to go. No waiting. Then you go and give the presentation and it takes 10 seconds to change slides because they're so slow.
The one last thing I have to mention about these systems is that they are not worth the money. You can fill an office with PCs for LESS money and then users have a system that they know and can use. I've seen people with these systems as novices. They are completely clueless. It's much better not to expect the public to relearn an OS. Yes, I know, windows is bad, but for office use, when that's what everyone knows, you really need to go that way. My school bought 700 terminals to the tune of $600 a piece. About 70 are in use and if more that 20 people are logged into a computer it's too slow to use. Sun claimed 700 users could use ONE server and we have 2 that breakdown after 40.
Bah! An efficient workplace requires people who know how to work with eachother, relationships, context, the right ammount of routine balanced against variety.
The mass-produced interchangeable part paradigm works very well with machines. Since the dawn of the assembly-line, corporate wonks have been trying to do it with people, and with miserable results.
Yeah, sure, incentivize your interchangeable drones to come to work earlier and enter a FIFO queue of interchageable work terminals. Looks great on paper.
I can see several things happening. First, the obvious worst-case scenario is where people feel (justifiably so) that they are being treated like robots, and a sense of disatisfaction, isolation, and anger sets in. You'll never know if you're sitting next to the guy who's gonna go postal today.
Second (and far more likely) the traditional type of social organization will start to impose itself on the system. People won't regard this arrangement in the nice, neat, theoretical way that management would like. People will exchange the possibility of a "better" cube for the *same* cube each day to provide continuity. There will be people who "save" cubes like people save seats in bars and churches (Theoreticly anybody could sit at Norm's seat at Cheers, but in practice, nobody does).
Unless they are shift-workers, people will "mark their territory" and after a while people will start saying stuff like "oh, that's Jane's cube" if some other person tries to sit there.
If management tries to deter this by enforcing a policy of cleaning cubes at the end of the day, the anger thing might happen, or people might bring "personality packs" that they set up and tear down at the end of the day.
Then, management might have start forcing employees to log in at a different terminal each day, thus wiping away the last vestige of this territorial pack mentality.
What of these packs? Well, there will be tribes of course. Over there in the corner, that's the JVM tribe, there's the sales tribe, the object modeling tribe, etc. Why would a salesman want to sit next to an object modeler? How do you know where to point the nerf gun if the territory keeps shifting? It would be like Afghanistan. Friendly nerf fire casualties could skyrocket until the system works itself out.
Once the territories are established, leaders will emerge, hierarchies will form, etc. It's inevitable.
The system they are describing, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad. It could in fact, be a much better framework in which to establish cliques and hierarchies than simply *assigning* places to people.
However, if it's coupled with an attempt by management to overturn the normal social order, they are just wasting their time and actually making things worse. Nevermind all this network stuff. Face-time still matters. Your online friends and co-workers just aren't the same as people you actually have lunch with and throw things at.
For all intensive purposes, "whom" is no longer a word. That begs the question, "who cares"?
I have to say.. if you are having problems like that, then two things are happening.
- You don't have adequate resources to handle what you are doing
- Your administrators have no idea how to maintain large sun servers. You should NOT have reboots that frequently. Once or twice a year, if that is adequate.
You can't measure a system based on the cost per workstation alone.
What about software? Maintenance? Etcetera?
Maintaing a network of PCs is HUGELY expensive compared to a network of sunray machines.
Six hundred bucks per workstation? I've seen sunrays for a fraction of that. Those must be the ones with built in displays.
If you say sun claimed one e4500 (or whatever oyu have with 16 processors) could handle 700 desktops, I'd say you, or whoever told you that, is lying, or didn't understand what they said. THat is such outrageous bullshit I can't believe even sun would say that. You'd need an E10k loaded out to the nuts to even *maybe* do that.
Also, did you have sun factor in the applications you would be running? You see...
If you tell sun precisely what you want, they will give you a price *and deliver*
Sigh ...
Working Link
No. I've worked at Sun for a number of years and every employee I know (including almost all contractors from agencies) have offices. Not cubes. Offices. I don't have one, but that's because I telecommute from another state.
