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Jetway PT800TWIN - Dual User Hardware
Steve K writes "Cost-cutting in IT. Something the beancounters are always looking at, no doubt. Jetway have attempted to provide an answer -- allow two users to utilise one machine at once. HEXUS.net have a review:
'The PT800TWIN is an odd beast. While it's admirable that Jetway have engineered it with MagicTwin support in mind, to go after the low-cost/budget/TCO crowd, you have to wonder about the implementation. It needs Windows XP, adding cost. A large proportion of applications released on Windows require you to have two licenses to run concurrently on a MagicTwin system, adding cost. While you save money on the hardware, you don't on the software.' Not really a revolutionary product, but perhaps it can be taken somewhere with a little more work."
Considering the market that they are targeting, the single largest expense is not the hardware but the software. A full version of XP Pro costs $300 and a full copy of Office 2003 costs $400. Sure, you can get volume discounts, possibly even upgrades, but considering most OEM's offer low end office PC's for the same price as a full version of 2003, you can see how the hardware isn't the biggest concern if you are aiming at the business value market. An effective API layer for Linux that supports the most common business apps could pull in more money. Also, before anyone brings it up, Crossover Office needs a bit more work and a stronger reputation before it would be considered as a common business solution.
Old news.. I recall it being covered in a PC magazine at least two-three months ago.
Conor "You're not married,you haven't got a girlfriend and you've never seen Star Trek? Good Lord!" - Patrick Stewart
Why not just buy a damn server and attach dumbterminals then?
All this thing is really is a scaled down version of time sharing systems that have been around since the 1950's.
Oh well, I guess the more things change the more they stay the same.
Coralized link
It's like an inverted KVM switch or a thinclient for one user while the other one - the one actually seated at the machine - has real control.
This might be useful for governmental machines, like CIA or such, but I can't see it being used in schools or offices, especially if someone infects a machine with something - though it would make it a hell of a lot easier to clean half the machines.
Striking fear in the authors of godawful fanfiction, I am here, appearing in darkness, Tuxedo Jack!
It needs Windows XP, adding cost.
Pass
Nothing to see here, move along...
Games Programmer And Designer
Um. You know, if you get a computer with two video cards, two keyboards, two mice and two monitors you can do with with X rather easily. Heck, if you don't mind the performance hit you can technically get a whole bunch of terminals hooked up to one machine like this. You're really not saving that much money though. Commodity PC hardware is so cheap these days that is just doesn't matter that much.
The GeekNights podcast is going strong. Listen!
This was also discussed on Slashdot a short while ago: FourHead: One PC, Four Users
Trusted Computing FAQ | Free Dawit Isaak!
"ATTENTION STAFF: From now on all developers will share a Jetway PT800TWIIN workstation. You can both log in to the same machine, thereby saving us hardware costs. A cost savings that you can imagine will get passed back to you in higher salaries, but there you would be wrong. Think executive bonuses for coming up with this idea in the first place.
In a further cost-cutting move, both developers sharing their PT800TWIN workstation will also share the same ergonomic chair. By getting our cleaning service personnel to sretch out your chairs in the off hours, we have found that two moderately overweight programmers can now fit into the same chair. Note the 'moderately' part. From now on all snacks from the kitchen will be removed to encourage proper weight maintenance...and to save costs.
Futher, you'll be happy to hear, we are discontinuing the practice of commuting. Both developers will now share their cubicles with two other developers in a shared work/sleep arrangement. You will work 12 hours, then utilize the new company-issued hammocks with corporate logo and mini pillows to sleep for 12 hours. During those sleep twelve hours, the other two developers will squeeze into the one chair to continue work. Note that you may need to nudge them out of the hammock first, as there will only be one hammock issued for each four developers.
We know you will appreciate the cost-cutting moves that will help yield higher profits and will be a boon to the executive V.P.s who thought of this move after reading an article in Forbes that called this the next big thing in business. You can thank the V.P. personally when he comes back from his 3-month trip to Fiji paid for by the bonus he received from suggesting this approach. Please join me in thanking him. And get back to work."
Why choose to buy one very performing desktop to split his performance in half, instead of buying 2 cheap desktops? Performing hardware is always more costly than twice its underperforming counterpart...
Also, twice the applications running, twice the opportunity to crash...?
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Maybe even go so far as putting Linux on the thing? As long as you're working on a budget system anyway.
