Slashdot Mirror
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.
Never mind the fact that employees like to have file cabinets, desk toys, and other stuff to keep them happy during the day, and organized and productive. Essentially what Sun has said in implementing this concept is "everything important about your job is on the computer, or small enough to be carried with you everywhere you go."
-Evan
They tried this a while back - get to work, go to a window, get your laptop and cell phone, head off to work in your 'office', the caf, outside, etc. They ditched it after finding it was hell to find anyone to have a meeting, which is still necessary no matter how much cyber you want to throw at a situation. One manager had a two-around rule - if he had to walk around the campus twice to find someone he needed, screw them - go on to something workable.
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
they called it musical chairs
I hope that someday we will be able to put away our fears and prejudices and just laugh at people. - Jack Handey
first post...
The system only works at Sun. Here at slashdot getting in early doesn't get you a better spot.
"Your superior intellect is no match for our puny weapons!"
No longer is "management by walking around" a possibility.
But maybe "management by remotely spying on your computer screen" is a possibility.
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Not coincidentally, the company tanked soon after this started, and had to be sold in order to survive. In their new offices, traditional offices are the rule of the day.
Scene: A staff meeting is in progress...
PHB With Diagram: We're taking away your cubicles. In the new system you'll sign up for whatever cube is open that day.
PHB: It's based on the model of public restrooms. But I call it "hotelling" because it increases my chances of getting tips.
PHB: Each cubicle will have a computer, a chair, and a roll of note paper ... take on and pass it around. [Hands out notepaper roll which looks like toilet paper roll.]
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.
...but it pisses everyone off because I'm the only one doing it so I leave my crap everywhere.
Small potatoes make the steak look bigger.
$500 for a SunRay, which is a totally stateless networked keyboard+mouse+graphics+audio. There's nothing to break, nothing to upgrade... Almost no upkeep costs.
In short, they ONLY have to actually worry about maintaining the back-end, not the front-end.
This reminds me of college. Make sure you are among the first few in the classroom, so you get a good computer. But even if you got the best computer it would still have a crappy keyboard on which the backspace key would get stuck every now and then (it would ALWAYS be the backspace key, so it would delete a few more characters than you wanted it to and you'd have to retype them) and the mouse would be so dirty that it would stick to your hand!! Well, I might be exaggerating a little bit. But the bottom line is if people can't say "this computer is mine" then they simply won't bother treating it with a little care.
Alas, but in practice, Brenda in Marketing NEEDS the graphics card right in her terminal, or else she needs a Fibre connection to the server.......
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
1) there's a system to view who is sitting where (at least what they've reserved, they may not actually be in the seat at any given moment). Very handy when you want to find Joe SE to talk to him about the account, not just when you're Joe's manager.
2) while there are no assigned cubes, it's common to have "neighborhoods" where a given group tends to congregate. So if I want to talk to one of the SE's on a particular account, I know where they usually hang out; if that doesn't work, see 1).
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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.
If you're interested in what happened, people working out of the trunks of their car, check out this overview.
...
Wacky Stuff
Chiat/Day Experiment
When I worked at Bell Labs we had Bit Blit graphics terminals that were all networked to an Amdahl 5880 Mainframe running SVR2. We also had real offices with walls and doors. We could work at our desks or in the labs. It was true mobility without any of the dehuminizing crap. This was back in the late 80's when people were still valued as people.
"'You come in early, you get a good a parking space, you get a good office.' Chief Executive Scott McNealy has summed up the iWork program. "
How early do I have to come in to get Scott's office?
If going to work could be as rich and variable, as, say, going to the library, this could be very cool!
Imagine! No office cliques, since there'd be no fixed offices!
Good thing, IMHO.
Cliques are for idiots.
You 'rub elbows' with many folk that you don't know! [duffman!] Ohyeah! [/duffman!]
Excellent foundry for mating opportunities!
You don't have to deal *every fscking day* with that drooling moron in the next cube that thinks large eyed velvet painting child images of the early 70's constitute 'high art'.
I'm liking this more and more.
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!
Ugh, check out the english on this.
"An office costs about $15,000 per year to maintain, Agnello says, and Sun plans about one desk per employee, including the remote locations, once the system is running, with 18,000 employees, roughly half the company, floating. "
comma hell!
What makes you think that employees never see each other? You think the cubes are miles away from each other in some vast wasteland? You think I don't have the common sense to reserve a cube next week that's somewhere near the cube I was in this week? (for that matter, you think there are no squatters?)
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
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...
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.
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.
Not for nothing, but I kind of like knowing that I'm the only dude using my keyboard mouse & phone.
What happens to me if the guy who used the terminal the day before had a really flu, or if he didn't wash his hands after using the bathroom.
Pretty disgusting eh?
Imagine finding someone else's coffee stains or bagel seeds on or inside your keyboard?
You'd be finding something new and disgusting every day!!!
I think this is the new way that companies will do their layoffs.
Take away 50 cubicles each day, and if there's no cubicle left for you when you get to work, well, you know what that means...
Think of the audience: corporate types, who tend to be suspicious of free software (who can you hang? What's it worth if it costs nothing?) I agree the point is stupid, but that's who's targetted. At least Sun knows what audience they're shooting for.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I have a hard enough time keeping track of my team now that they sit all together. I would have to pack a lunch and a compass for code walk throughs in a situation like this.