Not sure what the 24" monitors and SmartCards refer to, because nobody I've ever known has had one and no conference rooms have the monitors either. You do have a normal badge to get into the building like everyone else in the world and you do have an encrypted card system for logging in remotely through a VPN but that's it.
If you're more of a sales type person you can probably work from remote offices most of the time on whatever machine is available, but these are not the rule. These are the exceptions. If you go into any of the expensive new sun buildings in Santa Clara where the old hospital used to be, every building has hundreds and hundreds of *offices* and in each office sits an individual and only that individual uses the office. Walls, doors and everything. The doors are *sliding* doors but nonetheless... whatever the designers were thinking on that one I'll never figure out.
So yes some people are more nomadic either because they have a job where they can't really afford to be tied down to one desk in one building in one part of the country and need to move around or they are someone who works from a remote office due to traffic and so forth half the time... But the vast majority of people (and I'm thinking 90 percent at the bare minimum) do the normal office thing.
A lot of people in engineering positions telecommute but that is largely dependant on your managers attitude. Some are uptight fascists who want you to sit at a desk at the head of the class so they can feel mighty and powerful and haven't been hit by a cluebyfour yet while others couldn't give a flying fuck as long as you are good at what you do and are a productive person. Most telecommuters I know at the company put in the extra 3+ hours they would spend traveling toward doing even more work.
In practise this encourages people to work out of their briefcases
Uh, yeah. I have about 70 books in my office, a filing cabinet, and maybe a half dozen project binders. That's a big assed briefcase to haul around.
Portable offices have been a reality in the Unix world for more than a decade.
When I worked at the University of British Columbia in 1991, we had it down pretty pat -- and this was in a hetrogenous (but almost entirely Unix) environment. We had Suns, SGIs, IBM RS/6000s, NeXts and a good smattering of other random UNIX varients. Everybody was served by a network of NFS and NIS servers, and you could log in anywhere you want to do your work..
Not all of this was dumb terminals, though. People with light CPU loads would have X terminals and people with heavy CPU (or better funding!) would use a real workstation. Because home directories (and most binaries) were NFS mounted, I could log into any machine in our department (split over 2 buildings and 1/2 a mile) and do my work.
For part of my time, my desktop terminal was a 5-year old Sun-3 set to boot dataless, later on I was assigned a low-end SGI. Now, granted, the SGI did a far better job as a flight simulator, but for most of my work, the Sun-3 was quite satisfactory. For any of my heavy work I could log into one of the heavy-duty compute monsters (Either physically or remotely depending on the type of work needed) and work there.
word to the wise: in any remote-computing environment, always double check which machine your terminal is connected to before you do things like rebooting the system or formatting a filesystem.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
on a related note: I worked in a computer manufactureing and assemply plant. Naturally the plant runs 24/7, and people share equipment and workspaces across shifts. There was rarely a problem with equipment cleanliness. Except with the microscopes used for precision soldering. In particular people would forget to sterilize the eye pieces before and after their shift. This resulted in the occational massive outbraek of "pink eye." An annoying, and very contagious eye infection. You only need to get pink eye once to remember to clean the eye pieces with plenty of alcohol everytime you sit back down at a scope.
Interesting philosophy at work here. Not surprisingly, microsoft's quite the opposite. Along with your own office, they have windows terminals (i.e. old crusty machines that are now only good as dumb terminals) in all the building lobbies and in several computer labs so you can terminal server to the machines in your office or to a central server that just has Office+IE. So you can work remotely or in your own office...funny how they give employees the much coveted _choice_ while sun doesn't.
Hate to burst your bubble, but I, too, am a highly creative person and I'd have no troubles adapting to that environment... Why? Because I'm TRULY a creative person. I can make the best out of any situation, whether it's intrinsically to my liking or not. Same goes for tools. A truly creative person can figure out how to use any given set of tools. YOu might lose some productivity while learning the new tools, but the fact is, I don't think you honestly gave it the chance. You're probably one of those people who thought everything sucked ("Why did they have to change things?? whine whine whine I have to have dreamweaver blah blah I just *can't* work in this manner...")