Try not. Do or do not, there is no try.
-- Dr. Spock, stardate 2822-3.
Sharedware were doing this back in the days of Windows 95. They've since gone under and been bought out but they were also much smarter in another way - they did add in cards for generic PCs that had keyboard/mouse/video/sound on them. Unfortunately I've never been able to get anyone involved to liberate the docs to drive it in Linux
This sounds like a slightly different take on a fad from a few years ago called Citrix and MetaFrame. I don't hear too much about Citrix anymore; and I suspect I wont hear too much about this stuff either.
You don't have to be too old to remember departmental computers and minicomputers with timesharing that enabled 10 people, 2 of whom actually knew how to get net work done on a computer, to use one $50000 system. When did we hit bottom? This is not progress. I think these guys are re-inventing the flat tire. Wouldn't they be miles ahead to start with an OS that was multi-usr from the get-go and available with a LIceNse for Users at no eXpense?
SLASHDOT: news for people who can't concentrate on work or have no life at all and got tired of yelling back at the TV.
...to set up two X displays on a dual-headed machine, with each display being served by a different keyboard and mouse?
Give the X server access to the raw HID devices...Use udev to make sure the same keyboard and the same mouse show up as the same device node every time. (Even if you disconnect and reconnect the USB device.)
Never done it, but I think that's how it would be done.
tasks(723) drafts(105) languages(484) examples(29106)
Wasnt their a story several months ago where someone was shiping 4way xtermainls all homed on a single pentium? I mean XP supporting only 2users seems rather weak when they have 4way X machines using extra video cards and usb kb/mouse.
And considering that in 10 years the hardware will be free this doesnt look like such a great investment.
Stateless Linux anyone?
Im dreaming ofa big bndwdth, That can resist the
Applica did this five or so years ago. I tested their U2 product back 1999-ish.
http://www.applica.com/
You only need one machine if your Pair Programming anyway.
This just sounds like more trouble than its worth. If you want to go think-client, then go thin-client and reap the benefits. If you want individual workstations, then do that. Don't try to meet in the middle, or you'll find yourself with twice the headaches and none of the benefits.
$8.95/mo web hosting
While you save money on the hardware, you don't on the software.
as opposed to not saving on software AND not saving on hardware? sounds like a good solution to me. besides, you're paying for a single install of winxp, not two, so that's software savings right there. and yes, sometimes windows xp is the right tool for the job and is worth paying for (like in some office environments where the workers know, want, and need windows). forcing people to use linux against their will can be just as stupid as forcing people to use windows against their will.
"It needs Windows XP, adding cost."
True, Linux may be cheaper (free) but I think this is aimed at the wider corporate audience. I know this would be great in our call center. We would still need a Clientele (for example) license for each tech but Clientele doesn't run (last I checked) on Linux and we need one license per tech now.
I think office would not need multiple licenses either as it is a per CPU license.
Welcome to the world of mainframes.
What does this do that Citrix and thin clients can't?
You see? You see? Your stupid minds! Stupid! Stupid!
Is this some sort of standard for a shared hardware platform? Any docs anywhere? Is it like S/390 partitioning?
Yeah I guess this is ok, but man, it would suck to have your system resources split between two people.
It's called Sun Ray, and it's here now.
And it ROCKS.
http://wwws.sun.com/sunray/sunray150/index.html
I misread that as "Segway" and saw "It needs Windows XP". Then I thought, "Oh, God, we've reached new levels of pointless bloat!"
I remember some local company(local to me..) making something exactly like this back in 1996 or so, they sold a few of them but i remember trying one and they were amazingly slow. probably since that was the P1/P2 era and they were trying to make it a $2000 setup with monitors and everything. it was kind cool though because they desinged and built the things by hand. drivers, cases and all.
We use BeTwin here at work, and I wouldn't recommend it to anyone that actually wanted their users to do anything with the computer over and above basic web surfing and one other app...not to mention the list of programs that it doesn't work with (non listed on the site, as little testing was done, and we use some odd software (ie Pegasus Mail,XPSP2,etc...etc))
Get a linux box and a few Xterms
But then wouldn't you have to buy a copy of Crossover Office and Microsoft Office for each X terminal you attach? Many businesses rely on being able to open Microsoft Office documents that OpenOffice.org chokes on.