(+1 Funny) only if I laugh out loud.
Who does that leave?
Religion is a gateway psychosis. -- Dave Foley
And Sun didn't just discover them. They've been using them for a long, long, long time.
The SunRay, though, is different from your standard X-terminal.
It's not an X-terminal.
It's a remote framebuffer, smartcard reader, keyboard, mouse, and audio device.
When you see an X screen on a sunray terminal, the X server is actually running on a Sun server somewhere, not on the workstation. You are only getting the display; hence there is 0 processing on the terminal, hence it can crash and you can just go to another and re-attach.
This is nothing new, the SunRay has been out for years.
It's solid state. It's entirely hot swappable (you can smash it with a bat, go to the next one, pop your smartcard in, and your session is intact)
You could buy shit workstations for $500. Then you have to load them out with the software you want. Then you have maintenance.
I *guarantee* that doing this with normal pc's will cost you more than double this.
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
Explain to me how selling a piece of software is "maturity". Idiots.
Any slack-jawed mouth-breather can give software away. In fact, if you look at Freshmeat, it appears that most of them do.
But if you expect somebody to give you money for software, it implies that you've spent some time polishing and perfecting that software. It implies that you've got some pride in that software, and that that software is worth something. In sort, it's a sign of maturity, just like the article said.
That's why commercial software will always be perceived to be of higher quality than free software.
Of course, there's also the fact that, with remarkably few exceptions, commercial software is of higher quality than free software.
Slashdot just told us that workstations are dirtier than toilets and now Sun wants people to share them on a regular basis? Be sure to bring a can of Lysol in your briefcase.
Sun has turned normal office work into something more like a call center sweatshop. Damnit! When I was doing tech support, I had to 'share' my desk with 400 other agents. I NEVER sat in the same place twice for something like 2 and a half years. And boy is that a killer on the old moral. Now those Sun folk have to deal with traffic, an empty coffee pot at work and now they have to fight each other for desks. Oh well...at least I don't work there.
If Mr. Edison had thought smarter he wouldn't sweat as much. --Nikola Tesla
I can see this working for my company but only for certain job functions. I'm sure that Sun isn't implementing this across the board for all their employees. I think this might work well at my company for inside sales, technical support, and in conjunction with a beefy PDA even for outside sales. Basically anything that doesn't require storing piles of stuff someplace or leaving parts laying out for extended periods.
As for being able to talk to people you work with in person, this system will enable personal teleconferencing with an optional camera. And if you still want to be face to face how about browsing to a webpage on your intranet that displays a floorplan highlighting everyone in your department? You could also search by name. You would be registered automatically when you swipe your card in the reader.
Besides people will automatically congregate together based on physical location and habit. For example, Marketing people might head for the open cubes near the color copier while Engineers would look first for an open cube near the R)
... that no matter how early you arrive you cannot take Scott McNealy's office. Bleh, the big wigs that push these things through to "save costs" and encourage the grunts to get in earlier should have to play by the same rules! :-)
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
Thanks for saving me the time. I'd have mentioned something about developers getting paid, but that's just me...
jred
I'm not a mechanic but I play one in my garage...
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
It is maturity because Sun is realizing to make a buck they actually have to start making and selling software, as opposed to suing Microsoft.
I could not justify my existence if I were a turkey farmer. Would I terminate myself? Undoubtably, yes.
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*
I can see this working for my company but only for certain job functions. I'm sure that Sun isn't implementing this across the board for all their employees. I think this might work well at my company for inside sales, technical support, and in conjunction with a beefy PDA even for outside sales. Basically anything that doesn't require storing piles of stuff someplace or leaving parts laying out for extended periods.
;)
As for being able to talk to people you work with in person, this system will enable personal teleconferencing with an optional camera. And if you still want to be face to face how about browsing to a webpage on your intranet that displays a floorplan highlighting everyone in your department? You could also search by name. You would be registered automatically when you swipe your card in the reader.
Besides people will automatically congregate together based on physical location and habit. For example, Marketing people might head for the open cubes near the color copier while Engineers would look first for an open cube near the R+D lab. And everyone is going to want to be near people they hang around with so they can take breaks or go to lunch with friends.
Also inter-personal conflicts will work themselves out since workers can relocate easily. So the hot girl in Accounting can avoid that creepy MSCE guy and move closer to her hunky Unix god.
Not in US, though, in an asian city where office space were expensive. They locked us up in a tight room where no. of 3270 terminals is much less than no. of interns, contracts and supplementary staffs(yes, they called us supplementary) in this room. If you were late and couldn't find a terminal then you must search thru the building for an unused one "there's always one out there" they said.
:)
It worked as the PHBs expected - in the beginning. In order to fight for a terminal which had no blind spot on the green screen and keyboard with no defective keys we had come up with all the dirty tricks a human could imagine. Some people took the aggressive approach like splitting on the keyboards and claimed that they had got some incurable infectable disease, some took a rather defensive tactics like taking sleep beds to office and stayed in the room overnight just to get a working terminal until their projects done; some are very organizational who formed gangs to create their own 'district' where no others could cross the lines to approach their terminals.
We could tolerate this because we didn't have the concept of 'sweatshop' and we didn't usually sue our employers here, but I'm sure those PH-cluebies finally learnt when all the good people left.
