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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.
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
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
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.
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-
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.