Microsoft to Release a Thin-Client Windows XP

repking writes "I'm reading on Brian Madden's Thin Client Web that Microsoft is about to release (don't know exactly when) two new versions of Windows XP targeting the thin-client market (This products ARE NOT the Lite XP versions that Microsoft is about to release on certain countries like Brazil). Codenamed Eiger and Mönch, these two new releases would let you 'convert' old PC into thin-client Devices. Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?"

Comments

Small buisness

[maotx]

As a sysadmin for a small buisness (~100 employees and growing fast) I've been trying to push thin-clients for a while now. My manager and the other sysadmin is very reluctant to pursue this solution but I cannot find any reason why a recpetionist, data entry, or accounting needs a new, full featured desktop. Thin-clients are rising in popularity again and it won't be long for them to become a familar site in small to large buisnesses. The only reason I can find to purchase Microsoft's XP thin-client is for those of us who would use it with terminal services. Terminal server requires a license for each connecting client, which a Windows OS has. One of the arguments I've heard against thin clients is the licensing fees for terminal service. Why purchase a $200 thin client and then a CAL license[1]when you can purchase a $400 full fledge desktop with XP? If my manager wasn't so strong against Office alternatives[2] a Linux server with OO.org would save the company a fortune. We wouldn't have to worry about costly maintenance[3] or extradanory licensing fees with an OSS thin-client.

[1] can't recall how much a CAL costs
[2] we're a government contractor and worried about compatibility
[3] defrag, spyware, updates, corruption, etc

Re:Small buisness

[SeiRyu]

Maybe this is part of their .net vision to have web-enabled windows? Trying to compete with GooOS maybe?

Re:Small buisness

[bardothodal]

I agree completely.Haveing tinkered with LTSP there is a huge savings potential here. And of course , MS is late to the game on this issue. There are already a several boot to Windows Terminal server options out there already. Available in floppy , cd , or network boot form. There are a few Linux Live cds that have Remote Desktop Client included. Sorry MS party is over.

Re:Small buisness

[Craig Ringer]

I've been using thin clients at work for a while (LTSP based - netbooted X11 thin clients). They work very well, and I'm fairly happy with the results (some of the software could be less buggy, but that's OSS for you). They're delightfully easy to manage, in that they require essentially none. Unfortunately the server side configuration tools for user's desktop environments and apps are almost non-existent so you'll have to do a lot more rolling-your-own than you'd probably like.

Unfortunately, I'm having real troubles with the vertical market vendors as we seek a new newspaper accounts & bookings system. They *all* require Windows desktops - many don't even work with TS / Citrix. Consider this factor VERY carefully before deciding on a thin client roll out, especially Linux thin clients.

How well it works will depend a lot on how much in-house development you do... and in-house development is *expensive* (in time, if nothing else) to a small/medium business.

I share your opinion on TS and CALs. I don't see the point - the CALs negate most of the lower outlay of thin clients. Citrix makes it even worse. Unless you expect to save a *lot* on management and running costs, I don't see how it's worth it.

Re:Small buisness

[jbplou]

If you are a Windows only shop and most of your applications are web apps then a Windows Thin Client is a good choice if it is licenses cheap enough.

Re:Small buisness

[EnderWiggnz]

This project will go nowhere, fast.

The only possible way that it takes off is if MSFT literally GIVES IT AWAY.

I've watched several thin client manufacturers try to leverage into this space, essentially betting the whoel company, and then failing.

Jst because MSFT is doing it doesnt mean its a good idea. Why would anyone choose to cripple perfectly good PC's, especially if they have to pay for it?

Re:Small buisness

[Buelldozer]

Mmmm,

As a CCEA (Citrix Certified Enterprise Administrator) I'm at least partially biased but...

First lets clear up a misnomer, the TS Cal that comes with Windows XP is ONLY valid with MS Terminal Server 2000, NOT 2003. If you are using TS 2003 you STILL need to buy a TS CAL...even for your Windows XP boxes.

Now, let's look at what Citrix gives you...besides the nifty management utilities.

Citrix gives you UPD I & II (Universal Printer Drivers roxxors)

Citrix gives you the ICA protocol, more efficient bandwidth usuage.

Citrix gives you Secure Access Gateway for SSL Encrypted sessions through any web browser.

Citrix gives you published applications. (awesome)

Citrix gives you load balancing.

Citrix gives you MultiMedia, Browser, and Flash acceleration.

Citrix gives you a common clipboard with a local desktop.

Citrix gives you TS specific policies that allow you to tailor things like printer bandwidth, session bandwidth etc by user, group, subnet or machine name.

Citrix gives you dynamic client names.

Citrix gives you silent client rollout.

In all honesty I could probably put about another thirty things in here, but I think my point is made.

Long story short, if you think that all Citrix gives you is some nifty management tools then you REALLY need to look at the product.

Re:Small buisness

[bluelip]

I'm a gov't employee and I won't support anything that comes from a vendor in a MS-only format. I can nearly guarantee it won't even be opened unless it is straight text.

Put that in your boss's pipe and have him/her smoke it.

Re:Small buisness

[Craig Ringer]

I don't think I said anything about that being all Citrix had going for it. I know it's very capable.

It's also *very* expensive, and when I looked at using Citrix for thin clients it turned out it would've been cheaper deploy desktops and we would've had a lot of change out of that. For 10,000 desktops I imageine the management benefits and other facilities bring you real savings. For 30, like I have, or the OP's 100, it's just not worth the outlay IMO.

Since not even the basic Terminal Server turned out to be especially useful for us once CALs were factored in, I think Citrix would've been nuking a fly (and those nukes are pricey things).

Re:Small buisness

[JoeShmoe]

Starting with Windows 2003, Microsoft now licenses Terminal Services separately. You get 0 license credit for having XP, even XP Pro. Previously, under Windows 2000 Terminal Services any 2000 Pro client gets granted a license from a free unlimited pool.

Also, starting with Windows 2003, you have to decide between per-user or per-device pricing and you can't switch later. This means either having five computers with as many people logging in and out as can share them or having five users who can connect from any particular machine. Of course, this is all separate from the required client access license for Windows 2003 itself.

A Terminal Service license will run the average business about $84; that's the cost under Microsoft's Open License program. Huge companies under the Select program will no doubt save some money, and I think you can save more by signing up for software assurance.

So the bottom line is that since you are already paying for a license, why do you want to pay extra for a full XP license that is doing nothing more than passing keyboard and mouse signals to the server? It makes no sense. Odds are thay any computer you have came with a license for SOME kind of Windows, and since they can all run the client, that seems the obvious choice.

Regarding remote management, I haven't found anything in XP that isn't cheaper and better from third-party products. The only thing I would actually want Microsoft to do is freakin make an XP product that can run from a USB key or a bootable CD. That would be a valid competitor to the various thin-client projects.

So, I don't plan on getting any of these new XP versions unless they are so ridiculously cheap that I would do it just to not have to remember if a particular computer is running 98, 98SE, ME or XP Home .

-JoeShmoe
.

Re:Small buisness

[maotx]

You're right and you're wrong, though you did bring up a good point. I forgot to mention that in my original post as we're still at Windows 2000 Server. Windows 2003 server requires a CAL to be purchased seperatly given your copy of XP was purchased after April 24, 2003. Windows 2000, however, still allows your copy of XP or 2000 to be a "free" Terminal Services CAL (and it is permitted under the Windows 2000 Server EULA.)

Re:Small buisness

[maotx]

Unfortunatly we only contract to a few divisions of the Navy and all of the commanders use Navy issued machines. This means Microsoft all the way. Everyday I hear about another division of the government take in another opensource software or format I put a little more pressure on my manager.

Re:Small buisness

[drsmithy]

Unless you expect to save a *lot* on management and running costs, I don't see how it's worth it.

Since that's where the bulk of TCO is, that's where the savings come from.

A lot of people don't seem to understand that the initial layout - buying machines and software - is almost always the *cheapest* part if IT infrastructure, particularly when you're talking about user desktops.

Re:Small buisness

[Milican]

Or maybe someone that is continuing their education...

JOhn

Re:Small buisness

[drsmithy]

Regarding remote management, I haven't found anything in XP that isn't cheaper and better from third-party products.

What's your Group Policy/Active Directory alternative ?

Re:Small buisness

[ikkonoishi]

My college for one would. We have about 30 PCs devoted to letting students access the Internet, research libraries, and write papers.

Currently these are basically mid-range desktops with almost everything possible locked down to prevent everything from the bumbling click all installation prompts luser to the third year "I want to uninstall windows from this machine and run my own custom coded OS." geek.

If instead of an actual computer they could just present an Internet terminal, and remote word app for less than the hardware costs of the boxes they use now, they would jump at the chance.

Re:Small buisness

[bardothodal]

I thought "cut to the chase" would be more apt.

Re:Small buisness

[Pillowthink]

Silent client rollout just means no one gets prompted for install data when you're rolling out.

Re:Small buisness

[afidel]

--Ive not compared them, but how does the following compare: VNC compression, X with LBX module, ICA protocol, and gzip.

ICA beats every other remote protocol hands down. It's fast, efficient, and saves state across sessions.

--I dont understand... Maybe Im reading what this does wrong but why would you need to publish an app? Wouldnt you just copy it to the server and make links?

You can limit access to applications based on group membership, so if someone needs a new app all you have to do is add them to the published apps group and they can now run it.

Re:Small buisness

[Creepy Crawler]

Ahh, like I thought.

I never asked my clients employees if I could silently install a update. Once I was given approval, I'd load the update into the connect script on the Samba server.

And no Unix ever asked permission to "install data". The idea's a joke if you admin systems....... Now if you were talking about capability systems, thats a whole different ball-game.

Re:Small buisness

[bluekanoodle]

"The only reason I can find to purchase Microsoft's XP thin-client is for those of us who would use it with terminal services. Terminal server requires a license for each connecting client, which a Windows OS has."

Not quite accurate. Windows OS Do not HAVE a TS license, but are assigned one by the licensing server. However if the OS is Windows 2000, or windows XP purchased before the release of Windows Server 2003, the licensing server will give them a "free license" If it is a 9x machine it will require the licensing server to use a CAL purchased and added to the pool.

Now if your terminal server is Windows 2003 server, your screwed, because regardless of the client OS, you have to buy a TS cal for each

"Why purchase a $200 thin client and then a CAL license[1]when you can purchase a $400 full fledge desktop with XP? "

Because a terminal server license is only around $100 so your saving at least $100 per terminal and your gaining easier system management, Lower TCO, & less administration.

I challenge you to find a decent machine that will last a company at least 3 years, with Windows XP PRO for $400. Building it yourself from parts off of newegg.com only count if you add your hourly rate to the price

Re:Small buisness

[10Ghz]

Why would anyone choose to cripple perfectly good PC's, especially if they have to pay for it?

I did my final thesis on the subject. The reasons for using thin-clients instead of full-blown desktops are numerous:

1. Cheaper machines. Minimal amount of RAM and CPU-power, no HD etc. etc. It does add up, and it does save money. And thin-client consume less electricity as well.

2. Reliability. No fans that could break, no HD's that could break. No moving parts at all (unless the machine is equipped with a CD-drive).

3. Ease of service. The thin-client breaks down, what do you do? Unplug it, plug another machine in it's place, continue working. It takes about 5 minutes. Hell, the user could do it himself!

4. Longevity. You don't have to replace the clients in order to use newer software. Also, you could convert your obsolete desktops to thin-clients. Instead of buying new machines every few years, you could keep on using your machines for 5-10 years.

5. Ergonomy. Totally silent operation, tiny footprint. All that makes for a nicer working-environment

6. Ease of administration. No need to run around fixing clients, just work on the servers instead.

Re:Small buisness

[repking]

I'm a Citrix Professional too, but you must admit the ability to publish applications and load balancing on MF is a feature easily "approachable" ;-D, by TS (but see this article from Brian Madden's site).

I am looking for a real OSI alternative to Citrix or TS on the Server Side (TightVNC nor X with compression are real alternatives, primarily for the (very poor) performance :-( )

Saludos

Re:Small buisness

[pellaeon]

> Why purchase a $200 thin client and then a CAL license[1]when you can purchase a $400 full fledge desktop with XP?

We have about 100 thin clients here (linux-based ones :)

Apart from what you mention in administration costs, there also the following fact: thin clients have no moving parts (or they're not designed properly). This results in:
1) _much_ lower maintenance costs
2) silent operation
3) longer lifetime (twice as long, probably)

I can honestly say that where we used to struggle with about 2 FTE syadmins/helpdesk (for 100 linux desktops and assorted servers and services), since we introduced thin clients we're easily coping with the workload.

Of course, with windows YMMV :)

Re:Small buisness

[geordie_loz]

I think it's naive to think that MS is getting in too late. You see there may well be tons of terminal service projects out there, all working fantastic, but as MS writes the Server and is now writing the Client, all it takes is a little "innovation"(TM).

MS basically add "new and improved" features to server and client making it impossible to use ltsp clients with them, which are apparently impossible to live without (thanks to marketing), and all these new clients will be subject to that old chestnut Vendor Locking (Patent Pending).

Re:Small buisness

[Knara]

3. Ease of service. The thin-client breaks down, what do you do? Unplug it, plug another machine in it's place, continue working. It takes about 5 minutes. Hell, the user could do it himself!

Are you *crazy*? If they can't handle VCRs, they can't handle thin-clients.

Re:Small buisness

[krumms]

3. Ease of service. The thin-client breaks down, what do you do? Unplug it, plug another machine in it's place, continue working.

Just to play devil's advocate, what do you do when the server breaks down?

Answer: Your organization grinds to a halt. You lose lots of money.

(Disclaimer: I'm on a thin client terminal at work and have never had such an issue. Just posing a bit of a "what-if")

Re:Small buisness

[10Ghz]

Just to play devil's advocate, what do you do when the server breaks down?

Redundancy. Instead of having one server, have two (or three, if you feel like playing it safe). If one of them breaks down, the other one can carry on as usual while the other one is getting fixed. the users who were connected to the crashed server do need to restart their machines.

But this isn't really that much different when compared to "normal" setups. If some central server crashes, it will cause problems to the organisation. Even if they use fat clients.

Re:Small buisness

[caluml]

I imagine that Microsoft will add all those features to their next version of TS.

Re:Small buisness

[10Ghz]

Are you *crazy*? If they can't handle VCRs, they can't handle thin-clients.

IMO they could handle the clients. The cables could be color-coded, and the users could receive a 5-minute training telling them what to do if their machine really breaks down. They would have to plug in 5 color-coded cables (power, network, monitor, mouse and keyboard), and three of those (power, network and monitor) would only fit one port and the other two (keyboard & mouse, using USB) could be plugged to any USB-port.