Finally Sun is catching up with this.
Sigh ...
Working Link
They are actually really cool. You stick the card in (I think they once called it a "java card"), log in and start working. Open a bunch of terminals, vi, debugger, etc., then pull out the card. It goes back to the login screen. Take the card to another terminal and plug it in. The desktop is restored to *exact same* state you left it: vi is still running with your file loaded, the gdb is still waiting at the same step, netscape shows the same page -- everything is *exacly* in the state you left it. And it takes about 2 seconds for it to "boot". The terminals apparently support sound too, though I've never tried it.
:-)
It would be even cooler if it worked reliably though. The server that ran the lab full of SunRays had to be rebooted every night because of memory leaks. Apparently the login screen was the culprit. As far as I know they are still rebooting it.
But basically, if they got the reliability problems fixed (and I assume they did), then this box is probably worth the money. The terminal, monitor, keyboard and mouse will essentially last forever. All the code runs on a server, so you don't need to worry about upgrading it. Yet at the same time, they are basically expendable: if one breaks, plug another one in and you're back to work in 1 minute. Plus you have the extreme mobility I mentioned above. Plus you have centralized data storage and easy backups....
In contrast, PCs need to be upgraded every 2-3 years. They are tied to a particular user. They need to be supported and maintained. If there is a virus/HD breaks/fire/whatever you lose all the data stored on the PC. The cost of maintenance is very very high.
___
If you think big enough, you'll never have to do it.
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.
A Senior executive in a nice corner office with 2 big windows and a personal secretary. These directives only create resentment towards management unless executives are willing to work under the same conditions. I sincerely doubt Scott McNealy is working in one of these cubes with a dumb terminal.
what is to stop you from bringing your input devices with you? the sunray supports usb.
i believe many of the people had an assigned office in one building, but they could use a desk in another some days to avoid some commuting or something, so maybe you wouldn't be able to use that feature of employment.
Need a Catering Connection
How is this a misplaced apostrophe? In this case, the apostrophe marks the possesive form of a singular noun. The network belongs to the computer-maker, so it's the computer-maker's network. If there were more than one computer-maker and they had a shared network, it would be the computer-makers' network, but we are talking about only one computer-maker (Sun Microsystems).
I wholeheartedly agree that the article is poorly-written. The aforementioned sentence is awkward, even if grammatically correct. Adding a dash between "computer" and "maker" is not absolutely required, but is definitely recommended as it helps distinguish that the two words form one atomic noun. I'm guessing that the author calls Sun a computer-maker in order to introduce Sun to those who've never heard of Sun Microsystems; however, this is unnecessary given the intended audience. It also introduces an ambiguity (Sun is certainly a computer-maker, but some of its employees can also be considered computer-makers, in which case the apostrophe is indeed misplaced).
My source code comments are better writing - and I'm an engineer, not a writer.
Also, the RCA port on those is *input*, not output. It's designed to hook in a SunCamera or somesuch composit source. The caveat is that the current version of the server software doesn't support that yet (Real Soon Now!).
The motherboard is actually running a 110-MHz sun4m chip, the same that was in the JavaStations. 8MB of RAM onboard, only uses 2MB, but 8MB was the most cost-effective chip size they could get. For what this machine does, it's still overkill.
As for never upgrading, the first-generation SunRay 1 units would smoke the power supply like clockwork after 9 months of usage, due to overheating problems. Sun has apparently resolved this.
I recently pitched my boss on these, since the vast majority of our users have no need for a full-blown PC, and I spend 75% of my time dealing with desktop issues. That means a lot more expansion before having to hire another IT guy. Initially, we'll be using Citrix on the Sun machine, going back to Windows, but we have the option of kicking Microsoft to the curb, should we want to. The *capital* cost of these over the next several years is less than half that of continuing with a 3-year upgrade cycle on PCs, even after factoring in servers. They really liked the idea of being able to keep their work if the building lost power (sessions live on the server, which should have backup power)
Another poster mentioned the SPOF issue, but SunRay server software works well in a clustered environment, as well as a multi-server environment.
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.
I'm tempted to post anonymously, but since this is now in my past, I won't.
I actually worked in Sun's San Francisco flex office (the one that is mentioned in the article.) I have a lot of stories, both good and bad, about this way of working. First, let me start with a bit of an explanation.
On one of Sun's internal websites, there is a Java applet where you go to reserve workspaces. People like me who didn't have a "real" office were allowed to reserve 14 days in advance for up to 5 consecutive days. Others were allowed to reserve anything that was left. So it's not as much of a potshot as you might imagine -- I was in the office 4-5 days a week and most of the seats weren't even reserved. You could reserve at home through Sun's remote access, so it wasn't like there was a huge line building up at 7AM or something.
I can tell you the pros and cons, but I'm biased because I absolutely hated it. I hated the formulaic offices, and I hated that personal decorations were frowned upon. But the thing that really drove me crazy was that we were expected to use the UNIX terminals in lieu of any Windows or Macintosh laptop that we might have available. In fact, I was asked to give up my laptop because it looked bad for me to have a laptop on my desk and not be using my Solaris workstation (I had a real workstation because I tested websites on different browsers on Solaris.) The whole thing made me extremely bitter toward the company and was one of the main reasons for me leaving. I feel that it's hypocritical to hire a web developer who is used to using Photoshop, a nice solid text editor, and Dreamweaver, throw that developer in front of vi and the Gimp, and expect that web developer to be as productive as before.
