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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."
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This was also discussed on Slashdot a short while ago: FourHead: One PC, Four Users
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Applica did this five or so years ago. I tested their U2 product back 1999-ish.
http://www.applica.com/
.....Totally scalable, native support out of the box.
Centralized management, file sharing, and security.
Off the shelf hardware... Can't beat that for lower TCO....
If you don't hear about Citrix anymore, then you don't deal with enterprise level software deployments. Citrix is HUGE in the big leagues. You'll find it everywhere in Hospital systems, and anywhere security is a high priority. It's used primarily for its VPN-like features.
by Mike Buddha -- Someday the mountain might get him, but the law never will.
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))
Of course windows is horrible about program usage...it tries to open new copies of programs in ram every time you start another... again, the design of Linux proves much better for this situation!
I think they mean something different with the magic twin where it is a dual user workstation but still manages to get away with only using a single of any hardware like computer and keyboard and mouse and monitor. at least thats what I gained from the review. and the pictures show it.
*Must be Purchased with Hardware!!*. So an end-user needs to buy some hardware. Smart end-users will know you can buy a $5.00 cable or something. Corporations can get it at $150 or so, or maybe even less depending on the number of licenses, but it is still not cheap by a long shot. Most desktops today cannot run two users at once on MS Windows XP at the same time in an efficient manner. MS does not design multi-user systems. The best they have done is the switch user junk or maybe their over priced terminal server which is slow.
I personally don't think this is a good option at all. Every app you would run would require two or more user licenses. You can get an average corporate desktop from Dell for $400 or so, so what is the point of this "solution"? In the end they cost at least double the software licenses and save very little hardware costs. When you subtract their per-user software costs, you are better off to just buy another low end corporate desktop.
If Tyranny and Oppression come to this land,
it will be in the guise of fighting a foreign enemy. -James Madison
Hmmm, I Don't think you have ever used an X-terminal (in the true meaning of the word)... They have Keyboard, monitor, mouse and ethernet ports. And sometimes parallel ports as well. Just plug in an ethernet, configure the X-term to point to a boot & font server, and you are up and running.....
There are some hacks that severe the USB keyboard device and handle it in an X patch, but this is still not mainstream. There are also hacks that use a second keyboard plugged into the PS2 mouse port and have all mice on USB.
I guess by next year, it will be OK.
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.
IPC changed names and expanded their product line thoroughly. They are the ones behind the software reviewed here, actually.
http://www.thinsoftinc.com/
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 could ask you the same. Linux loads applications incrementally, and will drop unneeded pages of code without writing them to swap. Pages of code are certainly shared between all processes using them.
You're not even right about the stuff about Windows. OpenOffice is loaded incrementally too.
Perhaps your user name shouldn't be "badriram" but badRAM, and you should get it fixed?
Finally! A year of moderation! Ready for 2019?
it's not much of a performance hit. An old Dual P-III 866 can easily handle 10 users on diskless LTSP terminals and still have enough performance to get users mentioning how "responsive" it is.
One thing I've run into is Gnome font anti-aliasing - why you say? It slows down dumb terminals (stand alone x-servers) big time - especially those that don't support xtt. Never mind users using the system over some broadband link - where in Mozilla can take quite literally 15-30 seconds to do a page down on a website like slashdot.
Oh sure you can run the gnome font properties, but it always reverts back to full anti-aliasing after a few minutes - even in the same session.
Its bugs like that (which I've reported - but no-one has fixed - because who doesn't want anti-aliasing right?) - that can really slow down an implimentation and personally I think (unless someone has a solution) its sometimes better to stick it out with Windows Terminal Services.
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.