5 color-coded cables, 5 color-coded ports.

Re:Small buisness

[Craig Ringer]

A lot of people don't seem to understand that the initial layout - buying machines and software - is almost always the *cheapest* part if IT infrastructure, particularly when you're talking about user desktops.

I agree that that's often, even usually, true. However, I'm not sure if the massive cost increase of Citrix is worth the managment benfits on some scales of network.

Re:Small buisness

[mattyrobinson69]

if your converting from fat clients to thin clients, could you use all the desktop pc's you have now as a cluster?

also, i think (please correct me if im wrong) that most clustering software (openmosix,openmpi) would just carry on working if one node went down

Re:Small buisness

[Lumpy]

you asre looking at the small potatoes of thin client goodness...

we have a fleet of 27 users running on thinstations with another 3 sitting idle for this summer's interns.

If a machine drops dead, 30 seconds later the user is back operational, just swap out the old pc (we use super old P-233 machines dug out of the dumpster ) the user's data is ALWAYS backed up. none of the "oh I saved it elsewhere" excuses, it's backed up, including the user profiles.

It's perfect for general users, those 30 machines and server are easily maintained by a single person, I'm betting I can scale it up to 150 machines and that single person can still very easily maintain it because everyone's desktop just turned into a toaster that nothing has to be done to.

Re:Small buisness

[maotx]

Our WAN users in another state connect to our terminal server to use one of our Access databases. It's to large and to active for them to work on it locally over a T-1. Eventually we'll migrate our data over to SQL eliminating the need for our terminal server.

Re:Small buisness

[Craster]

And of course , MS is late to the game on this issue. There are already a several boot to Windows Terminal server options out there already. Available in floppy , cd , or network boot form. There are a few Linux Live cds that have Remote Desktop Client included.

Totally agreed. I am a Windows admin and architect and I see no value in using a microsoft solution if all you need is to boot into a TS session. With thin clients, use a linux-based image, updatable over the network. With old PCs use a bootable linux CD that takes you straight into your session.

It's light, and it's clean.

Re:Small buisness

[seanyboy]

A couple of things they could do to increase take-up are to include the cost of the Terminal Services CAL in the price and also to embed the Universal Printing clients of some of the more popular "Universal Printer" Software Suppliers. Because we use Terminal Services for users who are off site, we have to use EOL Universal Printer. This means that we can't use any of the thin clients that are out there.

Re:Small buisness

[Thaelon]

You neglect to mention that *using* thin clients sucks monkey nuts.

They redraw painfully slowly, they render simple bitmaps painfully slowly, where I work Firefox currently does not work on the thinclients (though it used to?). Certain applications (UltraEdit most notably) are a nightmare to scroll around in on a thinlclient. In certain cases turning on track changes in Word causes the thing to grind to a halt. Characters appear 1-2 seconds after you hit the key, Gmail's Login page brings the thing to its knees.

They have mine so locked down I can't adjust my own god damn mouse sensitivity, the admin has to log into the thinclient himself and adjust it.

Not to mention if one person uses all the terminal server's CPU everyone else's thinclient freezes up.

I would kill for a real PC at work and I've got the newest model on site. I hate running on a machine that can't keep up with me.

Sounds to me like you did your thesis purely from the admin standpoint and forgot about the poor suckers who have to use the godforsaken things.

Tell me again how they're, ergonomic?

Re:Small buisness

[10Ghz]

You neglect to mention that *using* thin clients sucks monkey nuts.

They do? I have built LTSP-systems, and they seem to work just fine. Clients were 100Mhz (or so) Pentiums with 32MB of RAM, and the servers were in the 1GHz range. Network was regural switched 100MB Ethernet. And everything worked smoothly. Hell, I could watch near DVD-quality movies on the server, and the client still had bandwidth to spare! And in many cases the thin-clients had BETTER performance than fat-clients. Reason being that many times the apps that were loaded on the clients, were already on the servers RAM, since someone else had already launched the app from another client. So the app loaded instanteniously (since it didn't have to be loaded from the HD)

Not to mention if one person uses all the terminal server's CPU everyone else's thinclient freezes up.

That's why you could use more than one server and more than one CPU.

Sounds to me like you did your thesis purely from the admin standpoint and forgot about the poor suckers who have to use the godforsaken things.

Like I said, I did USE the "godforsaken things", and they worked very, very well. Using regural apps worked just fine, as did watching movies (although I never bothered to make the sound work on the clients, I just wanted to see that could it be done). Granted, this was with LTSP, I don't know how well (or badly) Windows would work.

Re:Small buisness

[10Ghz]

1. Cheaper machines: have you taken into account the price of the server(s)? Have you taken into account that server price grows EXPONENTIALLY with the number of user it can handle, while desktop price increase is LINEAR?

Just about all organisations need servers. So the difference between the two approaches is not that great. It's not like you need to have server in thin-client environment, but you do not need them in fat-client environment. Both environments have servers.

And in some installations I built, the "servers" were actually regural 1GHz desktops (the installtion was not mission-critical). In fact, it was just 1GHz AMD Duron-machine! Hardly expensive even back then! Add it handled regural tasks just fine.

2. Reliability: again, you are only looking at what you want. Remember you need additiona infrastructure! If the server or the network breaks, everything breaks.

If the servers or network break in regural fat-client environments, you will also have problems. Again, the difference between the two is not that big. Both will have problem if network-services go down. And the problem can me reduced by careful planning and redundancy.

3. Ease of service: But what happens if the server breaks?.

Answer: redundant servers. What happens if the server goes down in a regural fat-client environment? You will have problems regardless.

4. Longevity: New applications means new and more powerful server iron, with new cooling systems, etc., every few years.

Or not. And the servers are usually better specced that desktops are. Even if software-requirements go up, you do not have to upgrade the servers. And if you have some apps that need REALLY powerful hardware (well, running that sort of software on the clients would be expensive as well, since you would need hi-end workstations), you could have a dedicated server just for that app.

And again: you have to just handle few servers, instead of dozens of workstations.

5. Ergonomy: there are plenty of almost silent desktops with very small footprint.

And they cost extra. And I'm not talking about "almost" silent, I'm talking about completely silent systems. Can you provide any links to systems that you had in mind?

Re:Small buisness

[grolschie]

>> Not to mention if one person uses all the terminal server's CPU everyone else's thinclient freezes up.
>>
> That's why you could use more than one server and more than one CPU.

We use dual Athlon XP CPU 2003 Servers for our thin clients at uni. When a student runs matlab, the whole system grinds to a halt. Scrolling a document in MS Word is a nightmare - pages keep scrolling long after letting go of the mouse. Using any of the selection tools in Photoshop make the app slow to a crawl or freezes. Various unexplained pauses freezes the entire desktop for seconds/minutes.

Re:Small buisness

[walt-sjc]

Another advantage of a thin client is that you have everything at any terminal be it in a conference room, another building on the campus (business campus), or even a remote office. No, this is not the same thing as a laptop, as points 1 - 6 don't apply to laptops (especially "reliability".)

Re:Small buisness

[10Ghz]

Like I said, I haven't seen anything like that. But then again, the installations I have seen/worked on weren't Windows-installations, but LTSP-installations (completely different animal than Windows). And while the setups weren't that large, the servers weren't that powerful either.

Re:Small buisness

[walt-sjc]

And in some installations I built, the "servers" were actually regural 1GHz desktops

Ugg. I would never do that. Real server class hardware is much more reliable, is designed for remote management (suck as the ILO feature on HPaq machines,) and mounts in a rack better. Real servers can also be fairly inexpensive if you don't need ultra high-end boxes.

We have actually moved to a blade environment with the only problem being heat. Those suckers use a LOT of power, hence generate a HUGE amount of heat. Very very few data centers have a design that can handle lots of blade servers. So we just spread them out for now until the industry comes up with a workable solution. I would expect anyone doing a large-scale thin-client system would need a fair amount of horsepower, and blades work well as they are so easy and fast to manage / deploy (most of ours run Linux BTW.)

Re:Small buisness

[grolschie]

Making a remote X connection to my XP2400+ running Debian (KDM login to a full KDE3.3 desktop), via a downloaded X server running on my Windows XP laptop was sweet. None of these issues.

Re:Small buisness

[10Ghz]

Ugg. I would never do that.

Like I said, the system wasn't mission-critical. I was basically asked to hack it together. If it worked, great. If it didn't, no big deal. And considering that I had no budget for the system, I really had no options. I had bunch of obsolete machines, and few more or less modern desktop-machines. But I did it, and it worked great.

Had the requirements been greater, I would have used proper server-hardware. But the requirements weren't big, and the money was not there, so I used what I had available.

Re:Small buisness

[walt-sjc]

For Active directory, it would be Novell E-Directory (NDS with a new name.) Faster, more robust, better scalability, cross platform, etc. AD is a bad clone of the old Netware 4 NDS (which was pretty cool 10 years ago. It's come a long way since.)

Re:Small buisness

[blackomegax]

do you prevent cd/floppy boot disks?
granted, knoppix does not "install" or change one bit on the HDD, but thats still a hole (but one that should by any logic, be allowed, due to the "no install" basis of knoppix).

good luck keeping those sam and system files secure, however :)

Re:Small buisness

[ejort79]

No kidding, nothing burned me more than seeing the engineering school at the college I finished at last spring using a 20 or 30 PCs each in each of several comp labs- all reasonable high end systems for (circa 1.5-2 years ago) that were locked down like that- every one had a cd-rw drive but the school's image didn't even have buring software installed. Thank goodness for linux boot floppies.

Re:Small buisness

[brightloudnoise]

Thin Clients definately aren't a panacea, and there are certain families of applications that I would hesitate to make available in that fashion.

Personally I wouldn't even have considered trying to run Photoshop or Matlab because they are known to be such resource pigs.

However, I've used and administered successful medium (>300 users) Citrix Metaframe installs before, running MS Office, web browsers, custom corporate applications.

So they have their place definately, but running heavy graphical applications aren't one of them.

Re:Small buisness

[LDoggg_]

And?

What does that have to do with using LTSP?

Gimp & Open Office on LTSP don't seem to cause the problems you're having with win2003, photoshop, & MS word.

Re:Small buisness

[pfleming]

...Thin-clients are rising in popularity again and it won't be long for them to become a familar site in small to large buisnesses. The only reason I can find to purchase Microsoft's XP thin-client is for those of us who would use it with terminal services. Terminal server requires a license for each connecting client, which a Windows OS has. One of the arguments I've heard against thin clients is the licensing fees for terminal service. Why purchase a $200 thin client and then a CAL license[1]when you can purchase a $400 full fledge desktop with XP? If my manager wasn't so strong against Office alternatives[2] a Linux server with OO.org would save the company a fortune. We wouldn't have to worry about costly maintenance[3] or extradanory licensing fees with an OSS thin-client. [1] can't recall how much a CAL costs [2] we're a government contractor and worried about compatibility [3] defrag, spyware, updates, corruption, etc

Interesting that you bring up XP and Terminal Services Licensing. With the introduction of Server 2003, Microsoft obsoleted the built in XP CAL. You must purchase a separate CAL for TS regardless of which OS you are running (or regardless of whether had a license to connect before) Terminal Services
As Windows 2000 Server standard support is at EOL you might as well go with 2003 which runs TS very well and forget about which OS is on the client- you have to pay for it anyway.
My office runs thin clients or dumb terminals off the k12 terminal server project to grab the OS and connects to a 2003 server using rdesktop to connect to TS for the Windows software that we still *have* to use.

Re:Small buisness

[will592]

You've probably already seen/read about this but the best project going for thin client computing is the Linux Terminal Server Project, http://www.ltsp.org/. There is an even more brain dead solution, which I have been using at home and also in my dad's office, at http://www.k12ltsp.org/ which is a version of the LTSP designed especially for schools (hence the K12, Kindergarten - 12th grade in the US). They have great instructions and have packaged everything in an easy to use distro that really takes all the guesswork out of it. Most of the time I use an old Pentium with no hard disk and whatever floppy drive came with it (I'm too cheap to put boot roms in the network cards) to boot over the network. Give it a look see!

Chris

Re:Small buisness

[lahvak]

When I was at grad school, our department used one dual processor sparc station as a server for over a 100 thin clients. This was a math department, and usually there were several people running heavy computation on Mathematica and other software. Only very rarely (like once a month) you could notice any lag, that was usually at times when you actually had over 100 users loged in and working at the same time.

Re:Small buisness

[will592]

Well I have never worked anywhere that didn't have a t least one machine (database server, GIS server, file server, etc) that wouldn't grind the company to a halt if it went down. If it was just one office where this was the case I would say bad IT design...but it really seems like even with all the talk about redundancy and fail over people(companies) just don't want to spend the capital up front to have redundant systems available. I would argue also that you don't have to have a single server available for all N employees...there is no reason not to buy 10 lower end servers and make one server host for N/10 users. This also gives you the added security of being able to load balance users over to the other servers if one goes down. You still have a lot fewer machines to keep patched/upgraded and now you've added some failover.

Re:Small buisness

[Malc]

I use a whole bunch of computers remotely via RDP (a.k.a Terminal Services, a.k.a. Remote Desktop). They work brilliantly. One machine is on my LAN and there isn't much I can't do workwise. DVD playback is the only issue I have. The graphics are fine (no ClearText rendering unfortunately) and the sound is brought over the wire too. Then I have a bunch of machines 4,500 km away that I use everyday - mostly servers and build machines. Even with 150ms latency, there are no issues for me like the ones you describe.

As for the CPU issue you describe, if that becomes a regular problem, use multi-CPU machines!

The best bit about RDP is that I can connect to my sessions from different places without having to lug a machine around with me, and without having to close my apps down.

Re:Small buisness

[operagost]

Yup, because Citrix doesn't have anything like, um, "server farms", "load balancing", or "failover". And Windows doesn't have "clustering".

Is email important to you? What do you do when your email server goes down? Does Outlook still work on your fat desktops?

Re:Small buisness

[operagost]

---Citrix gives you published applications. (awesome)

I dont understand... Maybe Im reading what this does wrong but why would you need to publish an app? Wouldnt you just copy it to the server and make links?

Here's a hint: if you have absolutely no clue about a technology, don't belittle it. Published Apps appear in a user's desktop. Only the apps to which they are given access appear.

---Citrix gives you the ICA protocol, more efficient bandwidth usuage.

Ive not compared them, but how does the following compare: VNC compression, X with LBX module, ICA protocol, and gzip.