I'd really like to be able to do this with my G5, so my wife and I could use it at the same time. It's got the power and the ability to have multiple users simultaneously logged in - all I need is two physical consoles.
Constitutionally Correct
We've had the xxx TWIN barebones servers, cases and motherboards in our catalog for some time. (We've even managed to get some of them showing on our website. ;)
Ok, so it's a blatant plug -- the point remains, this is NOT a new story. Don't know why I'm surprised at that, though - this IS slashdot....
[URL:http://www.theboyz.biz] Computers, Electronics and More!
If you're not living on the edge, you're just taking up space!
This is a terrible idea. This won't save much money at all. The only thing that it does is limit usable hardware.
You don't get any of the management benefits you get from using a single gold image and thinclients, and you don't get any of the flexibility you get from a full desktop system.
I predict this will fail. Miserably.
Why does this approach require THEIR motherboard?
Why can't the same thing be done (dubious though the approach is) on any commodity PC? This just supplies a couple of driver hacks to get >1 person logged into a single WinXP PC. (Note that this can already be done with non-console users accessing the common machine via Remote Desktop.)
So what does their motherboard enable that isn't available on other products??
Brits like to use plural verb forms to go with collective nouns: "The committee have discussed it," or "Arsenal are striking the ball well." This is, of course, stupid.
Americans see the sense it using a singular verb form with a collective noun, which after all refers to a single collection. Hence, we say "The committee has discussed it," and "Arsenal sucks."
How do licenses apply when you're using Remote Desktop through Windows? Do both people need a license when the software is installed on one machine, and the others remote desktop in and use it remotely?
I'm not up on microsoft licensing, but it seems like you could get away with one license for the machine it is installed on. I would think it would be similar to two users logging in on the same machine, each with a different profile...just curious.
sorry, i partly misread your post, you already figured out that xfree should work unpatched. there is however an alternative setup, where you can patch xfree and keep the kernel unpatched, by using raw usb input. but the backstreet ruby approach seems more elegant.
It looks like the perfect app for that would be in an Internet cafe with 2 15" monitors, keyboards and meese. Less maintenance and you can just re-image every morning before you open the doors.
-Randy
I knew this article looked familiar
there
http://shit.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=04/09/13/2 345235
I have been trying a few experiments on my Lan. with different systems of remote connection, realvnc, tightvnc and Remote desktop for windows Xp.
My linux pc has real multiuser capabilitys since each user gets a seperate desktop. With the majority of actual processing carried out on the superior host machine, very weak clients can be supported.
With Remotedesktop for instance I had a P166 laptop running 98 se in 48 meg of ram connected to an XP1600 pc running XP pro across a wireless lan.
The response of the 98 terminal seemed better than running applications locally with little use of the swop file. that underpowered laptop was practically reborn and almost as capable as the remote controlled XP Pc doing most of the work.
with linux a kde desktop being served (via a realvnc client) to a windows Pc ran smoothly and still allowed a local user at the linux pc but then linux is a proper muliuser environment.
The practical limitation is the bandwidth of the Lan and the power of the server Pc.
Someone said whats the point your just spliting a powerful machine in half or quarters or what ever.
thing is to run a word processor or any other number of other tasks doesn't take a huge amount of processing power a lot of the time a pc is waiting for you.
As single users we often leave tasks running in the background and hardly miss the resources on a powerful system. Sharing the CPu cycles with another user is not much worse than that.
Yes with windows program you probably do need to pay for multiuser to be legal but not so much with linux.
in a home environment do you really need to buy a top pc for everyone or run linux on 1 good one and have a few low powered boxes around the house where your family can log on and use the powerful system while dad sits on it locally reading slashdot.
Blarney Quality Restaurant, Plants
...10 of them. my weekly "free" It time...
...ever Cince I switched the church to Linux...
/. though.)
They got more, more performance...
I'm sure that one day the pendulum is going to swing back the other way, and that writing comprehensible english will become more highly valued than knowledge of *nix. (Probably not on
So what does their motherboard enable that isn't available on other products??
Increased cash flow.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
The current implementation doesn't seem to work very well, but the idea is pretty cool.
With a current workstation being much more powerful than most users really need, this isn't a bad idea.
For the office, I've built a score of AthlonXP 2500+/Nforce2 IGP machines with 512 megs of memory and all-around good, quality hardware for about $450 each. It doesn't make much sense to go for anything slower on the CPU. If I saved $30 (less than 10% of the system cost), I'd probably lose 30% of the performance. But at the same time, that's a lot more CPU than they need for IE, Excell, and Thunderbird.
