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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.
I remember hearing about some companies that had very open buildings. Each employee would have a computer on a rolling cabnet. They could move it around to wherever it suited them. This allowed people to group depending on what projects they were doing, and then re-group for the next one. It seem innovative to me. Sun could modify their 'dumb' setup a little and make it more efficent. Example: Bob from accounting needs a simple computer to do spreadsheets, etc. Brenda from Marketing needs something with more graphics capabilities for banner ads. So issue each employee at sun equipment comparable to their job. The mobile workstation Idea makes sense because of project grouping, but also prevents those office disagreements from getting to bad (move across the building).
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I dunno about everyone else but i LIKE it when my workstation breaks down. At my high school that i go to we run MS Visual C++ 6.0 on some win98 boxes... not pretty. But despite this i would go crazy is they didn't crash on me. First of all i get a nice time to step back and defrag my mind during the long ass reboot, and second if i was working for 8 hours straight like yoru supposed to I would go nuts. If every couple of hours somehting is wrong and it takes me a half an hour to fix it thats fun time for me. I enjoy messing with computers and it gives me a quick break. :) am i alone?
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
No big fucking deal. Everyone pretty much chooses the same general area everyday. It is not a fight to get to THE best desk first.
I don't really like the centralized shit, they can watch stuff too easily.
On a side note:
Sun also has its own word processing and office suite, called Star Office, which it has begun selling, instead of it giving away, in a sign of maturity for the Microsoft Office rival.
Explain to me how selling a piece of software is "maturity". Idiots.
Floating sucks, just take the mouseball when you leave - no one will take your station.
"It's so convenient to have a system where everyone is a criminal" - A. Hitler
First of all i get a nice time to step back and defrag my mind during the long ass reboot
When you get into the real world, you will find that most bosses understand the concept of thinking time. See The Hacker FAQ for detail on how hackers work. We all need time to think, bosses get that.
If every couple of hours somehting is wrong and it takes me a half an hour to fix it thats fun time for me
Agian, in the real world, you get paid to do a specific job. I program and monitor routers. When my computer breaks, I call the Help Desk and log a job. I like working on computers too, but at work, my job is not to fix broken computers. If I were to try and fix my box, I would probably get fired for goofing off. The chances that I would really make the prob worse is slim, but still, it is someone elses job. I get paid $60k to fix routers, the help desk gets paid $40k to fix PCs. You do the math.
I'd rather you do it wrong, than for me to have to do it at all.
>If his thin client catches on fire, it takes like 5 minutes to restore it.
:).
If a workstation sets on fire, you replace it with a backup workstation, pop in a ghost boot disk, and wait for the image to download (could be anything from 5 minutes to 10 hours depending on how crappy your network is
>If you need help on an application, just take your smartcard to your co-workers desk and ask him to look at it
In a company with standard software in the ghost images (which is how any company with more than a handful of computers should be managing the software on their workstations) all the computers have the same basic software. No need for smartcards.
>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?
Seriously, take a look into Symantec Ghost and Zenworks. They'll save you so much time you'll hardly believe it!
One image can serve for hundreds of computers. When you patch a computer all you'll need to do is update the image once (so that new ghost installs already have the fix) and push the upgrade onto clients with Zenworks.
That's going to take you about the same amount of time as patching the server and testing it with a few clients.
If you're worried about people saving their work onto their harddrives, tell them the harddrives are cleaned automatically every login (a little popup box that says its doing this will work wonders for re-inforcement) and that anything you want to keep for more than that session must be saved to the network drive.
Software like DeepFreeze can not only stop 90% of workers screwing up their systems by installing crappy software, but it will also enforce your "don't save to the hard drive" policy. The other 10% who are smart enough to work around DeepFreeze are smart enough to listen to your "don't save to the hard drive" policy because they've seen you ghost machines, and they've seen hard drives crash.
BTW: Bob takes more care of his computer when he knows that if it breaks he doesn't have a computer until its repaired!
If your company requires Unix, a little work with NIS and NFS could do wonders (and ghost will still work, although there's always dd if you're desparate)...
If you could be told what you can see or read, then it follows that you could be told what to say or think - BoC