I can assure you from personal experience that VNC compression lags under even optimal conditions. It's also not a multi-user option on Windows.

Re:Small buisness

[llefler]

Even without thin clients you have mission critical servers. Network authentication, file shares, SQL server. If you're running in a windows environment, you probably have servers configured for specific functions, because they tend to fall over from time to time. That has plusses and minuses. You can't afford to have 100 redundant servers, but if one fails you only loose one critical component. Rather than trying to have seemless backups, you buy good support contracts and use similar equipment for all your servers so you can pull and reconfigure a test box to run production.

Someone mentioned 100 terminals and a $125k server. Please, try some realistic numbers. 2-3 small Netfinities at a total cost of $10-15k should support 100 terminals in most businesses.

Re:Small buisness

[Master Bait]

Sorry to hear how badly Window's thin-client setup sucks. I have run Linux with Xterminals for years and say that scrolling a word processor document does not slow down anything, retouching high-res images under Gimp does not either. Most people sitting down at a terminal here wouldn't know it wasn't a full-blown computer.

There would be problems with certain webbie tasks, such as the Flash plugin playing an animated movie... I've clocked a Flash web movie generating 8,000 packets per second playing on an X terminal. But it is easy enough to install a read-only cheapo USB memory stick on each of the terminals for them to run their web browsers with all their Flash and Realmedia plugins locally. Many off-the-shelf thin clients already come with a local web browser installed.

Re:Small buisness

[Master Bait]

Does CUPS run under Windows? Mac's OSX runs CUPS and it is a snap to integrate within a Linux CUPS network, plus we gained PostScript functionality with CUPS.

Re:Small buisness

[llefler]

One thing I don't agree with is using 'thin clients' as a means to continue using old hardware. Thin client hardware is just so cheap ($150), and old PCs can have so many different problems. If you have a tight budget, reuse your old monitor. I prefer to put a shiney new terminal with a 17" LCD on a users desk.

That way the users are happy about getting something new, as opposed to something that was 'trickled down' from someone higher in the company. Maintenance is nearly non-existant. And the power savings alone will probably pay for it in a year or two.

Re:Small buisness

[d34thm0nk3y]

Did you just mis-type regular about 7 times in your last two posts or is regural some term I am unfamiliar with?

Re:Small buisness

[Buelldozer]

I doubt it. MS has stayed consistently behind Citrix with their thin technology since the beginning. I know that MS originally licensed the thin technology from Citrix, and I suspect they are still doing so...which is why they stay two years behind.

Re:Small buisness

[Buelldozer]

I'd actually like to see those calculations if you still have them somewhere and would be willing to share.

I've found that while all the licensing involved is pricey, it can make sense to do it all the way down to about 20 nodes or so.

Would you be willing to show me what you used for your ROI?

Re:Small buisness

[silicon not in the v]

The only thing "Interesting" about your post is that you have categorized an entire concept as bad because of the specific bad implementation you have to deal with. I'm sorry that the admins in your situation have set up a bad system. It sounds like they have overloaded the client to server ratio, so there's not enough guts to run all the thin clients well. If you keep up enough servers with load balancing and such, you can keep that from happening, but it does take some competent people to do that.

Re:Small buisness

[alc6379]

I'm going to get modded offtopic for this, but.... What does regural mean? I thought it was a misspelling, but you use this word several times. I tried googling and dictionary.com'ing it, but didn't find a meaning.

...or was it regular? I'm not trying to be a spelling nazi here, seriously.

Re:Small buisness

[ikkonoishi]

They do some pretty tight lockdowns.

You can't even change the resolution on the screen...

They also use ghosted backups from time to time I think, but that is a lot of work for the techs.

Re:Small buisness

[Craig Ringer]

Unfortunately I no longer have the calculations. There were really only hard calculations for the initial outlay, quite frankly. IIRC the LTSP deployment cost us about 1/4 as much as the equivalent Citrix deployment, and 1/2 as much as 2k3TS or XP desktops, including hardware and software licensing costs.

Initial deployment size was only 10 users in a business of 30. It's not likely to expand until/if OpenOffice stops sucking so we can have more demanding users use the system without a mass exodus of staff ;-) . Note that at a deployment this size, issues of base license costs, server costs, etc really start to matter.

The LTSP deployment costs were pushed up by the fact that the server bought for that was massively overpowered for the job. We needed a storage server and decided it was safe to double up the roles (a decision that's worked extremely well). The other deployment options would've required us to buy a separate storage server - Windows file servers are not an attractive option in our environment, and Windows isn't good at multi-role servers.

The primary "running" costs on the old systems were admin time (minimal, I spend all my time fixing F**ing macs) and lost staff time due to painfully, excruciatingly slow systems.

It didn't seem possible to reliably estimate the administration time costs or staff time costs/savings of any of the new systems without test deployments, which we're just not equipped for when it comes to commercial software. We can't just buy a win2k3 server and citrix "to see how it works on a test group." The best I could do was trial LTSP, which I could deploy on existing hardware (including server) and test with a couple of the users. It took some work getting over the hiccups but worked very well after that. For Citrix, RDP, and WinXP desktops I had to rely mostly on the experience of other network admins I know in larger organisations.

Looking back at it now, the LTSP setup probably costs us as less than the others were likely to, but probably didn't beat 2k3TS or XP desktops by a huge margin. There's a lot of screwing around due to crappy/absent user management tools, and while the software the users use is generally very reliable, there *are* a few niggling bugs that are a real pain. Bug fixing is not cheap. Windows has the user management stuff down really well, and the pain of desktops can be reduced by careful use of system imaging, domains, group policy, etc (but that would've taken a lot of learning).

On the flip side, day to day management is no worse than or slightly better than the old systems. User management is much the same, but adding and removing hosts is now utterly trivial, which helps. I understand that user management is one area the Windows networks definitely have going for them.

ROI can be considered mainly in terms of how the deployment affects users work and how it affects demands on my time.

Demands on my time are largely unchanged, when they were growing with the old system (ancient mail clients, ancient overloaded systems, etc). The staff are able to do more and get it done more quickly and easily using the very simple and cut down interface they're provided with, and it works very well.

Without a time machine I can't find out what our ROI would've been on the other solutions. How long would I have spent learning Windows administration and user management, learning and configuring Citrix, etc? How much more would backing up and maintaining yet another server have cost us? How much time would I have saved with the user management tools? Would I have had lots of trouble getting our ancient terminal-based accounts & bookings system working from Windows? The list goes on.

Overall, I think that my UNIX/Linux experience was a large part of why our choice worked, and why it was better than the alternatives for us. An experienced Citrix/TS admin or windows domain admin would probably have been better off going in the other direction. After all, admin time is the majority of the ongoing costs in our environment.

Re:Small buisness

[10Ghz]

I'm not a native english-speaker, so errors like that are expected. If you see something like regural/regular, you are encouraged to use your brains and assume that it's a simple error.

Re:Small buisness

[alc6379]

Hopefully you didn't take offense at that!

I did have brains enough to assume that, I just wanted to be sure. The Google search I did for that word turned up that exact same spelling, but no definition. I thought I was the one who wasn't getting something!

Re:Small buisness

[blackomegax]

lockdowns within windows have no effect at all on rather or not the BIOS has the cdrom set 1st in the boot order. :)

Re:Small buisness

[innocent_white_lamb]

2. Reliability. No fans that could break, no HD's that could break. No moving parts at all (unless the machine is equipped with a CD-drive).

Where does one get a thin-client X machine? Assuming that you're putting a new network together or something.

Everything that I read about this stuff is always centered on "recycle the old boxes into terminals" and so on; what about a nice new machine that's a thin client out-of-the-box? As you say -- no fans, insignficant power consumption, small size. So, where do you get such a thing? It would be nice to have a little "brick" that you plug your monitor and keyboard and mouse into and just log into the ol' network with. Do they exist?

Re:Small buisness

[Josepdin]

This looks to me like competition for Citrix. We pay for Windows clients, then we also pay for Citrix licenses in order for the user to get an application, running on the server, to be presented on the client (remote) system. If it works, it will probably be a benefit for us in peeling away a layer of the onion that can be a sticky integration issue.

Re:Small buisness

[scottv67]

Something like this....?? http://www.wyse.com/products/winterm/index.htm

Re:Small buisness

[innocent_white_lamb]

Exactly like that. Thank you very much!

I see that Wyse conveniently provides absolutely no idea of what the prices are on their website.

Re:Small buisness

[davidbt]

Have you guys heard of streaming software? Software is cached on the client but runs as if installed locally. This solves a lot of the problems mentioned on here with traditional server+thin client set-ups but with the advantages of thick-client set-ups ... see www.endeavors.com for example. (BTW I don't work for this co but hold a very modest number of shares).

Re:Small buisness

[pcnorb]

Your points 1 and 2 are noted if you were using a Wyse term. If you read the requirements for this new *thin* client, the HD requirements are a minimum of 500mb, 1gig recommended.

this_is_not_thin_enough

You are still stuck buying a friggin' eMachine at best, or using an old tired and slow PC. What's the point? Just give me a term or PXE or the like...or a full fledged desktop.

M$ needs to have thier heads examined for this one.

What is ThinStation?

[klipsch_gmx]

Thinstation is a thin client Linux distribution that makes a PC a full-featured thin client supporting all major connectivity protocols: Citrix ICA, MS Windows terminal services (RDP), Tarantella, X, telnet, tn5250, VMS term and SSH.

No special configuration of the application servers is needed to use Thinstation!

Thinstation can be booted from network (e.g. diskless) using Etherboot/PXE or from a local floppy/CD/HD/flash-disk. The thin client configuration can be centralized to simplify management. Thinstation supports client-side storage (floppy/HD/CD/USB) and printers (LPT/USB). Prebuilt images and a Live CD are available too!

Mozilla Firefox and lighter browsers are supported as client-side browsers.

Re:What is ThinStation?

[Short Circuit]

Warning: troll.

And a plagiarist.

(And that's a link to a Wiki. Call me paranoid, but I expect it to change.)

Re:What is ThinStation?

[Synbiosis]

As long as the spam is open source, it will be modded informative.

Re:What is ThinStation?

[klubar]

This sounds a lot like time sharing. In the 70's (and up through the 80's) a central "mainframe" would have dozens or even hundreds of "dumb" terminals connected to it. Usually the connections were RS232, but later on they got fancier. The terminals got smarter--fancier graphics and more features. Execpt in some environments they timesharing model have pretty much lost out to putting sophisticated intelligence at the point of use.

Thin clients don't work

[winkydink]

How many times must hitory repeat itself?

1 - Diskless Workstations
2 - X-terminals
3 - Network Computers

None ever saw widespread popularity.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[AlexCV]

X terminals had their glory days. Mostly when the alternative was a 10k$ workstation.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[benchbri]

But this time microsoft is bringing innovation...

Re:Thin clients don't work

[AvantLegion]

How many times did attempts at flying fail until one finally succeeded? Past failures don't guarantee future failure.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[VoidWraith]

That analogy doesn't hold up very well, because flying was failure in the sense that the device didn't work, and lite clients are working technology that failed to catch on in a market. Market failures usually do repeat themselves, unless there's a change in either the market or the product (and there hasn't been... at least not in the direction that would make them more likely to succeed).

Not that you don't make a point, it just doesn't get very far on its own.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[EnderWiggnz]

yeh - no one ever used those damn green-screens, either...

Re:Thin clients don't work

[ImaLamer]

I've got to say that if there was a way to tap into my 2.1 GHz machine running Windows now, that was portable, in house, I'd use it.

Linux and X can be used for this... either way it seems that my "big" desktop is being wasted 99% of the time because I must go to it. Tablets would be ideal if they didn't try to make *them* run the software.

If Microsoft makes it plug and play then maybe it will catch on more...

Re:Thin clients don't work

[gl4ss]

funny, I thought they worked pretty well in right environments.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[dsginter]

None ever saw widespread popularity.

This had nothing to do with the fact that they were thin clients. It had everything to do with the fact that they weren't Windows. Just like every other OS that has failed to attain any real market share.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[dublin]

How many times must hitory repeat itself?

1 - Diskless Workstations
2 - X-terminals
3 - Network Computers

None ever saw widespread popularity.

I've run networks of literally thousands of the first two (I'll agree NCs never really took off, as they were neither fish nor fowl - running limited applications locally, but without enough power to do it well...)

XTerms and Diskless workstations (to a lesser degree) are by far the most effective, consistent, cost-effective, and easy-to-manage computing environment I've ever run across. (And I have worked for a company that had only a dozen or so Unix Administrators supporting several thousand users in a business unit that generated a billion dollars on the bottom line. Over half of those users were on high-performance NCD or Tektronix X-terms.)

The concept has a LOT of merit. There's really no question that it's the optimal way to set things up from a minimal managment point of view. (I've also been on the corporate staff of the world's largest vendor of remote managment solutions, and no, there's no managment tool or framework on the planet that can achieve the same leverage you can get through a well-designed X-Term deployment.)

I'm convinced that if MIT hadn't abandoned X, but continued to develop it for multimedia support, Windows XP might never have gotten where it is. To a sad but somewhat true degree, it may have been the lack of MP3 playing ability that doomed the X-term approach...

Re:Thin clients don't work

[winkydink]

I don't argue that they're easy to administer. I'm saying that give the user a choice and the user will take a dedicated CPU most time.

I administered many an NCD back in the day. In the development environment I managed ($2 bln company), the engineers wanted a dedicated CPU on their desktop to build with. Never mind that there were 6-cpu servers shared across each 15 developers and, most days, they'd get better compile times that way. They just wanted their own dedicated CPUs. Eventually, they won out though it was 5 years later and I had left so I don;t knwo if things improved or degraded overall.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[winkydink]

Even expressed as a percentage of the overall desktop UNIX market only, they never commanded a big market share.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[winkydink]

Not for very long after there was a good alternative.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[crapnutassneck]

Yeah, never saw wide deployment. We have over 3,000 remote logins to our Citrix farm a day from diskless thin clients around the world.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[SunFan]

Past failures don't guarantee future failure.

Nor do past successes guarantee future successes. For example, just how much longer can Microsoft continue charging money for their software? Eventually people will look at the Microsoft tax versus IBM+Linux or Sun+Linux+OpenSolaris and do a double-take at Microsoft's price tag. It's inevitable. It doesn't hurt that Linux and OpenSolaris not only are cheaper but are years ahead of Windows NT/2000/XP technology-wise, too.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[peawee03]

What about VNC/Remote Desktop for basic stuff, or perhaps using Cygwin to make yourself a pseudo-Linux server on the Windows box and do remote X apps to a tablet (running Cygwin's X Server for Windows)?