It would be very cool to build similar with a gig of memory (say, $600), and let two people in the same cubicle use them. We currently have our customer-service monkies stacked two and three to a cube, so it would work out terrifically.
In fact, if it weren't for one terribly critical piece of Windows-only software, I would have long ago gone to a dual-CPU Linux machine with 8 gigs of memory, and given twenty people a dumb/thin client with which to connect to it. However, that *still* requires an extra computer on their desktop.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
I thought the Jetway Twin design looked familiar.
use one of the virtual machines out there? Install & activate the apps then map them to virtual disks - one app, one license, one activation. Each user works within a virtual machine running underneath the product.
I did this a long time ago with VM Ware and a second USB Keyboard/Mouse and dual displays. The main XP system on one screen with VM Ware on the other screen. The USB keyboard/mouse can be used in VM Ware, and the host system uses the PS/2 stuff. It is even pretty fast on a decent system with lots of ram.
We've got a similar thing happening at work. Certain people (read: PHB's) have this huge aversion to spending $800 on a PC (inc. OS and monitor) for use on the factory floor, when the software package(s) we use costs $7K-$10K per box.
The aversion comes from having a physical box that can be 'counted', if you are wondering. The goal is to do more with less PCs, not paying any attention to the point where too few impacts productivity. Nobody seems to notice the depreciation on hardware is surpassed by software and software maintenance costs.
Lately the buzz is for thin clients. Cheaper at only $500 per unit (inc. OS and monitor), but you can't make PHB's understand that servers and infrastructure are needed to support them.
I don't care, it's all toys I can play with.
As a Linux user plagued with crappy gaming experiences and having to dual boot, I was really hoping when I read the title of this article that we would be talking about a system with two computers in one box, so I could run two operating systems at once if I wanted to.
Imagine that... two machines in one box, and a KVM switch built into the case for picking which one you want to interact with. Mmmmmm.....
Either that, or like .. Transitive gets out of vaporware.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
I was looking to provide two separate terminals for a very, very expensive financial data application that typically has two screens anyway- if you work in the industry you know the one I'm talking about.
:)
I read about the "MagicTwin" boxes on a hardware site, and thought it might be worth a shot to see if I could get it to work with the "per terminal" licensing features.
it was a PAIN IN THE ASS to get the whole system working properly, and it basically is just a hacked up version of RDP so it provides a terminal on a second keyboard, mouse, and monitor (the machines have a built in dual head card, or require certain add in cards).
all in all, it was usable, but nothing to write home about. it didn't work for duping the app either, as it was pretty much the same as a terminal session through RDP and I think people have tried that route before
seriously though, it's kind of cheesy and proprietary... you'd be better off buying generic hardware (a decent shuttle box, for example) and having two separate machines. the admin overhead of that little POS is really not worth the effort, IMHO.
(for reference, mine is an AMD based box, with a NForce2 IGP- I think it's the magictwin 765 or something like that.)
EOM
Do you have an example of an MS doc that OOo chokes on? I don't doubt they exist, I've just never had it happen, and I'd like to know what chokes it and how it reacts (junk in the display? crash? error message?).
I thought that the MagicTwin might prove good for the VJ market..
A typical VJ setup involves two computers with NTSC converters hooked up to a video mixer to transition between the two.. With a computer like this, you could replicate this with half the footprint.
For a Microsoft Office doc that won't open in OpenOffice.org, try anything made in Microsoft Access, the graphical database frontend. OOo doesn't have a corresponding application.
Or try any of the vertical market applications that exist only for Microsoft Windows.
This thing is a gross waste. What silliness we go thru just to use windoze! The dumb terminal example is certainly viable. I learned on such a beast. It was a 386 and it was running (gag) SCO Unix and had 6 or 8 terminals with an appropriate number of students all compiling and using emacs.
For a modern equivalent we just use a cheap system with linux of *BSD and use it as an Xserver thereby letting more than one user use one Linux system with no extra cost or licensing or anything but a network.
Built a few computers with the magic twin software, all it really requires is a multi head video output, and multiple inputs, it is not hardware specific. That said, a lot of people who are buying the "miniQ" based systems are buying them for the onboard gforce dual head adapter, and not installing the magic twin software, have built several such systems for audio editing (think big mixing board breakout audio card).