I work in a fairly large company with thousands of Sun users. Generally speaking, homedirs and application are NFS mounted. And NIS lets any user log in anywhere inside the company as needed.
Yeah, it lets users move around, but that's not the biggest reason we do things this way. People still have their own cubes, and their own desks. But if their machine dies -- like via a HD failure something -- they can just move over to a vacant machine and continue their work.
Plus, establishing a standard OS load (jumpstart, in Sun terms), and building standard build scripts, we can make easy-to-swap machines for our users. Need a newer machine? Sure -- just log out, swap boxes, and log in. no muss, no fuss.
Uh, or you could just issue everyone laptops, and have them pick up and move.
Forrester Research has (had?) an interesting way of doing things. They didn't have private offices. They have "pods" which are a rooms which has 3 to 6 desks, and are organized by division. Some divisions, of course, had more than one pod; the one I was in had three pods, next to one another, with internal doorways. Seeting was very egalitarian and random -- as a new temp, I wound up a koosh-ball throw away from the CTO. From time to time, someone would decide they needed a change of view, or to be closer to someone they were working with, and would pick up and move to another (open) desk in the pod (or another pod of the same division). Since their philosophy was to issue laptops by default, moving was a matter of a hour or two, if you had a lot of plants or papers or something.
So it was for IT, Web Development, HR, Marketing, and, of course, all the Research divisions (the people who make the product :). I get the impression Sales may have been organized differently (cubes).
I found it really great. The low population of a pod (and I was in one of the crowded pods) meant everyone was quiet enough I could think. People I was working with were right there, and I could see if they were busy/on the phone/etc. before I interrupted them with a question, and without my having to leave my desk. It was pleasantly convival without being distracting. It was nicely flexible and the egalitarianism was very nice.
And they did it without thin clients. A lot of the putative benefits of thin clients can be gleened from investing in laptops as the default machines for everyone (regardless of platform).
They did a bunch of unusual business practices which worked really well.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
I'm running sunrays -- we have a pair of X1s (single processor, slow boxes) running for over 30 stations, and it's /fine/. You don't run compute jobs on those boxes -- you ssh to another box and run your compute-intensive jobs there. Simple enough.
Most likely, if it's too slow to use after 20 users on a 16-processor box, the box is not the bottleneck (unless every one of those users is re-encoding multiple mpeg files to Divx or similar). A much more likely bottleneck is a piss-poor network design. These things need some serious everfucking bandwidth (my only complaint about it -- I mean, it's a remote framebuffer -- give it simple acceleration functions, even on the level of a ET4000 or a Mach 8!)
-30-
The fact that Sun asked you to do this gives me a good deal of respect for who Sun is and what they stand for. While I have my own issues with Sun (having to do with the fact that Solaris barfs on code which every free *NIX can handle); I respect them for making OpenOffice available, and for striving to make *NIX the standard desktop environment for their users.
Now, of course, if I was your manager, I would let you use Windows, a Macintosh, or whatever else makes you productive. While I do respect people who are able to be productive in a strict *NIX environment more than people who need to use something else to get their work done, I understand that Linux is not for everyone.
As one of the other people who posted a follow-up pointed out, Windows is a real roach motel. You have made a decision to not learn how to use the proprietary tools well enough to be productive with them. As a result, you are stuck using Windows or a Mac to do productive work. People who can be productive with libre software tools and not tied down to any particular OS environment.
I have no problem using a Windows desktop, since the free software tools I use have been ported to this environment. All I need is a Windows machine with a net connection to get something very close to my Linux environment again.
Nor do I have any problem being productive in MacOS X, which is a single terminal window away from being essentially identical to my Linux setup.
Solaris can be made productive by a simple visit to sunfreeware
. Other proprietary Unices have similiar binary ports sites.
Of course, I prefer working in Linux; it is nice to know that I can fix small annoyances like this one as needed. An option I do not have with proprietary software.
- Sam
The secret to enjoying Slashdot is to realize that it should not be taken too seriously.