Re:Thin clients don't work

[drinkypoo]

You could have the best of all worlds by building a cluster. You can netboot cluster nodes, which can have an optional local volume to provide swap and/or storage. If something bad happens to the machine, it is easily replaced with another netbooting node.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[afidel]

Ever been to a bank, an airport, a car rental agency, an insurance agents office? Chances are better than 50% that they were using a diskless workstation/dumb terminal to access a mainframe/mini for their backend apps. If they weren't then they were almost assuradly using a dumb terminal emmulation app to do the same with a full fledged PC. These days some of this is being moved to web services accessing the same backends, but that just serves to slow access down but make it a bit easier to learn.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[Tim C]

If my company tried to move us all to running off a central server using dumb/thin terminals, I'd leave the same day. Then again, I do server-side Java development, and on my current project am starting to feel a bit squeezed for RAM at 1gig; there's no way I'd have that much available on a shared server, not with almost 30 of us in development alone. We'd really need one beefy server between two or three of us, in which case the savings are minimal.

Now, I realise that I am by no means a typical corporate user, and that for a lot of people that sort of a set up makes sense.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[mgbastard]

30 folks to a server for developers... 64GB server, 32way processors, gige x4 or x8, that should fit the bill, right?

Now think about the cost of 32 invidual xeon workstation with a gig or 2 of memory, versus one server that can be upgraded as technology progresses and handed down to accounting, etc. While ALL of development gets the latest and greatest.

I'm not saying it's ideal, because I haven't done it either. It opens up the possibility to speed up some operations, like having a 32 node workstation cluster compile farm to work with.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[Lumpy]

you really dont know what you are talking about.

Xterminals were/ are HUGE business. IBM and NCD dominate the market with their Xterminal hardware and the huge amounts of used NCD terminals on the market as with the new lines of products constantly rolled out by NCD tell me that the Xterminal business is still strong. Xterminals are not used by rinky-dink companies. Lockheed uses them by the thousands, the military uses them, Smiths Aerospace uses them also heavily as with banks and financial institutions.

I strongly suggest you look at the sucess that the think client market has had over the past 20 years. Its a strong business that several companies have built their business on and succeeded.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[walt-sjc]

To me, it's not about the cost of the license. It's about open protocols / file formats. I can only work with MS formats / protocols (for the most part) with MS software. This limits my ability to create custom software that works with those systems / files. It makes it harder to work with other business partners unless they also use MS. I want real XML documents that don't use proprietary extensions and binary containers. I want a single signon system that works with ALL platforms / applications. I can't get that from MS.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[painandgreed]

This had nothing to do with the fact that they were thin clients. It had everything to do with the fact that they weren't Windows. Just like every other OS that has failed to attain any real market share.

I don't know about that. The hospital where work had thin clients and then went to Windows thin clients. Everybody still hated them and that they were Windows just made all the managers push that much harder to go that final step and get them replaced with real computers.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[gnu-user]

Everyone else here seems to be taking this at face value. I think there are at least two fundamentally flawed assumptions.

1) Ten years is a good time-frame.

2) "Thin Client" is the major parameter.

Instead I proffer:

1) 40 years is probably more realistic. In that time frame a variety of approaches have been "standard". In particular, Terminals ruled for many years.

2) The real issue is centralized control vs. end-user control.

Even in the ten year time frame winkydink implies, there have been various paradigm shifts. Most movement these days is toward more centralized management:

a) MS is looking to sell service rather then software.

b) Web based applications keep gaining momentum.

c) PC hardware sales are stagnant, computing appliance segments continue to expand.

And yes, X-Teminals, Diskless Workstation (and even TS clients) still are widely used....

Re:Thin clients don't work

[ImaLamer]

That is exactly what I'm looking into, but if Microsoft can make it easy and not costly then I'm game. Currently you need to buy XP Pro or Terminal Services, a high price of entry for a hobbiest.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[llefler]

Thin clients didn't fail. They just became temporarily obsolete because the servers failed to keep pace with business requirements. Mainframe terminals barely got color before PCs rolled over them. But now, for business purposes a thin client will work perfectly for 90% of the users. With Terminal Services, managers are re-evaluating centralized asset management. Patches, viruses, and data theft are becoming costly.

Recent news story as an example: two computers stolen that had data for thousands of customers.

With PCs - A couple thousand to replace the PCs. Tens of thousands to contact customers. Security Audits. Possible additional government oversight in the future. And a black mark on your reputation.

With thin clients - $500. And more importantly, and non-story.

Re:Thin clients don't work

[peawee03]

Buy XP Pro for what? I use my PDA with a VNC client to connect to RealVNC's GPL'ed server on my desktop- it seems that a Tablet PC (with the included copy of Windows XP) would win pretty decently with a VNC client, or just Remote Desktop into the box- both are free and do not require extra licenses, as it's still one-user-at-a-time. I'd try using Remote Desktop to see if it could perform better than GPL'ed VNC over wlan, but neither I nor Google knows how to get opie-rdesktop working on my PDA.

Multiuser gets tricky- that's where Cygwin would come in, and X-forwarding, but it's still do-able. In that case you're then limited to linux apps that behave under Cygwin, but if that's alright with you, it works just fine.

Unless you were talking about a complete multisession Windows system (a la Terminal Services)... then I agree whole-heartedly with your assessment.

Hooray!

[Anonymous Coward]

Finally, we'll be able to centralize spyware/worm/virus infections on the server, where they belong!

Re:Hooray!

[lukewarmfusion]

Finally, I'll be able to write spyware/worm/viruses for servers, where they're more efficient!

Re:Hooray!

[mindaktiviti]

At least it's one place to look and secure, as opposed to 100 with a bunch of bean counting IE users. :)

Re:Hooray!

[AtrN]

Not so fast bucko. Did you read the specs? Obviously not. MS have a slightly different opinion of what constitutes a "thin" client. In addition to being an RDP client these beasties run IE and a few other things. It'll probably mean a whole new slew of cross-machine attacks via the desktop.

Re:Hooray!

[mattyrobinson69]

ooh! SMP aware malware! oooh!

Been There, Dont That.

[spotter]

I did that 3 years ago! Fit a linux kernel, X (vesa, so should work everywhere), dhcp and rdesktop on bootable floppy image (though the linux kernel only had one ethernet driver compiled in), basically a thin client you can take with you and would work on most computers (albiet network issues) you can find.

people can still get the image from

http://www1.cs.columbia.edu/~spotter/floppy.bin

though I give no warrenties for it still working, as haven't looked at it in years (and probably needs to be manually setup once it boots). though I recall it working well enough to get me an A on the project it was for.

the idea was that this floppy would give you a full screen X (via tiny X's Xvesa) and you'd run rdesktop full screen on top of it.

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[EnderWiggnz]

blech... vesa? thats gotta be awful effing slow....

i've found, from experience, that you can do a good job in 8mb. but 1.44 ? bleh... too many corners cut... too many shortcuts, etc...

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[spotter]

why slow?

remember.

Q. What's a thin client?
A. A glorified frame buffer.

Q. What's vesa?
A. A standard way to access the framebuffer.

so, yes, if the images were being rendered on the client it be slow, but they aren't, they are basically being rendered on the remote device.

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[EnderWiggnz]

first, i'm an engineer at one of the major thin client manufacturers, i really dont need a definition of a thin client.

vesa is way too slow, unless the apps that you are running are specifically designed for it. Wyse did this with their 1200LE product... unix-ish thinger, with a vesa buffer on top, running an uber-hacked ica... and its still slow.

you would really be surprised at the amount of optimizations that you can throw at a (semi) proper graphics chipset, so much that it is well worth while to take the extra cost in flash to carry the proper drivers.

also, both the rdp and ica client do not rely solely on throwing bitblt's at the screen, but rely on caching fonts, renderring tricks, and other cacheing tricks to lower bandwidth consumption.

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[eakerin]

While vesa is a standard method for accessing video card functions, it dosn't have all of the features that some native card drivers do, and some operations have do be done by the CPU instead of being hardware accelerated by the graphics adapter.

I have setup a thin client system using older hardware, and while testing out options I tested using the vesa X server vs the X server for the chipset. At least to me, there was a noticeable speed difference in bit-blt operations (such as when moving a window around on the screen).

Vesa would be acceptable in most cases, but with a little extra work, I can use the lower-end machines for a little bit more then I would otherwise be able to, by using a native video card X server when it's available.

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[goaty_the_flying_sho]

Just tell me again, how much flash is available on 1.44 meg floppy disks? thanks, goaty

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[spotter]

yes, I know that. I've read the rdp spec backwards and forwards (as I have been in the employ of MSFT (after I made the above project) and hence while I use rdesktop as an application, I don't hack on it).

but again, I stand by my statement that while protocols like rdp do support some set of raster operations (ex: fills of a region), at the end of the day the current model of thin clients is most blt'ing to screen, especially with graphic heavy apps like a web browser. Things like caching prove the point, as one is caching rasterized font bitmaps and hence vesa doesn't care about, as at the end of the day those operations are mostly blt'ing the cached font bitmap to the screen or whatever other bitmap you've cached.

Thin clients might be changing to the point where my project isn't a good example anymore (i.e. getting fatter w/ more functionality, such as video acceleration, as you can't efficiently pump many different videos worth of pixels on a single lan today, though that could change as well), but I'd still think its perfectly usable today (though as I said, haven't tried that floppy lately, so it's only an intellectually masterbating type of thought)

But that's really besides the point. I used vesa because it can run anywhere, as the point was a floppy you could carry anywhere.

Today w/ things like USB keys I'd probably make a knoppix like setup that autodetected the appropriate x driver to use.

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[spotter]

I don't disagree, the point was a single floppy that would work on any machine. vesa gave me that. remember this was 2002, while I could have made a cd for cheap, they are bigger than floppies.

today I'd probably go for a small usb memory key and a knoppix like autodetection bootup.

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[spotter]

confused, wasn't arguing that web browsers dont do well on thin clients (in fact I think they do), just that a lot of the raster operations don't help as they are mostly gifs/jpgs and text. all of which get blt'd directly and aren't raster operations like fills.

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[millwall]

first, i'm an engineer at one of the major thin client manufacturers [...] unix-ish thinger, with a vesa buffer on top, running an uber-hacked ica.

Hmm...

Re:Been There, Dont That.

[spotter]

PXE only matters on a network, i.e. need a machine that it can talk to.

Why they do work

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Security. Standardised software.

Sure they don't work with sucky servers and networks, but with grunty servers, networks and reasonable software thet can work fine.

Re:Why they do work

[Seraphim_72]

but with grunty servers

Congrats!! I think that is the first time I have every seen the word "grunty" used in a sentence. :)

Sera

widespread

[AndreySeven]

"Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?"

I used to work for a school district in Washington that deployed ThinClient systems throughout the whole district. At first the staff were whining about how they couldn't install anything(like those dumb picture screensavers) but eventually it quieted down.

If I remember correctly, the ThinClients used Linux to connect to a server running Windows 2000, which made it the same as using a regular Windows box. there is quite a big market for these devices, so I am not surprised that MS is persuing it...

Why use XP and PC? Go for low power.

[EmbeddedJanitor]

Last time I checked, XP needed a (non optional) hard disk for a swap space and only runs on x86. If you're going thin client you can do way better by using something that is lighter-weight and runs on a cooler CPU. That could take fans off the desk etc.

Re:Why use XP and PC? Go for low power.

[EnderWiggnz]

nah - you can turn off the cache when making an XPe image.

Are they... ?

[templest]

Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?

I'm reading on Brian Madden's Thin Client Web that Microsoft is about to release (don't know exactly when) two new versions of Windows XP targeting the thin-client market

Apperantly so.

Re:Are they... ?

[repking]

Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?

Don't you know what retoric and ironic means?

saludos

Sounds sensible for a change...

[VeryProfessional]

A Windows 'Lite' (as in low resource usage, not crippled) would be perfect for many corporate environments where most users do not need or want the feature bloat present in normal versions of Windows. If this product helps companies get another couple of years out of their current workstations then I imagine this could be pretty popular.

I don't see that this would go down very well with hardware companies though. I had always thought that there was some sort of conspiracy/cartel in place whereby the big software companies constantly bloated their products in order to drive sales of hardware. This could shake things up a bit...

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[Anonymous Coward]

yea, and they shot JFK so he couldnt tell anyone about it...........

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[glazed]

I refurbish computer for our local school district to give away. Right now I'm getting a lot of low end P3 machines, so that's what a lot of companies are getting rid of.

Now, to get another couple of years out of these machines it generally requires a drive replacement around this time, the BIOS is usually years out of date, and the worst of all, most of the fans are dead/dying.

The current workstations aren't going to give another couple years. Something with no HDD or active cooling is needed.

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[fabs64]

completely missed the point... They're talking about a thin client OS, not a 'lite' version of windows.

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[eclectro]

completely missed the point... They're talking about a thin client OS, not a 'lite' version of window

Don't you get the feeling though that it is going to boot into a dos prompt??

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[killjoe]

"I don't see that this would go down very well with hardware companies though."

Who cares? Ms has screwed over every single company it has ever partnered with, why should the hardware companies be exempt.

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[meestaplu]

A Windows 'Lite' (as in low resource usage, not crippled) would be perfect for many corporate environments where most users do not need or want the feature bloat present in normal versions of Windows. If this product helps companies get another couple of years out of their current workstations then I imagine this could be pretty popular.

At this point, the issue isn't even getting a couple more years out of their workstations; it's making the current workstations usable. I'm still running a 366 MHz laptop as a backup system/test subject, and even this was noticeably faster than my workstation at the place I worked last summer. When a company runs 40 processes on all machines, all the time, they a gig of RAM to run, and mine unfortunately had about 128 megs. I was surprised at the amount of waiting that people did because their machines were so bogged down -- not with spyware, but with standard stuff that you couldn't terminate.

Only the design guys and the top level managers had decent machines. If a company was able to make everybody's machines fast enough using software that fit into its current IT mentality and didn't totally kill its budget, I'm sure that productivity would go up somewhat, and it would be a lot more pleasant place to work.

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[Tim C]

Just out of interest, what would you remove from the OS to strip out the "bloat"? I'll take visual themes and eye-candy as read (although personally, I *like* that sort of thing), so what else would you take out?

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[Kris_J]

Browser, email/news client, IM client, media player, zipfolders, fax software, web server, AOL client, MSN client, games, image editor, and indexing service. For starters. The shell and file manager in XP is pretty bloated too, a smaller one would be much better. I used to use Litestep back in my Win98 days.