On the whole, i find it a bit useless for the solution they are supplying these miniQ boxes for (home entertainment, tv out, 3d audio, remote control, etc) as they tend to have big problems doing anything on the second terminal if the first one is heavily loaded down.
Maybe when dual core systems become more the norm this style hardware/software solution will be more viable.
...
I used to build and sell Alloy multi-user systems (full pc's on 8bit ISA cards) in the mid 80's, and even did some PC-MOS and DR DOS systems on AT clones w/serial terminals.
Using the IBM expansion unit you could put plenty of Alloy cards in. We used serial terminals and in most businesses the people that NEEDED terminals could have one, back when an XT was $8,000 and an AT was even more.
I did a few Altos 80186 Xenix multi-user systems too, also using serial terminals.
Low end multi-user systems have been around a long time. What's the big to do over this thing?
I do remember that the above systems were allways having problems, many long hours, very high maintenence. I really don't miss those days after all..
FWIW, in X terminology the big central computer is the X client and the little terminals are X servers. (OK, even more pedantically, the processes on the big central computer are X clients and the processes on the little terminals are X servers.)
Not that it matters. Carry on.
All's true that is mistrusted
X is multi-display out of the box. Do you ever get error messages about opening a window on 0:0? That first "0" is the display (keyboard/mouse/video card combo) in question; on PCs there is generally 1 display but X is designed to work with many displays natively. For all of X's flaws, it's handling of multiple displays is excellent: network transparency, good permissions control (man xhost sometime for a starter) based on host, display, and screen... years ahead of commodity windowing systems.
The second "0", if you're curious, is the screen on the given display.
All's true that is mistrusted
In fact, Chinese versions of Office have been very difficult for Open Office. As of 1.1 there have been many improvements, but people got burned early on and this really hurt the effort.
The Chinese language is an interesting battleground in Open Source, especially when it comes to productivity apps since a localized desktop isn't really that different from the western version once you get the key-in system set up. An office suite, on the other hand, is quite different between English and Chinese. Once you start getting into fancy fonts and positioning, it gets a bit hectic since Chinese can be written in all sorts of ways on the page and typically inculdes both Chinese and western writing and punctuation. From what I've seen, it's the shift between single byte western punctuation and double byte Chinese punctuation that can cause a lot of problems with erroneous characters and messed up formatting.
One of the interesting issues here is that the simpified Mainland Chinese tends to be further along than Traditional Chinese used in Taiwan. This is a bit of a reversal of what happened in closed source. Initially, back in the DOS and earlier days, Taiwan was far ahead of the mainland with a word processor suite called ET3 named after the company that had developed the font set and key-in system-- Eten. Eventually, their tech was bought up by Microsoft as well and was eventually included in the unicode standard.
But in Open Source things change, especially politically.
Although Taiwan has Linux User groups, it's surprising how few people are willing to consider Open Source as an option given the prevalence of tech in the society. In many cases, there is a fear that if Microsoft slips the local economy will do so as well. But since the local economy is all about hardware, this seems a bit odd. They have the most to gain. It's a very conservative society in many ways though and especially when it comes to business, so it's not that surprising. If it aint broke, don't fix it. They just aren't seeing that it is broke and they will benefit more than anybody by getting it fixed.
But yeah, there are still issues with Chinese compared to Office and this is a major battleground where a lot of the soldiers are hesitant to fight out of a false sense of allegiance.
I search for Motherboard/CPU/RAM combos.
The list comes up with fifty models to choose from before I get out of the $150 range. A large portion of these include not just the board/CPU/256Megs of RAM but also the sound, Lan, video and assorted goodies you get on motherboards these days. That's fifty models for less than a hundred and fifty dollars. How the hell is a system tied into XP a good deal when hardware is that cheap?
LTSP! Allow about 300 people to run the same program with only ONE (1) license of each, and use diskless terminals. SAVE MORE, and with Open Source software. I won't say it enough! L(inux)T(erminal)S(erver)P(roject)!!!
---- I am certain of only one thing : I know nothing else.