I worked in a lab at Bell Labs where we formed a setup somewhat similar to this. we wanted it, and had to fight some to keep it when we moved, but we really like the model. basically, we had one large lab that we all spent the majority of our time in. before our move, everyone had an office, as well, but when that corridor was torn down for renovations and we had to move, we gave up our offices [1] to be allowed to tear down walls in the spot we were moving into to turn three mid-sized rooms into one large one. we set up desks with Plan 9 terminals (where there's nothing but a boot loader and swap space on local disk) around the perimiter of the room, a nice conference table in the middle, and a television (for demos and such) and couch at one end.
[1] for a group of 6-8 people, we kept two offices. this was really useful for when you were doing work that required serious concentration, or if you had to make a private phone call. they were seldom used.
the setup worked great. there were typically 4-6 people in the lab. the theory of being able to pick any terminal did slowly evolve into people having a "normal" terminal, where people would leave manuals and such. evey once in a while, you'd walk in and there'd be someone passed out on the couch (if you were a loud sleeper, you used one of the offices, which also had a couch in it). we had one guy who telecumuted from halfway across the country, and was on-site for one week a month; after the second visit or so, he stopped getting a hotel and lived out of the office (thankfully, we had showers in the basement). whenever someone walked in who wasn't normally there who wanted to show/ask us something, or who we wanted to show/ask something, she'd just log in and go.
your reaction was not unheardof among people neighboring our odd lab. but you're describing very much a worst-case scenario, and is impacted by a number of factors, probably most strongly by how management (we pretty much managed ourselves, basically appointing one of us as an acting manager) treats it. in our lab, personal decorations were encouraged (everyone was expected to bring at least something in, and people hung a flag of choice around the perimiter of the ceiling - the lab quickly got the name "the Flag Room"). management needn't force people to move around, but should encourage people to sit by whoever they're working with at the moment. if you work with the same group of people on a long project, it makes sense you'll sit near each other for a good while. management should tell people not to do anything that prevents people from logging in at that terminal, though.
the results of this sort of environment are that you form a stronger community with your co-workers, and you get all the beifits that go along with it. your code (or other work) is of better quality, because it's dramatically easier to say "hey, what do you think of this?" than it is when you even have to go to the cube next door. the two private offices recognize the occasional need for real privacy (which cubes don't give at all, despite the illusion of). you form a social bond with the people you work with, too, which is just sort of a nice side-benifit. and you tend to be right next to the people you're actively working with, moving to another lab to work with a different set of people (although there were only two like this in the building i know of).
i speak for myself and those who like what i say.
You know how everyone has been saying "Sun has been doing this for 20 years"? Well, it's because they have. Have you ever managed a Unix network? Have you ever compared them? Do you know where Novell got its inspiration to give you these abilities? Oh, that's right, Sun!
I don't even need SunRays to beat that. If it took me more than about five people to manage 1500 workstations (not including managing the users) I would be pretty pissed; it's trivially easy to replace any of the physical workstations, of course, but it's also trivially easy to rebuild them over the network.
Oops, did I say network? Yes, I did. Notice the total lack of mention of a "boot disk"; I'm not even sure what that is. I can rebuild a Solaris box in, oh, about 15 minutes over 100Mbit Enet. Without ever touching the stupid thing. And all of the actual applications and user data is stored on a central NFS server, so it's never lost and does not have to be copied to 1500 workstations.
But wait, let's say I don't want to do that! Let's say that I don't feel like even having a local copy of the OS! I can even do _that_ without SunRays! I can netboot all of my workstations by default, and all I have to have is a decent NFS server. Then if there's ever a problem, the user just powers the stupid thing off, and powers it back on.
You give power users local copies, as long as they understand that any local data (which _never_ includes /home) can and will be easily removed, and everyone else gets netboot.
The reality is, spanky, if you are impressed by new technology which allows you to manage workstations, you are not using Unix and are not aware of Unix. The windows tools are still just a "ghost" of what Unix tools are available, and your stating that we just don't understand how easy it is now just goes to show that you don't understand how easy it has always been (at least since about 1986) for Unix admins.
Servers, obviously, are a bit different, but that 's the case for both sides.