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[kyojin the clown]

roll your own..

http://nuhi.msfn.org/

Re:Sounds sensible for a change...

[scottv67]

a lot more pleasant place to work.

I think that you'll find this item will be much cheaper to implement than buying new PCs for everyone:

http://www.thinkgeek.com/cubegoodies/stickers/3190 /

I don't think MS can compete

[digitalride]

Unless you have a ton of old reliable boxen to run LTSP or other thin client solutions on, thin clients are way too expensive new for what you get. Local Multi-user systems are much more efficient. Especially when running 4 people on one box, open source (free) software is the only way to avoid killer software costs, so I don't think Microsoft can compete in this arena. You can get new hardware (and all the software you need) for 3 or 4 users for less than $1000 with an open source solution. For more info on local multi-user systems, check out http://groovix.com/ (that's my company, so obviously I'm biased!)

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[Donny Smith]

> Especially when running 4 people on one box, open source (free) software is the only way to avoid killer software costs

Well if you ran 40 people on one box like Windows Terminal Service does you would have saved a lot of h/w expenses and maintenance as well.
Besides the savings from using thin clients come from reduced cost of management (which lowers TCO) rather than savings on software licences.

> so I don't think Microsoft can compete in this arena.

Is that a fact?
I would say their installed base of thin clients counts in millions.

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[LDoggg_]

While not as nice as real thin clients, old junk machines can easily be made to be reliable with an LTSP network.

You can get a good bootable NIC for 20 bucks, remove local devices (hard drive, floppy, cdrom) and you have a pretty reliable machine.
Sure the CPU fan or the power supply can go out on your dumpster pentium 166s, but its not like you can't just take the NIC and put it in another junk machine.

I've outfitted a school with 60 workstations that my company has thrown away. Pentium 133s - P2 350s.

LTSP, specifically K12LTSP has been the perfect solution.
Save your money for network infrastructure, flat panel screens, and internet :)

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[digitalride]

you're right, obviously Microsoft can and will compete in this arena, but from a technical and cost standpoint I'm confident that the open source solutions have a considerable advantage.
Whether or not big corporations choose those open source solutions is a different story.

Even low end thin clients can cost $300 each, not to mention the cost of the server, and the performance you get running 40 people off one box is abysmal compared to local multi-user systems, where you usually can't tell there are other people sharing the machine, and you can run 3D games and see full motion video without a problem.

If you wanted, you could even run a 4-user local multi-user system as 4 thin clients, and get the thin-client administration advantages combined with the local multi-user advantages like power, noise, space, and cost savings.

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[LnxAddct]

Just some business advice, lower your damn prices. Just curious how your business is doing? Your selling customers Debian (stable I suppose), how do they respond to it? Regardless, those prices are way too high especially considering the OS is free. I thought it was a sweet deal at first when I thought the monitors came with it, but anyone buying off you is getting ripped off majorly. For about 50%-60% of what your charging I could build a system with equal or greater specs in a much smaller box, or just take the easy way out and just buy a mac mini, double the ram, and use it as a server for thin clients. Seems to me that your misleading your customers, on the front page you claim they can play 3d games together which to me implies full fledged modern day 3d games at high resolutions and fast gameplay and I know there is no way your achieving that. The systems are under powered, over priced, and the network latency for the thin client would make it a bitch to play.
Regards,
Steve

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[digitalride]

Hi, Assuming your post was addressed at Open Sense Solutions, let me try to answer:

1. Business is slowly but steadily growing.

2. We take Debian sid, mirror our own copy, then adjust our repository to make sure that everything is tested and works well. We keep our repository stable, and add security updates. This gives our customers all the latest software, but without the churn and occasional breakage of Debian Sid. Our customers have liked the software repository, but some have wanted something more like linspire. We are actually duplicating a lot of the goals of Ubuntu, and we may switch to Ubuntu in the future.

3. If you could build us boxes for 50% to 60% of what we are charging, please contact us with more details, because we cannot aquire quality hardware for anywhere near those numbers. For example, we use Antec quiet cases and power supplies, which cost us over $60, not the usual $20-$30 junk that most online linux retailers use. Furthermore, we'll give you our software and support standalone for only $50, and you can put it on any box you build yourself! Look at our detailed specs, look up the prices, consider shipping, and remember we have to research and develop our systems, and there is almost no hardware markup. We encourage people building there own systems, but there is no way an individual can do it for less if there time is worth anything. If our prices were any lower, there would be no way we could stay in business.

4. You can play 3d games head-to-head at reasonable resolutions with reasonable frame rates, but these are not hard core gaming machines. You are free to use more powerful video cards, any nVidia cards will work.

5. These systems are extremely fast for the money, you would have to pay 50% more to get 10% better real world performance. Our generous amounts of RAM and fast hard drives are key. We optimize for cost/performance.

6. There is absolutely no network latency, that is the beauty of local multi-user systems.

Thin client setups cannot even begin to compare in terms of performance, and they aren't cheaper if you're buying new hardware.
Thank you for the feedback, and if you have any other questions drop up a line.

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[LDoggg_]

and they aren't cheaper if you're buying new hardware.

Here's a brand new and cheap fanless thin client
I've also bought a few of these and have been very happy with them.

And buying from this vendor directly supports the development of LTSP.

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[digitalride]

Those cost $225 or $275 plus keyboards plus mice, plus a server, plus a little network infrastructure, nothing mentioned about sound, and that gets more expensive for a 3-4 user setup with not-so-great performance compared to a local multi-user setup.

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[LDoggg_]

The sound works perfectly on the 279 model, not sure about the newer cheaper model.

50 bucks for a keboard and mouse is insane. I usually pay 5 bucks for optical mice and 5 bucks for a keyboards at Frys.

The server is an investment, but what good is a large network without a server to manage things?

Network infrastructure is a given. Its 2005, computers arent all that useful without an internet connection.

Don't get me wrong, I'm knocking your machines. I do enjoy 3D gaming and it looks like your setups are better suited for that.
Its just not as relevant for what I'm using them for.
60 thin clients do X11 over a 10/100 network well enough for web browsing, word processing, programming etc.
I get centralized administration using ltsp, and junk thin clients are very low maintenace. Solid state clients are practically zero maintenance.

Have you tried one of your 4 user machines against an LTSP server? You could lower the ram, remove all the drives and still do some local apps.
Might be worth looking into.

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[LDoggg_]

I'm knocking your machines

Doh!

sorry about that, I'm NOT knocking your machines.

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[Lumpy]

not completely true.. brand new thinclients built on overpowered mini-itx motherboards cost less than $200.00 each.

Brand new NCD thinclients cost$1700.00 each and the IBM thinclients are around $900 each.... we switched to building mini-itx motherboards and case+PS + 16 meg CF card for thinstation. total cost with new KBD and mouse and the 15 minutes for the tech to assemble is $200.00 each. less if we bough the stuff in bulk and did it ourselves.

Re:I don't think MS can compete

[digitalride]

Could you please contact us and tell us exactly which parts you are using and where you get them from? You can send email to slashdot at groovix.com We would love to experiment with some systems like that if they really are that cheap. The local multi-user systems are just one aspect of our business, the goal of Open Sense Solutions is to provide cost-effective complete Linux solutions, and for setups > 10 users, LTSP is probably the most cost effective when you don't need high performance.

For 2-5 user setups, the incremental cost of another user for LTSP is $200, but for local multi-user it is just the cost of another video card and sound card, so local multi-user is guaranteed to be cheaper, and it is a whole lot faster!

Competing with Citrix

[hellfire]

I love how the OS community assumes it's always about them. In the thin client arena, Microsoft's main competition is Citrix Metaframe. My company sells a solution that works on both citrix and terminal services. Citrix is more expensive but has more features. There are also a ton of addons and configurations that TS doesn't do yet.

The more options MS comes up with, the more they can compete. So far our customers are buying more TS Licenses than Citrix since windows 2000 came out because it's adequate for most users who want a reasonably functional thin client solution.

Yes, thin client options on Linux are a threat, but that's just lumped into the over all Linux beast they are tackling right now and specifically isn't anything special... yet.

Re:Competing with Citrix

[Planky]

I have been the admin of relatively new Citrix setup in a rural hospital for a couple of months now.

What do I like about it? It's fast, efficient, easy to admin and great value for money.

That said, does anyone have any experience with the two open source programs in the blurb? How do they compare with Citrix and the like?

Re:Competing with Citrix

[rigga]

Im not sure that Citrix and Microsoft are competing. Citrix offers an ADD-ON to MS TS. Without Terminal Server Citrix is useless. CItrix is a suite of management and deployment tools for Microsoft Terminal Server. Microsoft loves Citrix. Why every new shiny Citrix server has a copy of MS-TS running on it. Plus for every Citrix License that you have MS gets to sell you a TS Cal. They are laughing all the way to the bank.

RiGgA

And you're gonna need it, too...

[Weaselmancer]

Because according to Microsoft, that's all the PC you're using to read this is good for - because it won't run Longhorn.

Re:And you're gonna need it, too...

[AndroidCat]

That's cool. I doubt I'll run Longhorn either.

Re:And you're gonna need it, too...

[Anonymous Coward]

Cool! Now we're only gonna need 3GHz of server CPU (and a GB of RAM) per thin client connecting? Nice, I can picture out a server to handle 1000 simultaneous users. :)

One of those new dual core P4s from dell might be enough to handle 2 users. Licensing won't be a big issue, but air conditionning will be!

And a great bonus would be

[Sprotch]

Never (or barely never) to lose a project again while you're working on it and your computer crashes! It would be stored on a server, right? (or is this a fantasy?)

Re:And a great bonus would be

[VoidWraith]

Well, thats true in theory, but where I go to school all the Windows computers use a Citrix server. It is abysmal. The computers will sometimes hang while saving files, crashing the computer and trashing the file. Terrible for my physics class. (not that every computer does this, but a few do. And the server has a tendency for forgetting things... I think its because the tech department is too backup-happy.)

support issues

[blew_fantom]

its been a while since i used a thin client or installed them. but one of the major problems i had was you were at the mercy of the quality of "hardware" of the thin client. doing firmware upgrades was a huge hassle since i had to do them on each individual machine (not sure if this can be pushed out from a server these days), and if you are going run TS, server robustness, cpu/ram, backup, and total throughput are huge initial historical costs that need to be considered. from an accounting standpoint, the initial investment would have to weighed against the cost-savings that could result from running "cheaper" thin client models (of course, there is support issues related to this that also need to be considered)... there's always the issue of educating users that needs to be dealt with as well.

All about .net, right?

[ExileOnHoth]

"Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?"

No. Microsoft never heard of PXES or ThinStation. They are absolutely desperate to deploy the .net framework more widely, so people will actually start to develop for it. They fear people will never deliberately download and try to install it on their older boxes without something like this.

Be interesting to see how this works out for them. I won't lose sleep over it.

Wait.

[Omni Magnus]

Does this mean XP going to have small bugs instead of big ones?

"Release *On* Certain Countries"

[adavies42]

I like that. Sounds kind of like "release the dogs".

Re:"Release *On* Certain Countries"

[hunterx11]

I suspect that they won't need the hounds if they simply release Ballmer.

THIN CLIENTS! THIN CLIENTS! THIN CLIENTS! THIN CLIENTS!

Thin clients ...

[kabz]

Sweet, lots of companies including the one I work for already run Citrix to allow scarce and expensive software packages to be accessed without having to commit a full installation to every single possible client.

For example, I typically run Citrix to access the the SQL Navigator software, and also certain corporate applications that would necessitate me having a whole lot of configuration to do if I couldn't go through Citrix.

Response times over a typical corporate pipe are pretty decent, and it certainly beats not having an app you need.

One worry for MS though, if this catches on, might the ease of administration, standardised licensing etc, start to hurt full Windows sales ?

Re:Thin clients ...

[SunFan]

One worry for MS though, if this catches on, might the ease of administration, standardised licensing etc, start to hurt full Windows sales ?

What about the permanent full-time employment enjoyed by many thousands of Windows admins, whose job it is to troubleshoot every little problem on all the Windows desktops?

Re:Thin clients ...

[afidel]

--One worry for MS though, if this catches on, might the ease of administration, standardised licensing etc, start to hurt full Windows sales ?

They don't care, they probably get about as much for one of these licenses as they do for an OEM copy of windows, and then they get a TS CAL purchase, and a windows server seat license, and probably an Office CAL. So MS makes plenty of money on small machines hooked up to a TS box.

Big question is...

[strredwolf]

Can we run OpenOffice on Mönch?

What about OEMs??

[malraid]

However huge Microsoft is, they still need the OEMs, and I don't think they be very happy about this...Recycle old hardware?? A new Windows version that doesn't require a hardware upgrade to run more or less adecuate?? Time will tell,,

WTF....

[Lxy]

Has no one here heard of "Windows XP embedded edition"? That thing's been out for at least a year, maybe two.

I run Hpaq t5700 thin clients. These boxes are nothing more than a Crusoe processor and a small ATA flash disk. You load the XP embedded image onto the thin client, customize it, and it's ready to go. Footprint? Under 200 MB. That sounds large for a thin client, but this is truly Windows XP with a lot of crap stripped out. IE and MSN messenger are included, as well as basic terminal emulation and other normal thin client apps. All in all, not bad for 200 MB and it does almost everything I need it to. For a more functional box you'll want to grab drivers.cab from a real XP machine, but aside from that it's ready and waiting for your apps.

Re:WTF....

[rhizome]

>That sounds large for a thin client, but this is truly Windows XP with
>a lot of crap stripped out. IE and MSN messenger are included,

So what "crap" was stripped out, then?

Re:WTF....

[addbo]

I believe that is a different market altogether... the HP T5700 come installed with Windows XPe... this is an OS made specifically for thin clients of the variety you speak of... which come with hardly any components at all... USB slots, a sound card, Parallel port, and some flash RAM/ROM... if you want a CD-ROM you buy an HP specific CD-ROM Dock that is supported by the OS... certain USB printers don't even work on the thin clients...

This new OS will be used to convert old PC's (like your PII 333's) into thin client like devices... these machines weren't originally designed for thin client use... and so it will have to have XP's expanded device driver list in order to support all the myriad of different things PC's can have as components...

You can't just buy Windows XPe to install on something... unless you're OEM planning to create hardware yourself.

This is for the regular joe administrators and small businesses with aging hardware that can still be put to use as thin clients while they spend their money upgrading their TS box.

Competition for SunRay

[Darren.Moffat]

This is very likely in response not just to Citrix but to Sun's SunRay technology which is the ultimate thinclient - there is no OS on a SunRay it is basically a remote keyboard/mouse/usb hub/audio/framebuffer-display all hanging off a network interface.