Your reasoning is flawed. "cost of computer hardware" is not necessarily the same in both expressions.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
yes. Not choked - but worse. Boss sends me evaluation form as msword doc. Much of information is same for all of our group so I open it in OOo and I see coworkers name instead of mine. I figure its boss making boo-boo, even point it out. I open it in ms word, and its my name. WIERD! I examine binary file: turns out that coworkers name was in the file, as was mine. But it was edited from their name to mine. msword of course knew how to interpret the edited file correctly, OOo did not, and displayed WRONG information. One example of better to just barf on it, than get it wrong in terms of factual content, not formatting. Major bummer really because I'm a big OOo fan, but now I have to think - just because it loaded, and looks fine, is it correct? Its the sort of thing that can happen with that kind of file format reverse engineering. The proprietary format is the real culprit here. As for msword, who wants a word processor that silently stores your previous drafts anyway? Best to avoid entirely!
This can already be done with legacy/consumer hardware in Linux thanks to the Linux Console project: linuxconsole
;)
:)
I am really looking forward to when the linuxconsole code is in the Linux kernel - since this will make Linux even better.
When you have the patched kernel you can just put in as many AGP/PCI graphics cards, USB mices and keyboards as you need consoles. I have yet to find a motherboard with multiple AGP ports - and that is the type of hardware jetway should have done in their project - not specialized windows fluff.
Anyways, I am running a setup with 2 userconsoles at home, and it works great! The setup I have was extremely cheap, like sub 300-400 USD for a 2 user setup (the most expensive stuff being the monitors). It is possible to play fullmotion video or 3d games on both consoles at the same time if you have nvidia graphics cards. (Finally good ping in quake 2!
Btw a cool "by-product" of the linuxconsole project is that you apparently can use both PS/2 ports for keyboards (or mices)
Also I believe that HP already have a multiconsole (4 users) product based on Linux with Linuxconsole targeted at the african market.
Kindly shove your anti-abortion politics up your fucking ASS, motherfucker! Slashdot is not an appropriate place to discuss anti-choice issues that you cock chomping pro-life goddies are forcing down our throats!
Do you have an example of an MS doc that OOo chokes on? I don't doubt they exist, I've just never had it happen, and I'd like to know what chokes it and how it reacts (junk in the display? crash? error message?).
Funny. I have yet to find a document that OO doesn't choke on. Yeah, it will display something, but the bugs in layout and missing features makes it unusable for most users. There's enough crap with computers than having to deal with such bugs. I severely doubt you actually use OO for anything serious (with MS Office crap-format that is).
If you're really interested, which would be great if you're a developer, I suggest trying to open lots of documents in both MS Word and OO and see the differences yourself. And yes, the documents should have more than just a few texts and a table. Header, footer, pictures and a complex layout with several columns. I can guarantee you it's not going to look the same.
You can run MS Office in wine though, so crossover office is not nescessary if you're cheap.
"Piece 'O Crap" or something ...
You're right, I don't do anything really heavy-duty with it, just school stuff.
But I've done "newspapers" with pull-out text boxes, columns, graphics, a header and footer all on one page; I've also done tables galore for science. The only difference for me has been adjusting the font to size nicely, which is something that can't really be blamed on OOo. If you need that, you need something more than OOo/Word, and even MS Word doesn't handle it that well between versions.
That's a big bummer. Hmm. I wonder how that happens? It seems like it's kind of stupid for Microsoft to store edited/removed info in the document anyway. Perhaps this demonstrates the advantage of separating content and meta-data, or one bit of content from another ("layout content" versus "fill-in-content").
That's something entirely different, that should be handled by a different tool. Access doesn't belong in an office suite. And MS Access can (I think) easily be converted to open formats.
ghost works fine on OEM - is there a EULA restriction on imaging software for OEM XP licences?
Hey fucknuts the link in the parent isn't anti-abortion it's pro-adoption. I know 3 couples who are very pro-choice but who have fertility problems and are considering adoption. Choice is about a woman being able to decide for herself to carry a baby to term, and possibly put it up for adoption, or abort the baby.
I didn't say it was, but more than likely it is still less than twice the computer hardware in the other.
What?
Back about '89 when 286's were high-end, the big cost was neither software nor the general hardware but rather the hard disk itself. I seem to recall Segate ST-4096's were going form upwards of $2K (and took most of the day to low-level and format!). Anyway, we sold a neat piece of hardware to several clients who wanted common access to files. It was called "OA Link" and was essentially a full 286 on an ISA card that coexisted with the host computer and had access to the hard drive as if it were its own. Keyboard and video were added via a pair of DB-15's over cables that could run up to about 50 ft away to a small interface box.