However, if you could get all your work done on Solaris, it worked out well. Most of the non-technical people got used to CDE (!) and were fine with a Netscape window. If all you need is Netscape, Star Office, and a couple of other applications, then sure -- a flex office is beneficial. A friend of mine still works out of that office, but she's not there very often, which is the whole point. She works all over the Bay Area and doesn't seem to mind giving up the development applications of a Windows or Macintosh machine. Then again, she isn't a developer...
I think whether you like these offices or not depends on your personality. I must admit that Sun pulled it off well -- it's a solid implementation. The applet on the website shows you where person X is at any given moment, and you can forward your phone extension anywhere, even to a cell phone or to your home phone, so you're never out of touch. I had a real problem with it because I am a highly creative person who requires certain applications that simply aren't available on Solaris. This, and the lack of office decorations, really threw me out of my comfort zone, and I know I wasn't the only one. Apparently, however, I was in the minority. (I suppose the others who hated it, many of whom were my startup-personality friends, also left.)
I hesitate to just bash on Sun since I know that it was more of a personality clash than a bad implementation, but to anyone who is considering this: the creative minds in your company will hate it. I'm talking about the people with their offices/cubicles decorated with every imaginable sticker and toy -- the ones who treat their office as a second home. These are often some of your most productive and worthy employees, so be sure to listen to their needs.
This article really struck a nerve with me. It brought back all the frustration I had with working in that office. I can only hope that the others like me have had their complaints heard or, like me, have left for greener pastures. To the rest of you -- stick with the small-group (2-3 person offices). That was the environment in which most of us thrived.
-- I left Sun in May.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
Savings: Up to $144. More if you don't want to use Windows. Another $124 if I'm right and the $500 sunray doesn't include a display.
You forgot software;
You forgot support;
This is where MS makes it's big killing. They probably get $500+ for each office worker in software. -- and then there's your AntiVirus Software too. .. just to keep all of those boxes inter-operating, since Microsoft software often fails to interoperate properly with it's older bretheren.
and your (semi) yearly software upgrages
And, of course, you need to pay people to run around doing the weekly MS security updates.
It also sounds like (from other posts) that the $500 quoted for a sunray is a bit high (unless it's for the 24" display model, in which case, it's pretty cheap).
It may be that $500/seat includes amortized server costs..
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
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.
You're comparing Sun hardware (usually fairly decent, isn't it?) to a system built around a PC Chips (aka Piece-o-Sh*t) motherboard? Let's see what we can build with something a bit better (prices are from Newegg):
Not counting the cost to ship all those parts, you're looking at $634. Drop Win2K from the order and you're down to $493. (Hmm...looks like I only ended up reinforcing your point, even with the better hardware. Damn, this stuff's getting cheap!)
20 January 2017: the End of an Error.
Both KDE and Gnome have session management features. Note that the applications you are using have to support them though..
Blaming GW Bush for the Iraq war is like blaming Ronald McDonald for the poor quality of food.
I'd bet heavily that productivity (i.e. ability to find bugs, model a market, write a well crafted paragraph) goes down. Not hideously down, just enough to make great programmers merely good, and good programmers seek other employment.
Mixing phone people with keyboard people isn't nice. It makes the phone people feel guilty and rude, if they know the programmers, etc. are trying to meet deadlines. (And people who listen to their 19 voicemail messages by speakerphone: Dante has a 6th circle reservation just for you. It involves Muzak and a pair of 20 billion watt speakers, so Don't Do It. Thanks.) It makes the programmers jumpy- you never know when a beautiful train of thought and logic gets derailed on the "RING, RING...Hi! Glad you got Back to me on those trade show booth color quotes! Teal? Lets talk Blue!Blue Blue Blah Blah..." the next cubicle over. I've been in this situation, and it hurts.
And it ignores that paper is still a useful office object- crisp clear text that can be stared at for more than 1/2 hour without your eyes going numb, easy to spread out and cover with sticky notes...but no, you'll have to clean it up and put it away each night, regardless of sudden deadlines.
I'll bet even more heavily that they did only a Benefit estimate, not a Cost-Benefit estimate, when they came up with that $150 million figure. I doubt they'll study it at all.
Well, as Neal so aptly wrote (but darnitall he was making fun of them at the time, it wasn't supposed to be emulated):
Why not just use cell-phones and wireless-enabled laptops? That way you don't spread keyboard germs and if there is a wireless link (properly authenticated) at home, you could work/phone there too without any loss of productivity or change in work environment.
If the issue is centralized management, you could just have a hard-drive duplicator with everyone using the same image (with their home directory mounted from a server based on username/password).
Are the dumb terminals (+ mongo servers + superfast networks) that much cheaper? What happens when people have special needs like Kinesis keyboards, tablets, or speakers? What happens when a server goes down? Is everyone hosed? What happens when the network is down?
I think I must be missing something.
All fine and dandy, but does it have the nifty card-reader feature where you bring your desktop along to the next machine?
Let's make it better than the sun box though:
Total: $512 and this does far more than the Sunray.