SunRay is very heavily used in US Military applications because they really like the zero state on the desktop and no ability for state to be put there. It is even used with Trusted Solaris (which provides Mandatory Access Controls), to access Citrix services.

SunRay also has very simple and very effective desktop mobility, pull out smartcard move to new SunRay unit plug in card, reauthenticate, and off you go.

SunRay however does require dedicated Sun specific hardware, but that hardware is pretty cheap.

Re:Competition for SunRay

[NickHydroxide]

I agree here - SunRays seem to be the major contender (although admittedly I have little experience in large server situations). Our University employs SunRays for about half of student access computers, the other half being HP workstations. I really have no idea why they don't expand the SunRays - I've *NEVER* seen a SunRay out of order, but on any given day 1 of every 5 HP is down.

It just seems to make administrative sense.

So this means?

[Mad Ogre]

What? What can I do with a thin XP? What can I get out if this? Enlighten me.

Windows What?

[CarlinWithers]

All these new versions of Windows with some sort of focused audience, or supposed focus audience are making me wonder...

Has Microsoft gotten to the point where it feels it needs to create it's own alternatives in the same market it has sought to crush all the alternatives of others?

How ironic.

Not Anymore

[Tony]

Not anymore, it doesn't. SunRay server software is now available for Linux, as well. So you can run a *cheap* SunRay lab. Get some SunRays off eBay, buy the server software (it's kinda spendy, but cheaper than the Sun hardware), and run a couple of dozen SunRays off a single server.

They are really nice machines. Fanless. And their software is getting very capable. You can even mount USB pen drives off the back of them.

Re:Not Anymore

[drinkypoo]

They are really nice machines. Fanless. And their software is getting very capable. You can even mount USB pen drives off the back of them.

Aside from the fact that they are very slow this describes i-openers, too, and any SFF LCD PC (available from all kinds of places as point of sale systems) that netboots from, say, a Linux box. You could even run selinux on them, and get the security some people are looking for. My i-opener is an antique but it's actually fairly useful. The hardest part is finding a USB hub with a short enough lead to not be annoying...

Re:What's up with the names?

[lowe0]

No, they're mountains in Switzerland.

Believe it or not, not the first...

[klipsch_gmx]

Microsoft Corp.'s newly released operating system designed to power small computing devices has found a home in a new slim computer terminal, or thin client, from Wyse Technology Inc.

The terminal was unveiled Wednesday in conjunction with Microsoft's release of its Windows XP operating system for embedded devices. Wyse said it expects to be the first hardware maker to offer a thin client device with XP installed. The company said it will begin shipping its new machine, commonly used to run cash registers and bar-code scanning applications, in the first quarter of 2002.

Full article from November 2001.

embeded

[hammurderer]

microsoft already has a thin client its called windows xp embeded. I work at circuit city and this is the only system we have used for over 2 years now. it is the most stripped down version of windows i have ever seen it boots directly into the program for writing up sales (DPS) and then it loads internet explorer. if you close internet explorer it opens a new copy. thats it there is nothing more to this os. so if you want something for only running one or two programs try embeded.

Not sure why they're bothering

[drsmithy]

You can install XP to use as a TS client on just about anything with 96MB+ RAM and a Pentium or better processor (and at my previous job we had dozens of such machines). Heck, XP runs usably *standalone* on any P2 class machine with 384MB of RAM or more.

I really don't think there are enough "old" machines out there to justify this.

Alternate names?

[Skevin]

> Codenamed Eiger and Mönch

These are only the pre-release names. When they hit the shelves, these MS products will be named Auschwitz and Dachau.

Solomon

How useful is this...?

[miscellaneous_havoc]

This might have been useful to me about 4 years ago. But now there are very few people who don't have the resources for an OS like the full-blown Windows XP. This program is a day late and a dollar short (or too expensive)!

Cost OF CAL + Cost Of XP thin Client

[monkeyboy87]

I think you are making the assumption that the thin client doesnt grant you a CAL on a TS Server. Purchasing this thin client software may grant you a CAL to upgrade your TS to one more client on your TS. Keeps the price down, gives enough bait to those organizations considering thin client alternatives to windows to stay on windows for about the same or a just a bit more money. than say a system from Sun.

Answer: TCO

[slashdot_commentator]

Why would anyone choose to cripple perfectly good PC's, especially if they have to pay for it?

Answer: Total Cost of Operation

If you have a screen, CPU, RAM, and a NIC, you will not be wasting time extensively debugging problems, running viruses scans on each machine, etc. Less points of hardware failure. The logical bugs can come from only one place, the server. Its a matter of competence to make sure your servers are redundant, reliable, virus and bug free.

You would probably avoid running a thin client on a full blown PC. You sort of add another point of failure. The other problem is that I haven't seen any Microsoft based platform that matches the concept seamlessly. Unlike *ahem* unix/linux....

Re:Answer: TCO

[TeraCo]

The other problem is that I haven't seen any Microsoft based platform that matches the concept seamlessly. Unlike *ahem* unix/linux....

You haven't been looking too hard then. Since Microsoft got together with Citrix, things have been pretty sweet in terminal services land. A few of our bigger SME customers don't have a home network, their entire company is hosted on our servers, and they use managed/adsl links to get to it.

The REAL problem with this sort of solution is that when it fails in a big way [1], it really fails. Not many companies can absorb all of their staff being down for a few hours. [1] The data centre is redundant down to the last rivet in the racks, the platforms are almost as solid. So the only failures they get are big.

Re:Answer: TCO

[Dr. Evil]

This has been promised for over a decade. Citrix has been making terminal-services like machines for that long. Citrix screwed up by charging too much (a thin client with licensing and hardware cost 3x that of a PC), and Microsoft's OSes and software packages didn't deal well with multiuser environments.

Yeah, the software is getting better, and I sincerely hope they charge less than $2k in licensing per workstation.

The argument back then for the $3k thin client and the $2k licensing (then your $20k server) was that it made backup of data trivial, local workstation security trivial, upgrades of software trivial... and like you say, it cuts TCO dramatically. In my experience, the stickershock kept people from trying it and the permissions issues made the TCO arguments a little less compelling.

If MS is trying to target Linux thin clients, they might set the pricepoint more reasonably.

It's a shame for Linux, but if MS gets it right, it will be a very nice system. RDP works better than X11 anyways.

Re:Answer: TCO

[pizpot]

Hmmm, we have Wyse Cytrix clients at my office. People hate them because of how slow they perform. I tried one out, and I think if feels like a $50 computer.

Re:Answer: TCO

[operagost]

Well, if they're the ones that run Windows CE on very slow, obsolete RISC processors (ARM, I think) then that's why.

Re:Answer: TCO

[TeraCo]

Hmmm, we have Wyse Cytrix clients at my office. People hate them because of how slow they perform. I tried one out, and I think if feels like a $50 computer.

When I was back in the managed desktop area, we installed a few 'local' citrix solutions at customer request. I found that selling thin client is generally a terrible idea, because the customer never orders as many servers as required, and then it's your fault that it's all slow.

So, the rule of thumb is: Don't be the guy that sold it, be the guy that came in after the guy that sold it was sacked. You get all of the ease of administration, and none of the blame.

Re:This won't work

[El Gordo Motoneta]

I've been (for the most part) responsible for the implementation
of the second larget thin-client rollout in my country. In fact,
I'm still in that position, since we still have two whole buildings
left to migrate.

The average box in this company is a Pentium II, 333Mhz, with 64MB of RAM
with Trident PCI VGA.

They are way too slow to run a modern desktop (before we started the
thin client rollout, they were mostly running their original Windows 95
installation), but they are fast enough to run Xfree 4.3 with accelerated
2D Trident drivers. They run *beautifully*. The large amount or RAM
let's us add small webservers and telnet servers to the thin client disk
images, and a Samba nmbd process so they have a NetBIOS name. We are using
Terminal services on a Windows 2003 Server to provide a modern and relatively
secure OS.

So far, the absolutely biggest complaint we have ever had is that Office
2003 does not include the "Office shortcut bar" (boo-f*ng-hoo) so we ended
up installing the damn bar from an Office XP CD we had lying around.

The users are happy with their "new computers". They crash a lot less, Word
and Excel open instantly, and if power goes out or the machine breaks, their
whole session is intact. Help Desk is a lot easier now: When a thin client
craps out, the techies just dump it and plug another one in, turn it on,
and the user keeps on working as if nothing happened.

locked down? yes, they are. Very. But in this particular company there are
nearly no "power users" and they barely even notice things the lack of a
wallpaper. They just power it up and use it to work.

Yes but

[billsoxs]

will they run Office Apps?

It's a joke!

Re:This won't work

[Anonymous Coward]

I run an LTSP with ~30 thin clients attached, and I guess that I'd be one of the nazi's you speak of. I don't let the users run viruses, and no, they can't load any dancing bunny screen savers.
They run OOo across the board, but M$ Office2K is installed (under Cross Over Office), and is available at the odd times that it is needed, we run Firefox, Mozilla, Netscape, Evolution, and Gaim. There are a few games that the users know about, and a lot that they don't.
Video is usable (not full screen though), sound works, users can plug in their thumb drives, and help desk calls went from 3 / day with this group of users to 2 / week.
Users have a home directory where they store files, but no, they don't have write access to any of the folders where system files are (do you feel they should?).
And the numbers;
The server is a P4/1.8GHz box with dual 100GB drives in a hardware raid, 1GB RAM, GigaBit ethernet, redundant PS $1700
The Clients are fairly expensive, $300 each, plus an LCD and a nice Keyboard and mouse.
Software is all free except for the O2K.
Total cost for 30 users, $11,000
If we had put a box on every users desk, we could have forgone the $1700 server, but the PC's would have cost about $450 (Win2KPro or XPPro - not home), then we would have had to load them with Office ($350) Adobe Writer ($200), Virus Scanners ($20/Month?), and more frequent help desk requests . Total for 30 users; $35,000+
I could give the users a $500 christmas bonus and come out way ahead.

The clinchers - no fans on the workstations, they last at least 5 years (so far I've had 1 failure since 2000), and I've got over 150 days uptime on the server. I bought one tape drive that backs up all of the users every night, whether they left their terinals up and running or not.

And the users are salesmen (and sales women), and they can figure out how to use it.

Is this really new?

[crapnutassneck]

I have been using a Maxbook against Citrix Secure Gateway with Sprint and AT&T WWAN cards for about 8 months now. Isn't this just a rebrand of XP-Embedded? http://www.maxspeed.com/

OO alternative

[mamladm]

There is a German company called Softmaker Inc. and they make a commercial but quite affordable Office alternative. It's available for both Windows and Linux.

http://www.softmaker.de/index_en.htm/

I haven't used this myself, but heard people who have used it talk about the software in the highest terms. Also, it appears that MS-Office format compatibility is far better than that of OpenOffice. Also, they sell professional fonts for Linux, too, so that alone will probably make the whole thing look much better. This may go a long way on its own.

Perhaps if you test drive this and show it to your boss, let him play with the Windows version for a while to prepare the ground etc etc, you might just get lucky and he might be more open to discuss Linux thin client deployment with the Linux version of them Softmaker folks' software as an alternative to MS-Office instead of OpenOffice. It may be worth a trial, I guess.

Also, how about running MS-Office via CrossOver on a Linux box. Not acceptable to your boss?

anyway, good luck.

Re:OO alternative

[walt-sjc]

how about running MS-Office via CrossOver on a Linux box

Um, I do, BUT you should check out the compatability info on codeweavers web site, and understand what does and does not work. It works well, but not perfect. Sometimes far from perfect.

Re:OO alternative

[maotx]

Yeah we have one full time Linux user in our company that we were able to setup only because we promised our manager that CrossOver would allow him to use Office. Needless to say he hates using Office in Linux as CrossOver keeps faulting on him.

Re:This won't work

[menace690]

Not only do I work for a company that has done what you just said, I was the one that implemented it. (CEO's decision) Users complained for about a week. Oh I can't get to website X... if website X was deemed work accesable, it was opened up. Or I can't do blah blah. After all settled down, we found our users no longer used the web for surfing but actually started doing work. Productivity is much higher (along with taking some things away, we were also able to give new tools to users that would have been security nightmares on local machines) And my job as a sys admin/programmer has been made much simpler. Oh my machine is crashing, or my hard drive died, or well you get the idea.... All I do is replace it with a freshly formatted machine (we keep two in rotation) and install a Remote Desktop Icon on their desktop. If you were doing your job, you wouldn't care about the invasion of privacy. The company is paying you, you are on their time. If you are doing your things on their time, you are STEALING. I'm not trying to say we discourage people from using email to contact family, etc. But things like buying concert tickets, etc can be done on one's own time. Also, loggin emails made it easy for us to spot a salesman (who has since been fired) that not only wasn't using the company email, but actually had the name of a different company in his signature. (found it in a reply from a customer that was cced to another salesman who has been using our server (as is company policy)

What a shame

[WillhelmTell]

It's a shame for me as a Swiss citizen to see that Microsoft uses the names of two beautiful Swiss mountains for their software.

WillhelmTell

Thin clients do work

[2short]

The fact that something does not see widespread popularity does not mean it does not work. I know the first two on your list worked because I used a few of them. They were not as popular as standard PCs, but in the right environment they were nice.
In any case it's not exactly history repeating itself if the conditions are different. Typical network availability, reliability, and speed are much better now than they have been in the past. Do the current conditons mean thin clients make more sense than they used to? I don't know, but I'll tell you this: The computer I'm writing this on (at home) is an ancient POS with a nice screen. It occasionally runs a web browser directly, but 99% of the time it is on, it is running Remote Desktop pointed at a much nicer box (at work) across town. So I've got to disagree with your assertion. Thin clients work great for me.

Metaframe is great

[cbreaker]

Microsoft's RDP came from Citrix, as many people probably don't realize. Citrix came out with a product called Winframe for NT 3.x and it was very similar to Metaframe all the way until Metaframe XP.

Microsoft made a deal with Citrix to license some of their technology, and they put it into NT4 Terminal Server Edition.

But if you're serious about terminal servers on Windows, Metaframe is a MUST. It makes the system so much more manageable, smoother, and usable. And published apps are awesome if you want both thick clients for some applications (maybe apps that won't run on a TS, or CPU/Graphics intense apps like photoshop) and still benefit from the central administration and single point of maintenence.

If you've used a Windows terminal server, as most people have with the simpler administration mode, check out Metaframe - you won't believe how much better it feels to login and use the remote desktop, as well as how much better the administration is.