Edited/removed data is usually stored in .doc files for the 'Track changes' functionality to work. This is an invaluable feature IMHO.
"You heard the man, Tubbs.. get undressed."
Sounds like a challenge...
Someone must have told them about the brilliant new idea called "timesharing". This principle, introduced less than fifty years ago....
Try the terminal server script that comes with Knoppix. You export a fully equipped desktop of your choice. The kitchen sink is in that thing. And your clients are every bit as fast as your server. Oddly, they even seem faster at times.
And that's just using Knoppix. There are more sophisticated terminal server projects out there. But the association with the words dumb and terminal is an anachronism.
The original IBM mainframes worked like this.
Also, earlier this year hp released a 4-way Linux machine which does the same trick with twice as many users - and considerably smaller licence fees.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Ummm. Perhaps you might have mentioned you're talking about a MOTHERBOARD. The article is about a MOTHERBOARD. Yeah, yeah, one click and you get to the article but still, is it too much to ask that you actually say what TYPE of gizmo you're talking about? It's a MOTHERBOARD. Just say MOTHERBOARD. Just use the word once. Just once.
There, that didn't hurt, did it?
Talk about burying the lead. Sheeesh.
Insert witty sig here.
...for me, anyway.
I use OOo to rescue broken MSO documents with great success.
MSO saves documents out as a straight memory dump of its RAM OLE structure. If there is a mistake made in this process, when MSO loads the doc in it dumps the file straight into memory, does a few fixups as usual and flies straight into the deck.
Because OOo treats all documents as alien (ie it fully parses them on the way in), it will often recover all of a slightly damaged document which totals MSO.
As for MS-Access, it's a dead-end. Neat for little glue projects that aren't too complicated, but to turn a larger project into anything but a rolling disaster, you really have to know what you're doing.
Use a purpose-built DB admin tool to design your structures and queries, then plug OOo into that through ODBC and it'll work fine, but stay aware that an office suite is just one way of getting to a serious data system, it's a very frail thing to base a database system around. That's a lesson that many macro cowboys should have beaten into them at an early age.
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
this specific product may be new, but multiple user hardware is not new, I have myself been using the project backstreet ruby recently. it is a port of an even older one. site: http://startx.times.lv/ mirror: http://www.schuldei.org/aivils/ works great. it is a kernel patch and for some configs an XFree patch (some roups have a patch for xorg out to) it is still beta and has some setbacks (incompatible w/ framebuffer) but I used it to hav e 3 vt's (3 keyboard/mouse/monitor (actually 2 of them were dual screen) setups on one system.
This kind of seemingly cheap solutions have been around for at least five years - I know I was selling some USB-connected thingie from an obscure Taiwan manufacturer that did this sometime before win98se appeared. Besides the huge performance impact that solution and everything "twin" MSI started selling later have, some critical issues were never adressed: how does such an environment handle file/record locking for concurrent usage? I tested with MS Access and some legacy MS-DOS accounting app, and they broke really really bad. How does the same setup work for apps that require hardware protection? Does it work at all? Did anyone test them with HASP keys? Did they test any form of network-aware aplications besides the usual "click iexplore.exe and see if web page loads"? :) didn't expect to find anything relevant in it.
PS. no, I did not RTFA
1 isa video .....
...... ...) ...
..... ...
1 agp video (dual agp mobo anyone?)
-or matrox 2-4 port video (chep now)
Linux/Xfree86 with 2 mice 2 keyboards
2 monitors
This is no magic, setup can be a pain depending on your hardware/distro.....
need no twin-whatever and 2 licences of XP
have VMware and 1x win2k (you run it on 1 CPU don't you
it is still cheaper, reliable, and does the job
ahm did I forget ? stash in 2gb of ram and a SCSI and connect 4 keyboards/mice and 4 monitors for 4 users
and again it is 1 CPU for win2k and VmWare
(my copy is professional, it says 1-2 CPU and does not say anything about users)
read it like this: 4 people use it, but it still runs on 1-2 CPU (the licence did not say I have to count VM cpu-s, just real ones)
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
http://www.jetway.com.tw/evisn/product/twin/n2view /n2view.htm
So why did you write it in pseudo-mathematical form as if it did? Trying to be smart? You fail it!!!!