Yes, it now has a harddisk that can fail, a useless floppy drive, and a cd-burner allowing employees to spend time maintaining their music collection instead of actual work. But does it still have the nifty features of Sun Ray?
More video performance is always needed with age, vendors obsolete proprietary old hardware by not providing necessary software upgrades, network standards change, people spill coffee into them, people stuff postit notes in silly places, people destroy the buttons, they stack telephone books on them, stack books to block the fan, stop the fan with pens when its too noisy, open them to "fix" them -- there's way more, but I'm not interested in reliving the pain. :-)
Yes, but there are fewer parts to destroy with a Sun Ray. Anyway, people who deliberately damage the fan should probably pay for repair themselves.
BTW: Speaking as someone who has worked as computer support staff for a college with over 1000 terminals, I can tell you that software is one of the least worries. Computers, even though most parts don't move, do "wear out" -- parts either fail or stupid people beat the crap out of the computers.
Yes, and that's why it's worth a little more to get something without moving parts.
Every coder I've ever known keeps a collection of vital dead-tree books at hand. And its usually a couple of shelves worth - not something you could cram into a locker or lug to your desk every day. What about whiteboards too?
These are common things for coders. I see no allowance for them in this system.
And it helps to have paper (filing cabinet) as well, things like notes from meetings, or desktop sketches where you are brainstorming. I use my Palm-Vx for some of that, or a PC drawing program, but, except for a whiteboard, nothing compares to 8x10 grid paper and a sharp Staedler Mars mechanical pencil for brainstorming with several other people.
I do not see how this one would work for coders at all.
Buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo buffalo buffalo Buffalo buffalo! http://goo.gl/J9bkO
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.
Only in the Windows world do you really really need a workstation of your own
/Metaframe products before that. Get out more before spreading FUD.
Windows NT 4 Terminal server has been around for quite a while, and Citrix's Winframe
Sounds like John Varley's "The Barbie Murders" in which a cult, all modified to look identical, wearing standard coveralls, and supposedly taking whichever cell was empty for the night, had renegades who secretly grabbed the same cell every time and kept exotic costumes in it for private parties.
Every office has secret stashes of one kind or another ("I know where there's plenty of Red Label Liquid Paper!"). Unless the building itself reconfigures every night they'll develop even under this plan.
Sounds like there'd be MORE walking around-- Looking for your team members.
When we started going down the flexible office path here in Italy people were not really happy about it. Expecially in Rome, where I work.
I must first of all admit that this kind of solution would not work for people that spend every single day of their worklife at the office or people that need, for the kind work they do, a well specified place to sit and think. On the other hand to most of these people flexible office simply doesn't apply.
I'm a project engineer. As such I spend most of my days sitting at the clients' site, or having meetings with colleagues to organise and plan our work, sometimes I do test installations in our labs, but at times I end up at the office. More often than not I go to the office simply to keep in touch with colleagues and to feel what's going on, other times to print documentation to be given to clients.
All that I need to work it's there. I read about people that were worried about their manuals, and I really don't see the problem. My own manuals are on the public shelf we have, and it's even better than having my own shelf, since I can lookup also books that other people have brought in. It may be some thing about us down here in Southern Europe, but I don't think anyone has had a problem about it so far.
When I arrive at the office I simply pick an empty spot near colleagues from my same team, plug in my laptop (yes, I do have a laptop, as all the people working on the field most of the time), put the smartcard in the SRay and at this point I have two workstations at hand!
But, "Oh My God!!", some of my colleagues was on this very same seat before me, and used this mouse and keyboard. He could have had a deadly virus, or a cold!!
Mmm. Let me think: I shake hand, hug, pat on the shoulders plenty of people everyday. I use often public transportation to move around, and damn: the ones I hang on are very dirty railings. And I'm doing still quite fine.
I don't know about the people who showed these sort of concerns, but I use to wash my hands before eating. And I wash my hands when I get home. Sometimes I even wash my hands _before_ I go to the toilet. See, I've always seen personal hygiene just like that: personal. I really don't rely much on others when it comes to it.
The point I'm trying to make is simple: I can't judge globally, but I have to admit that flexible office made my work better. I can't say it's the solution for anything, but it made my day better, because I can move near the people I'm working with at that point in time, and compared to a fixed office I can now choose in which office I want to go and work of the two we have here in Rome.
Just my twopence,
a smile,
MrWHO
It is me, none else but me. And who would you be?
Nobody in your building has assigned desks. You go in and sit at the desk that Big Jim had been sitting in for the previous three weeks. Big Jim can't make you move. Big Jim finds you during lunch hour, beats you up, and takes your lunch money.
The masses are the crack whores of religion.
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.
Sounds like some folks at the top desperately need to read Peopleware. I thought hoteling was an idea whose time has come and gone...trying to treat knowledge workers like factory workers is really, really stupid. The idea that workers might be a company's biggest asset is a really threatening concept to some companies, apparently, and I think that some of this bizarre behavior is indicative of that.
Also, just because it is easy to admin doesn't mean that it justifies this soulless environment.
"...it probably is cheaper to run the business off a few large Sun server..."
At Sun's prices, most companies can just buy cheap workstations from Dell or HPQ and still save money...