Re:Metaframe is great

[smyle]

Microsoft's RDP came from Citrix, as many people probably don't realize.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

A sibling post came close to telling the story, but left out a few relevant bits.

Citrix had a license to the NT3.5 codebase, which they modified and sold as a completely separate product (WinFrame). Their modifications to NT were

1. "MultiWin" - that essentially made NT usable by more than one person at once. At that time, only one person could be on the desktop at once. Citrix's code made it multi-user.
2. "ICA" (I don't remember if that's what they called it at the time, but that's what it became at any rate) - the protocol that sent keystrokes and mouse movements to the server and screen updates back to the clients.

Interestingly enough, at that time, Citrix was saying "we're charging for MultiWin, but ICA is free" (which is exactly the opposite of what they're doing now).

They were going to do the same thing with NT4, and it was even in public beta, when Microsoft did what it does best, and threatened them. The upshot was that Citrix licensed MultiWin to MS, and Citrix got a "blessed" addon from MS.

Citrix did NOT license ICA to Microsoft. RDP was Microsoft's replacement for ICA that built upon Citrix's MultiWin technology. The marriage of MultiWin and RDP was NT4TSE.

...and FWIW, Citrix also had an OS/2 based product (WinView) at the same time that also used the ICA protocol.

Eiger and Monch...

[jxyama]

...are 2 mountains in Switzerland. They come in 3's, as they are a part of a famous Alpine range. So... what is Jungfrau, the 3rd mountain in the range?

Re:Eiger and Monch...

[west.to.east]

OT but somewhat related; check out Canadian fiction author Robertson Davies

Re:Eiger and Monch...

[OldManAndTheC]

So... what is Jungfrau, the 3rd mountain in the range?

She put on some weight, so they won't let her represent the thin-client product line anymore.

I hear she's going to sue ...

Re:Eiger and Monch...

[shellbeach]

They come in 3's, as they are a part of a famous Alpine range. So... what is Jungfrau, the 3rd mountain in the range?

Having seen just how big the Eiger and Monch are, I'm guessing the names were chosen to represent MS code bloat. Of course, the Jungfrau is even more enormous, so that'll be reserved for a Longhorn thin client OS ... :-)

Re:What's up with the names?

[incom]

What's up people's asses today? I wasn't refering to what the words meant, but why they were chosen.

the little things

[DSLAMngu]

This products ARE NOT the Lite XP versions that Microsoft is about to release on certain countries like Brazil

I appreciate that Microsoft releases Windows "on" South American countries, as if it were unleashing a pack of diseased wolverines upon poor Brazilian villagers. (Jokes about diseased wolverines being faster than XP are not encouraged at this point.)

The anti-MS sentiment seethes around here on so many levels.

Re:This won't work

[Onetrack]

You got away with this on only 1 GB of ram? usually you should allow 128 meg/station so just under 4 gig for 30 desktops. I agree anyways, LTSP works so insanely well you won't even need a helpdesk.

Not for me...

[bigmanjq]

Why would I exchange our "free" ltsp server software for this [garbage]? I'm perfectly happy with what I have. Microsoft is going to have a hard time making a sale to me and others like me. How many BSOD's can exist at once on a Microsoft thinclient network? An entire office might have an eerie blue glow if something goes wrong!

Re:I hate Microsoft.

[Maul]

Don't hold back. Tell us how you really feel.

I saw them

[dago]

In fact, I see them everyday trough the WINDOWS.
In fact, there's also "jungfrau" with it, but it's so super secret that I can't tell you what it is.

Here you have a photo of them, taken from my office roof.

Re:Alternate names? (OT)

[dago]

and after such jokes, you will wonder why ppl rant or make jokes about "ignorant" americans.

I mean, seriously, how someone with a low slashdot UID like you could ignore Godwin's law.

Moreover, I think better alternate name could be UBS & CS, after the products hit the shelves.

Total Cost of Ownership

[addbo]

I am part of a team that runs a network with around 250 employees... currently about half of the organization is running on thin clients... the time spent administrating these clients is much less than the ones with regular desktops and laptops...

Yes when you say $200 thin client plus CAL would probably equal an XP machine... but... we have thin clients that are around 6 or 7 years old now from compaq that are still being used... how long do desktops or laptops last?

how long does it take you to install a new desktop for a user versus a thin client where you just drop and go? I understand you can just "ghost" a machine... but unless you're very diligent in keeping your ghost image up to date you still have to patch the darn thing...and any software that has been implemented since... as well as any special software specific to the person. Whereas when I do have to patch my servers... it's done once for the 100+ users...

I think the savings in your time alone would outweigh the cost of that XP box.

I also find helping end users with problems is so much easier... I just hop in on their session to show them what to do... almost everything can be diagnosed over the phone! (Yes you can also do that with other software like PC Anywhere, Dameware or even XP's own "Remote Assistance"... but sometimes getting that stuff to work is more pain than it's worth... whereas with this if you can get on the server you can remote control the user) I've even worked from home a few days =) (VPN and Cable modem are great together)

Granted there are still certain things that require a PC... some applications just don't play well with Terminal Server... we've had some major problems with some of the older Access 97 applications that people have developed and which are no longer supported by Microsoft. Palm pilot users can't sync (that I know of) on a terminal server... and you can't share out printers from thin clients... like our label printers which are difficult to network. And then there are those people who are travellers and require their laptops and data with them... so thin client isn't for everyone... but I'm sure it's good enough for most...

For the people who we've switched to thin clients... people seem to like it... it "boots up" faster... and most people really don't know the difference... everything is stored on the server so we can backup everything on our tapes... which you can't really do with 100+ desktops...

The single point of failure is a relevant argument for some... but if you create a cluster of terminal servers for redundancy you reduce that possibility of one server crash breaking all your eggs =) If you have all your eggs in one basket you can watch them carefully... versus having hundreds of eggs in hundreds of baskets being attended infrequently.

Re:What's up with the names?

[Medievalist]

Perhaps they were chosen to step on Matthew Grant's linux-based single-floppy distros "Eiger" and "Matterhorn".

Those were from the LRP, which is no more (LRP is dead, long live LEAF!)

Or maybe it's like Dilbert says, all the good code names have already been used (I myself am working on "project phlegm").

Re:I hate Microsoft.

[xtrvd]

... wine?

You figure out what I mean by it. =)

Re:What's up with the names?

[Sique]

And Munich (München) means 'founded by monks'. So this etymology is not so wrong after all. As far as I remember Munich was founded by Cistercensian monks settling in a large swamp at the Isar river and gradually turning the swamp into fields to plant crops.

Good answer

[C0d1ngM0nk3y]

My Chyropractor's receptionist uses a computerised typewriter! When I saw this I chuckled to myself and thought how long it had been since I saw one of those but then I thought: why would they need anything else on the front desk? All she ever does is type letters and write down apointments in a little black book - you don't need a 1.3Ghz processor, 500 Meg memory, DVD r/w, flat screen plasma monitor and the latest in fancy-smancy graphics cards to do that! People use technology for it's own sake these days.

Re:Good answer

[zero_offset]

Which is why most medical practice management software (I wrote some for several years) runs on extremely low-end machines. Assuming the doctor isn't gaming the books (chiropractors are especially famous for this), there is a great deal of value in having everybody on the network. Medical billing is painfully complex -- having patient information and appointments online is itself more than enough justification to put her on a low-end PC.

And hell, these days, the PC you described would probably be cheaper than that typewriter.

It's patently obvious to anyone with a clue...

[advocate_one]

The Microsoft resellers are losing clients hand over fist who can't see the point in upgrading their existing hardware to run a full blown XP desktop. The clients are making noises about and probably already moving over to running LTSP and thin clients with their existing hardware.

With this announcement, Microsoft are hoping to stop the bleeding to Linux by being able to say, hang on a few months and we'll have a solution for you that doesn't involve the "unknown" of Linux, but keeps you in the nice warm fuzzy Microsoft fold...

Anything to stop people experiencing the delights of Linux is worth this volte-face from Microsoft, who until previously, have always required you to go and purchase new flashy hardware to run the new flashy OS on...

Thin Clients and XP Embedded Edition...

[Vo0k]

Recently I saw an ad in a pro magazine (about vision systems). It was about a PC-like device that can interface several types of industrial cameras, has gigabit ethernet etc... It comes bundled with Windows XP Embedded Edition.

The slogan on the bottom of the ad read:
"Spend less time integrating your components and more time developing the application."

How accurate...

Essentially this...

[amcdiarmid]

This is the same crap deal as the WinCE devices that wyse and Boundless used to sell. Essentially, rather than buy a linux device (with Rdesktop, and 5250 emulation, and Xserver, and a local browser) - you purchase a WinCE, EmbeddedXP, MoenchXP, etc-OS-device from M$ (With IE and RDP only) and get the RDP portion of the TS license with it.

It is a play to keep people from mass producing a nano-itx/Linux thin-client

Re:Not going to fix anything

[Anonymous Coward]

Please note, the OS can only be based 'on' the architecture ... not 'based off' and most certainly not the doubly foul 'based off of'

IBM's strategy, ten years later.

[Anonymous Coward]

This sounds strangely familiar, somehow.

Of course, WSOD was, as the article notes, just a way to buy a netboot environment in shrinkwrap, but what do you think these two 'distributions' of XP will be?

Re:Answer - we've done it already

[TeraCo]

That's nice.. but why shouldn't users be able to have their own settings? And what if you need to restrict applications to certain users for licencing purposes?

This is about Linux

[amcdiarmid]

Two comments:

1) This is a retread of devices with WinCE(pocketPC); XPembedded. (I beleive that both have some of the same code-base)

2)This is a thin ploy to keep people from using Linux on their thin client devices: NCD; MaxSpeed; Wyse; etc.. have generally made their thin clients in two versions a) LinuxOS and b) MicrosoftOS. Generally, both come with RDP (and all the native Microsoft Technologies that go with it... such as printing) and a web-browser. If you get the Linux Version - you generally also get ICA (a premium item on the MS version); X; 5250 emulation; a little other junk.

2a) The real key here is that if you purchase the MS-OS thin-client, you historically get a client license for the "current" version of Terminal Server: In 97-8 if you bought a WinCE Thin-Client you got a NT4 TS-cal. Now you get a Win2k3TS-Cal.

So lets see:

Option1) Buy Thin-client with MS-OS and not have to buy TS-cal. Have to pay on upgrade of TS-server for new CAL. Have vendor lock-in on Thin-device. Not be able to upgrade RDP client b/c, well it has not happened in six years yet, you think it's going to change now? Not have any other window-manager-clients other than RDP (and perhaps ICA for a few bucks more).

Option2) Buy a Linux based Thin-client-device. Have more emulation options out of the box (RDP; ICA; 5250; X, etc...)- And have to buy TS-CALs. Be able to re-use/re-sell devices when you are done because they can have all their clients updated.

This Moench version of XP is just to keep people from seeding a crapload of nano-itx / Linux machines on the market.

ltsp

[marafa]

i just helped a friend out and this was the result:
5 recycled compaq sff workstations without hard disks or cdroms and builtin pxe enabled nic.
1 hyperthreaded 3.2gb with 2*80gb harddisk with 2 nics

hardware costs
workstations=5*350LE=1750LE
server=3100LE

monitors are out of the equation coz when he realised he was gonna save 15000LE+ on hardware alone he decided to get 5*2000LE LCD monitors.

software = mandrake 10.1+ ltsp 4.1 = free

ok i took a bit of cash for the setup but nowhere NEAR M$ prices!

total cost of hardware without the monitors = 830USD (1usd-5.84LE)

Babies

[nrpil]

Microsoft is always trying to compete with others. They are just like little babies in a box. If one baby has a toy the other M$ baby looks at it and thinks, i want that !!!

Or am i completely wrong and is M$ just trying to help us poor computers users

Thin clients *DO* work. And they work very well.

[Colin Smith]

"None ever saw widespread popularity."

Simply not true. In the corporate and academic environments both diskless workstations and Xterms were widely used and were (and are) *extremely* effective at reducing operating costs.

They did suffer in the past from high capital costs, the workstations and Xterms were extremely expensive, and the very large servers required to run the systems were also extremely expensive to purchase and maintain. Also when a system went down large numbers were unable to work. A team of 3 administrators[1] could however manage a site of several thousand users quite easily.

Today, diskless workstations and Xterms are an even more compelling proposition. The workstations and xterms themselves can be very cheap 200 quid desktop systems and the servers can be an array of cheap ix86 based Linux boxes. This gives a spectacularly low implementation cost and extremely low running costs. It's also an amazingly scalable system architecture, (Assuming Linux) I can take the capacity from 10 to 1000 to 10000 users simply by adding capacity in parallel. I don't even need any downtime.

With the fact that you are now using arrays of servers to run the login and application services there is also no single point of failure except the client and the network the client is on. If that goes down these days nobody can work anyway.

[1] And you really only need 3 in order to handle holidays, illness and out of hours support rotas.

Competition is Win98 on eBay

[michaelmalak]

Is Microsoft trying to compete with open source projects like PXES or ThinStation?

I hadn't heard of those projects and I seriously wonder if Microsoft has either.

As oft reported in the press, Microsoft's biggest competitor is old versions of its own software. The competition to XP Thin is Windows 98 sold on eBay.

how thin clients work for me...

[way2trivial]

I have XP Pro on my main CPU

My crappy windows ME laptop has a cheapo 15" lcd attached to it, sitting out in my shed- with a g network adapter... running a 2055 hack, I can- with one of the two monitors in my shed, run a full screen XP session and a full screen windows ME session at the same time-- the ME session serves up any video stream (rdc sucks at motion video) and stat monitor on my wlan connection- the XP screen affords me power to run whatever I run....

Consider- I can run any of my commercial software while my wife is inside running the same commercial software... one license....

this has extended the useful life of my winme laptop immesurably-- if it powers up, and runs mstsc.exe- it's a windows xp machine...

that's what will mess over the hardware manufacturers...

A lotta folks are annoyed at oracle for charging a per-processor fee, and counting dual cores as two processors.... I say-- fuck em! pay for two processors, and connect to it from 50 machines!

2003 TS CAL's can be free

[Anonymous Coward]

Your comment that the TS CAL that comes with XP Pro is not valid with Windows Terminal Server 2003 is not quite accurate.

We hit this exact problem when upgrading our TS server to 2003, and found that Microsoft actually have a transition plan in place: http://www.microsoft.com/windowsserver2003/howtobu y/licensing/tsletter.mspx.