Nope, I was referring to the SunRay 1 specifically - We smoked more of those than i care to remember when i was working at Sun's Broomfield campus. Sun's interim solution was to take the wedges out of their plastic stands and lay them on their sides.
All three models have seen price increases. The 150 is now $1400 (up from $1200), and the 100 is $960 (up from $800-850 or so)
What was changed during the design refresh, and how do I identify a refreshed model?
This is really for the most part used for consultants, sales and the like that travel a lot and really aren't in the office most of the time. Programmers, sys admins, admins and those that are in the office all the time still have real desks. And if you want to argue with me I work for Sun and I am a consultant and I had a desk the first year I was with the company and was in the office I think a total of 4 days. This kinda office enviunment makes sense if you understand the context it is used in.
Given that it's Sun we're talking about, I hardly think these are Ye Olde Green Screen Terminals. We're talking X Terminals here.
And since the X Window System is quite able to serve different displays simultaneously, I would think that different workers needing different graphics capabilities is no problem whatsoever.
At least at home my desktop system has no problems serving a 1280x1024x32 display to my monitor and a 1024x768x16 to my laptop simultaneously. I expect Sun to have a little more powerful hardware, but the basic concept is the same.
Mart"I know I will be modded down for this": where's the option '-1, Asking for it'?
This is just the successor to their previous "iDon'tWork" program.
(sorry, it was too irresistable)
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
Adaptability does not equal creativity.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security
I'd have mentioned something about developers getting paid, but that's just me...
Doh! How could I have forgotten that little tidbit! As a rule, developers who get paid to work on software will produce better, higher quality code, with fewer bugs and tighter design, than developers who do it in their spare time. Yet another reason why commercial software implies better, more mature code.
I mean, with a polished and perfected piece of software there'd be no security or usability problems, right?
Wrong. You're trying to use a reducto ad absurdum argument on be. It won't work.
I didn't say that commercial software is always perfect all the time, like you seem to wish I had. I said exactly what I mean: if you try to turn software into a business, you're probably going to spend more time and energy on your software than if you just do it as a hobby. If you fail to do this, then you'll be out of business. So the implication is that commercial software is of higher quality than free software.
This implication is strengthened by the fact that, in most cases, commercial software is of higher quality than comparable free software.
A poster said that the person who said that Sun's selling of StarOffice is a sign of maturity was an idiot. I'm refuting that. While not a guarantee, it is entirely reasonable to consider commercial sale of a piece of software to be a sign of maturity.
And all shareware is worth its registration price. Heh. If you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell ya.
I'm not sure I understand. Are you trying to say that commercial software is not, as a rule, better than comparable free software? If so, I'd like to get specific, please.
I can think of one example of free software that's as good as or better than commercial software of the same type: Apache. Apache is the reference standard web server, and while there are other outstanding servers, none other seems to be quite able to balance portability, performance, and flexibility. So that's one.
On the other hand, I can't think of any databases that are as good as or better than Oracle, DB2, or Sybase. I also can't think of a free ERP or AR/AP package the compares to SAP, or a free CRM package that compares to Siebel or Salesforce.com, or a free HR package that compares to Peoplesoft.
Hell, I can't even think of a small business accounting application that compares to QuickBooks, or to Peachtree!
So I'm really having a hard time understanding your argument, here.
Scott McNealy:
When an office is designed around making the office the primary focus, rather than the humans that occupy it, you have lost. It's not the office that generates revenue - it's the human workforce.
To create shareholder value, you have to make the workforce productive, and nothing - and I mean nothing - makes a workforce more loyal, productive and ready to jump through hoops for you than happiness and belief in their own greatness. This office deliberately sets out to destroy human qualities by dehumanizing the workplace (ie, photos being frowned upon, etc).
Offices such as this have no human response, and in fact, it's like a disgruntled or evil bean counter (ie a human Catbert) wanted to make the most offensive office they could.
I'll tell you a story about why Sun will go broke in the next 10-20 years, and irrelevant in 2-5 years (just as SGI are irrelevant now*). About six years ago, Sun (and several other high end Unix vendors) responded to a multi-milion dollar tender. All the other vendors concentrated on unique features of their hardware (Digital on clustering and massive scalability, etc), software and service offerings. Sun concentrated on bashing Microsoft for 90% of their face time with us. Microsoft wasn't even in the potential set of competitors! And to top it off, Sun was the least competitive of all the bids - slowest hardware, and most expensive.
Sun - you have to focus on making the humans happy. Whether they be your users, your customers, or your employees.
--
* I work in the security industry, and it's been three years since I've seen an SGI in production, and I've been to hundreds of clients all over Australia. I've seen an Aviion and a DG/UX box since the last time I saw an SGI, for example!
Andrew van der Stock
Pretty scary.
I feel that it's hypocritical to hire a web developer who is used to using Photoshop, a nice solid text editor, and Dreamweaver, throw that developer in front of vi and the Gimp, and expect that web developer to be as productive as before
It's not hypocritical, it's stupid. They shouldn't have hired you in the first place... a point proven when you left anyway.
I'm reading that exact strip, under the "Hoteling" section of The Dilbert Principle, in Chapter 2: Humiliation.
Meldroc, Waster of Electrons
"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."
Perhaps I would have gotten people more up in arms had I mentioned that Linux (any PC-based OS that required your own computer instead of a terminal) was frowned upon as much as Windows and Macintosh were. I said several times that I would work fine if they gave me a Macintosh instead (since the Windows 2000 computer I received from another part of Sun was evidently not adequate.) But my boss pointed out that other people (who were doing email support and not development) were fine with a Solaris box. He couldn't understand why I didn't want to give up my laptop for a CDE desktop and smart card, even though (here's the kicker) he too used a laptop on a daily basis.
When you hire an employee, you are expected to give that employee a standard set of tools. In this case, Sun bought me a Windows 2000 laptop and a Solaris workstation (well, the workstation was a hand-me-down.) Then my boss tried to force me to give up the laptop in favor of being Solaris-only because of the "image" that using Windows gave Sun (trust me, they were doing this to the Mac people as well.) I said no, and I quit.
When you don't give your employee the tools that that employee needs, and try to force their hand in using other tools that aren't designed for the job, then you have a bad match as the employer/employee relationship goes. What bothered me most was that they weren't trying to proclaim that Solaris was more productive or had better tools than Windows or a Mac, but that Sun's "image" would look bad if Sun's web developers used anything but SunRays. I can understand this attitude from a high corporate level, but can anyone seriously (with a straight face) tell me that you have the same applications available to you on Solaris as on Windows? (I'm not even sure if the GIMP was available on their servers.) It's a terrible mentality to push the "eat your own dogfood" attitude so far that your employees quit. I know I wasn't the only employee to leave over something like this, either.
I think Sun needs to rethink its position regarding the tools that its employees use. Sure, give everyone a SunRay. But don't shove Solaris down people's throats as the One True Way. Understand that there are a lot of things that simply don't run on it, and understand that your (Sun's) customers aren't going to want to run a 100% Solaris shop, either. Sun will fail in the marketplace if they believe that Solaris will fill every business niche that Windows fills now, and that is exactly the attitude I see from inside Sun.
Simpli - Your source for San Jose dedicated servers and colocation!
You're using latin debating terms to piss me off. It will work!
Excuse me for using precise terminology. (Except for the typo. It's "reductio," not "reducto." That's my bad.)
Reductio ad absurdum is, first, a very common term. And second, it's clear, both from the term itself and from context, what it means. So quit complaining and crack a book.
You then tried to point out a flaw in my argument. I'm going to try to get all of the relevant context here, while trimming it down for length.
You said "Of course, there's also the fact that, with remarkably few exceptions, commercial software is of higher quality than free software." [...] "So the implication is that commercial software is of higher quality than free software." But you said that the remarkable majority (opposite of remarkably few) of commercial software is of higher quality than free software. You said it. Not me. Either take that or I'm going to call you on it.
Um. Okay. I said that the majority of commercial software is of higher quality than its free software counterparts.
Maybe you were confused by my use of the phrase, "with remarkably few exceptions," although I believe your quote was accurate. My statement meant that, while a few exceptions exist, commercial software products are superior to their free software alternatives.
Now, finally, we get specific.
Sendmail
Okay, that's a good one. I'll give you Sendmail. It's big, and hard to use, but it's just as good as any other small-to-medium email server out there. Exchange server is really in a different class, and fairly crufty. Solutions like Post.Office are designed to deal with hundreds of thousands of users, which puts them in a different league.
So you get Sendmail.
GCC
GCC is an okay compiler, but only if your #1 priority is portability. GCC will, it seems, generate code for damn near anything.
But if you don't care about portability, then GCC is really a substandard compiler. It's okay for C, and utterly unacceptable for C++. Of course, it also tries to compile languages like Fortran, Objective C, and Java, but these are even worse disappointments. SGI's C, C++, and Fortran compilers for MIPS are the best I've used personally. I hear great things about Intel's compilers for IA-32 and IA-64, too.
So GCC is marginal at best. It's got some things going for it, but on the whole it's not too great.
Cygwin
Cygwin is something of a one-trick pony. I suppose it's fine for what it does, but I'm having a hard time understanding why it exists at all, except as a novelty. I consider Cygwin to be inconclusive.
KDE
Are you serious? KDE is awful in comparison to the Windows, Mac OS Classic, or Mac OS X desktops. It's ugly, slow, and incomplete. Please don't try to hold up KDE as some kind of example of open source excellence.
GhostScript
GhostScript is neat because it works at all. But there is a lot of PostScript and PDF code out there that GhostScript can't handle. It's woefully incomplete when compared to Adobe's PostScript and PDF interpreters. Compare the number of RIPs that use GhostScript to the number that have licensed Adobe's interpreter to get a feel for how good GhostScript really is.
Mozilla
Every commercial browser currently available is superior to Mozilla. On Windows and Mac, IE is a lot faster. On Mac OS X, OmniWeb is prettier. Opera, although I don't use it myself, also has a lot going for it.
We can talk all you want about how neat Mozilla may or may not be at some indefinite time in the future. As of right now-- and by "right now" I mean 1.0 RC 3, the version I have on my computer-- it's too buggy and too slow to be useful.
So, what you're saying is that commercial software beats free software because it does a better job at accounting systems and ERP systems (which are often interrelated)? I think you'll need to do far better than that, especially as projects like GNUCash gain steam.
Nope. I'm saying that commercial software beats free software because, as a rule, it does. Period. Accounting, databasing, ERP, CRM, and so on are just examples of things that lots of people use computers for.
And GnuCash? It's trying to be Quicken for Linux. Only it's not as good as Quicken. If you insist on running Linux on your desktop (a mistake any way you slice it), then I guess you have no alternative but to use tools like GnuCash. In that situation, you're really comparing GnuCash to nothing at all, because that's what you'd be using otherwise.
Depending on your needs, GnuCash may be superior to using nothing at all. But no promises.
That's right out of Snow Crash! The Fed (US Government) workforce functioned in exactly the same way. Early arrivals would sit close to the door of the office and latecomers would be forced to sit further away making them the obvious object of spurn and ridicule.
Frightening stuff.
teams work better together.
Body language & gestures don't work well in emails.
Plus someone getting up & explaining something on a white board for some reason actually works better that a white board networked work station program
Have you seen what those office specialist places charge that corporates & govt depts have accounts with?
It much cheaper just to give employees petty cash & send them to the local bargain basement shop in the mall & tell them to buy what they want & bring back a receipt.
You might want to start taking that medication again, Buddy. A spell checker wouldn't hurt, either.
I take it as a compliment that you can't verbalize an opinion without name calling. However, at that point, you've already lost. You didn't even argue on topic. Thanks.
They who would give up an essential liberty for temporary security, deserve neither liberty or security
And people who listen to their 19 voicemail messages by speakerphone: Dante has a 6th circle reservation just for you. It involves Muzak and a pair of 20 billion watt headphones , so Don't Do It. Thanks.
(* PHB obviously has not visited Germany, Belgium or the Netherlands often! Every toilet there (even in many McDonalds!) has a wizened old lady sitting by the cubicles collecting money. *)
Hmmm. Shouldn't the lady pay the "visitors" for supplying fresh furtlizer?
Table-ized A.I.
Man, I'd go nuts if I had to put up with that. And probably take out a few people with me.
I'm back at school at the moment, but at my last job, I had a very particular set of requirements. They were absolutely necessary for me to work efficiently, and for me to be sufficiently happy with my job that I wouldn't just up and leave.
For example, I had to have a Mac, and it had to have the OS set up how I like it. The apps I like (e.g. Illustrator instead of Freehand, which is the vector program of the Devil), the preferences I like, and the file structure I like. I had to have a big ass CRT, and because I was a graphics person, I had to do a fair bit of work to ensure that everything was perfectly calibrated. (9300K sucks ass) I had to have the kind of keyboard that I like, despite the fact that they haven't been manufactured in years. (though it wasn't much trouble finding one) My headphones are too big to carry around with me ordinarily, so they needed to be left there, along with the extension cord for them.
The desk had to be extremely deep, very large overall, and have no middle drawer because of the way that I like to sit at it. The chair had to be precisely adjusted, and I needed to control the lighting for my comfort and to preserve the color calibration. This means no florescent lights, and no direct sunlight in my field of vision or where it interferes with the screen.
I had piles of notepads and sticky notes, which I needed to keep ideas handy. Not to mention several reference cards I made, laminated, and fixed to the desk surface for convenience. I needed to have certain reference books handy, since looking things up online would've been slower (I heavily tab and highlight my books, and I write and draw in the margins various useful things) and would waste valuable screen space that could be used to look at whatever it is that has me resorting to a reference book.
Fortunately I never had a phone at my desk -- I don't believe in them and don't like to use them.
And with all this, I was at my best. In a generic environment, where I am inevitably uncomfortable, because I haven't changed things to suit me (something humans tend to do, you know), I'd spend more time either trying to get things set up right, or slow because of conflicts with the surroundings (imagine getting direct sunlight on the screen for half a day!).
OTOH, I very much enjoyed having an open floor plan, since I could conveniently talk to my co workers, and them to me, as well as move about. When cubicals started to come in, I managed to stay out of them, and have an open desk.
This isn't to say that there aren't one or two good things about this. I'd like to be able to access my stuff as though I was sitting at my computer from another desk. But it wouldn't be my computer, or my desk, so it's not as though I'd ever make a habit of it.
I can definately imagine if I were ever stuck with something like this, having to establish someplace as my area, and perhaps having to wheel around a shopping cart to keep my stuff.
Given that business relies on human beings infinitely more than technology, I can't see that this is a good idea at all.
-- This and all my posts are in the public domain. I am a lawyer. I am not your lawyer, and this is not legal advice.
AC - you're missing the point. You can log onto your desktop via. Terminal Server and get your exact desktop, with all of the applications that you left running. It's pretty much the same as the description of the SunRay, except that you're remoting off of your own machine, not a central server.
Also, people in core product groups usually have 2-4+ machines 2+ monitors in their office, so when you need to collaborate it's a mini lab. Someone else can just drop by and log in using a spare machine to reference source code or whatever else they need.
(Is this new? No, X has been doing it for years. But it's still cool.)
hawk, refraining from pointing out that there is no such job, and that that's just some lady who wandered in and takies advantage of gullible tourists
I didn't mean to be a jerk. /. unwashed really bothered me, since it WAS a smart comment.
Your post really worked. The notion of it seeming clueless to the
Sometimes it's hard to tell the difference round these parts..
Brak: What's THAT?
Thundercleese: A light switch.. of TOTAL DEVASTATION!