Essentially, any copy of XP you owned at the time Windows Server 2003 was launched is eligable for a 2003 license. As is any version of windows with Software Assurance or Upgrade Advantage at that time:

"In light of the discontinuation of desktop operating system (OS) equivalency, Microsoft has developed a transition plan to accommodate customers who were licensed for Microsoft Windows® XP Professional (or entitled to upgrade to Windows XP Professional under Software Assurance or other upgrade protection) at the time that Windows Server 2003 became available on April 24, 2003. Customers who have acquired Windows XP Professional licenses (or active upgrade protection coverage, including Campus and School Agreements, for Windows Professional), prior to April 24, 2003, will be granted complimentary Windows Server 2003 Terminal Server Client Access Licenses (TS CALs)."

Ross

trying to compete?

[SolusSD]

virtually ANY version of linux can be set up as a thin client!Newer releases, like Suse 9.x make it easy for nay one by implementing all the tools needed in the GUI

Re:Answer - we've done it already

[Anonymous Coward]

They shouldn't be allowed to have their own settings because it is not their fucking computer. It is our computer, we let them use it to do the JOB we pay them to do. If they want to do personal computing, they should do it at home on their own time. Thin clients are in place for people who don't need computing horsepower.

Would you give every receptionist a full blown PBX, why give every Tom Dick and Jane a full blown PC. History has shown they will just fuck it up anyway, thus costing us money to find and fix the problem.

Again, you go to work and get paid to do a job. If we lock down your PC then you will no longer be able to fuck off and will maybe actually do what we are paying them to.

If you don't like it then perhaps you should get an education so you can get a job where you are required to get a full blown PC.

Man, I fucking hate people. If one more user complains because of some error weather bug causes I am going to kick them in the face.

Economy 101

[Moraelin]

1. A decent computer costs nowadays, what? A few hundred dollars? How much can you save on CPU and RAM anyway? A decent CPU is under 200$. (You don't need a 3.6 GHz P4EE on everyone's desk.) So you're gonna save... what? Maybe 100$ for the whole machine?

With costs in the range of several tens of thousands per person per year, that kind of saving is a spit in the bucket. It's just not worth the loss of productivity and the learning curve.

Even assuming that all programs ran exactly as fast over a network (and they don't), and the server had enough computing power to not get stuffed when 100 people do some CPU-intensive batch processing at the same time (e.g., before the big meeting on Friday), etc, it's still a losing proposition. You only need 1-2 server crashes, or hard drive getting full, or whatnot, to turn that "profit" into a loss.

2. Precisely because salaries are high and operating costs are high, the way to go is to increase productivity, not to handicap everyone with piss-poor cheap tools. It's not even something IT speciffic.

E.g. if you have a construction company, the way to go is to buy a bulldozer and a crane, not to give everyone shovels and buckets. Yes, shovels and buckets are cheap, redundant (you can have everyone have one), reliable (no moving parts for a start), bug free (the design was tested for millenia), etc. It's still a bloody stupid business plan.

3. Is it even a win anyway? Let's say you ran 100 terminals off a mainframe. You saved maybe, what, 10,000$ by buying thin clients instead of computers?

Now let's say you connect them all to a small-ish 8 CPU Sun server, say, the Sun Fire V890. Let's take the 8-way 32 GB RAM option: $123,995.00

Net _loss_ there: over $100,000. You also want to make it _redundant_? Shall we take two of those? Net loss: almost $250,000.

And that's already a piss-poor solution, since 100 users actually running CPU and graphics intensive software on that, will make the machine crawl. I.e., you invested $250,000 into... lowering productivity. How bloody stupid is that?

I.e., please... I can see how snake oil vendors like Sun would love to convince you to pay them $250,000 for a piss-poor big-iron solution, instead of paying $100,000 to Dell for some good PCs. But is it actually in your company's interest to pay more for less? Definitely not.

Re:Economy 101

[xMilkmanDanx]

We're running one here, we didn't need a 100K server to run it well. Just a run of the mill tower server, not even 2K. As far as clients, we turned the existing 95 licenses we had and stacks of 200MHz doorstoppers into decent thin clients. If one of these ancient machines dies, it's 45 minutes of work, period, to get the user back up and running with no loss of data. That includes the time to load up another computer for the spares we keep on hand.

For your typical office worker, not doing CAD or Photoshop etc, you don't need a lot of processing power. We run 40 people on a cheap server and still have plenty of power left over. 10% of CPU being used with only occasional spikes to 40%.

Supporting the end users is incredibly easy now. Remote control their desktop and see exactly what they're doing wrong. Plus, they can't install anything to mess up their systems. AND, if we need to upgrade or add software, it's one install instead of 40 at various workstations in another building.

Re:Economy 101

[Master Bait]

100 users are served in luxury by a 4-way Opteron with about 16 to 24 gigs of memory. Add another for Tandem-style rollover cluster and that's all you need.

What costs more than hardware in a one-person, one-desktop setup is support for all those spindles of rotating memory, each containing its own operating system, each with anti-virus software and each containing its own userland software installs. Each properly licensed and upgraded and service-packed regularly.

All that time spent to perform some of the lamest tasks an IT department could possibly face. So, beside the cost of hardware, it is the lower cost of IT support and the elimination of so many dumb-ass tasks on IT's plate which makes terminals so much better

Re:Economy 101

[slashdot_commentator]

First, let me point out that I am not an evangelist for thin client setup. I DO recognise they have a potential advantages for TCO, but the devil is in the mission requirements and the configuration.

Second, I am not completely sold on thin clients, but only because people insist on using microsoft products. If the microsoft based implementation is flawed, or has vulnerabilities that cannot be adequately addressed, then thin clients are not a viable technological base for your business. Having said that, I do not have any experience with large scale Microsoft/Citrix based configurations. Perhaps, as one poster alluded, those problems are in the past.

Now having said all of that...

1. A decent computer costs nowadays, what? A few hundred dollars? How much can you save on CPU and RAM anyway? A decent CPU is under 200$. (You don't need a 3.6 GHz P4EE on everyone's desk.) So you're gonna save... what? Maybe 100$ for the whole machine?.

The biggest cost now to any PC is the Microsoft operating system. This is a non-issue if you insist on OS vendor support (RHE, SuSE, IBM, Sun, whatever.)

The whole point with a thin client is that it reduces the cost to its bare necessities. TC does not require a harddrive or an operating system (license cost), that requires maintenance (employee cost).

So you're gonna save... what? Maybe 100$ for the whole machine?

$100 x 20,000 PCs. If you're a small office, $100 x 20 PCs. Either way, its savings. $100 x 80 PCs? $8K, plus $35-50K/yr for a salary.

With costs in the range of several tens of thousands per person per year, that kind of saving is a spit in the bucket. It's just not worth the loss of productivity and the learning curve.

And what is the productivity cost every time services are denied due to a virus? Or a harddrive dying? Why is there a high learning curve cost to maintenance staff? Because you hired people who have difficulty learning or need to pay for MSCE costs for them to be competent at their jobs? If you're talking about users, how difficult is it for them to click an icon?

Even assuming that all programs ran exactly as fast over a network (and they don't), and the server had enough computing power to not get stuffed when 100 people do some CPU-intensive batch processing at the same time (e.g., before the big meeting on Friday), etc, it's still a losing proposition. You only need 1-2 server crashes, or hard drive getting full, or whatnot, to turn that "profit" into a loss.

If you incorrectly implement TC/server workgroup, you will have those problems. If you have enough servers to support your users, will not have those problems. The server is not providing CPU services for each thin client. Again, its all about implementation.

You only need 1-2 server crashes, or hard drive getting full, or whatnot, to turn that "profit" into a loss.

Those costs exist in a standalone PC environment. If a harddrive gets full, that is because IT has an inadequate amount of disk storage, configured it to allow the situation to occur, and is not capable of monitoring problems on their servers. Don't blame incompetent staff for TC's shortcomings.

2. Precisely because salaries are high and operating costs are high, the way to go is to increase productivity, not to handicap everyone with piss-poor cheap tools. It's not even something IT speciffic.

The savings in TC is not the hardware, its in lower staff requirements. Less PC jockeys needed to maintain standalone PC's and their software. TC does not handicap productivity. A word processor is a word processor. How can I possibly be saving money when Microsoft is charging $300 USD per PC for Office?

E.g. if you have a construction company, the way to go is to

The real challenge in the long run...

[suitepotato]

...will be getting CPCI and ATAC systems to come down in price to a truly reasonable level and for drone boards to become commonplace. I don't need every single board computer to come with graphics chipsets beyond basic VGA, with better than old Soundblaster quality audio, etc., etc., etc..

Currently, building a blade server cluster is still an exercise in spending a lot of cash that may not be on hand. The alternative is leashing together multiple white boxes and there's no need for ten or more separate 350+ watt power supplies adding to energy cost and heat output. Wiring with -48VDC telecom style power systems is much easier.

Sure there's plenty of open source and closed source code availble. The hardware end is still lacking if you want to do it for a reasonable cost and without getting stuck with all sorts of things you don't need. Heck, I'd kludge a solution with full size motherboards if I could get recent model processors and memory capacities but lose all the unneeded bundled onboard things I don't need or want. Why should a drone net boot board come with USB2, Firewire, SATA, etc?

I'll file this under "holding pattern".

Windows Live CD - Re:Small buisness

[licamell]

The only thing I would actually want Microsoft to do is freakin make an XP product that can run from a USB key or a bootable CD. That would be a valid competitor to the various thin-client projects.


There is such a thing as a LiveCD for windows, you might want to check out Bart's Preinstalled Environment (BartPE) bootable live windows CD/DVD for more information. It's actually pretty usefull sometimes. Check it out.

We already do this...

[kaustik]

Nothing special here. Most of my office is run on WYSE Winterm devices that run WinXP Embedded completely off of flash memory. The memory has a locking feature so that if the users somehow manage to screw the device up, you simply reboot and all is well.
When we are out of Winterms and need a temporary solution, I simply load XP on an old box, turn on autoadminlogon and forcelogon in the registry, set the shell to a batch file with the following tiny little script and Viola! An XP thin client, complete with local printer mapback.
@echo off

mstsc.exe c:\termserver1.rdp

:Repeat
cls
echo Press any key to connect...
pause > null
mstsc.exe c:\termserver1.rdp

goto Repeat

Interesting ploy

[UnknowingFool]

In creating thin-client Windows, I think MS is trying to address a major business concern. Businesses do not want to update their hardware every 3 years to keep up with Windows/Office. Unfortunately, the MS strategy of growth by bloat does not work when
1) Businesses are generally happy with existing hardware and softare.
2) Businesses see no need for the new features.
3) Businesses simply don't have the money for new hardware.

Add to that MS is late with Longhorn. According to the last SA license, customers who buy it will receive discounts on upgrades every three years. Problem is that Longhorn will be well past the 3 year mark. Some customers will not be pleased.

I think this is an area where Linux could make huge strides. Not so much the thin client market but the underpowered, older PC market. Knoppix combined with OpenOffice could slowly take away their market share as businesses realize that they don't need to replace their older PCs.

Feeling the heat from LTSP

[SgtChaireBourne]

Could this be a response to feeling the heat from the Linux Terminal Server Project ? Kiosks, classrooms and call centers do well with thin clients and the hardware specs for LTSP let you get by with really old or inexpensive hardware on the client side.

Add more memory

[blorg]

Disk grinding is a sign that the OS is having to use virtual memory. My PIII laptop runs XP fine with 512mb (256 factory+256 added). If it were a desktop, I'd suggest a gig (memory is very cheap these days), for this machine consider adding 512mb if you can afford it for a total of 768mb.

256 is just not enough (and there is a good chance that some of that is being stolen for integrated graphics.) We have two machines with 256 in here, and they are horrible to use. Exact same machine with a gig and it sails.

http://www.crucial.com do a 256mb module for the Inspiron 1100 for $33.99. This will be more than enough to make the machine usable.

Also, presuming that you keep the OS patched regularly through Windows Update, you don't use IE/Outlook, and your wife doesn't open random attachments, etc., disable the background anti-virus and spyware scanning and just run full scans overnight once a week instead. Background antivirus is a horrendous resource hog.

Re:Answer - we've done it already

[Anonymous Coward]

Man, I fucking hate people.

I think this comment sums up the typical IT mindset quite well.

School Network

[martiansoup]

Our school decided to use thin-clients. They would seem good except they often run so slowly that you have to wait for the computer to catch up when typing. If trying to do anything more intensive than static images they grind to a halt completely. Also, as we often have to take work in from home we are unable to transfer files apart from e-mail. This can be a real pain when you have files over the size limit.

And that's when you can log on...

Bend over, MS is driving ...

[hotspotbloc]

Starting with Windows 2003, Microsoft now licenses Terminal Services separately. You get 0 license credit for having XP, even XP Pro. Previously, under Windows 2000 Terminal Services any 2000 Pro client gets granted a license from a free unlimited pool.

That sucks big time. When I upgraded our offices from Win98 to WinXP Pro* one of the big selling points was that we didn't need to buy TS CALs (at $150USD per seat). It was much cheaper to get XP Pro than XP Home and TS CALs. Most of our machines needed access to TS to access an accounting program at the head office. Also many of the users liked easy of use and speed of remote access to their work machines. TS one of the few things that have come out of Redmond that I've liked.

Needless to say I won't be upgrading to Win 2003 Server anytime soon.

I've been faced with either:

Going to Win 2003 Server and keeping the current accounting software system (which cost $20k upfront and $2k per year in maintance). Most people in the offices would prefer this option since it's the one they're use to.

GNU/Linux everywhere (both thin and thick as needed) and a web based accounting program our accountant has been pushing (for about $4k per year). Since it's a new interface many users have resisted a possible change.

While the latter had a marginal lead this news makes our choice a little easier. We're tired of MS "nickle and diming" us every chance they get. My boss has no problem paying for software, he's just sick of paying and paying and paying. What happens when MS changes the rules again and maybe says that you need to buy a new TS CAL every year? IMO many anti-MS people wouldn't hate them so much if they weren't so greedy.

There's a reason Bill Gates is the richest man in the world ...

* Not by my choice but if the boss says you're a MS shop then you either play the game or leave.

Re:backups

[bobv-pillars-net]

so we can backup everything on our tapes... which you can't really do with 100+ desktops...

Actually, you can, with BackupPC. Okay, the program is actually designed to backup to disk rather than to tape, but you can then run tape-backups of the spool area. You'll wind up storing a lot more data in less space because BackupPC hardlinks identical files.

Re:Windows Lite

[bobv-pillars-net]

... most users do not need or want the feature bloat present in normal versions of Windows.

Sounds like you're looking for XP Lite. I've bought and used a copy; it's good for selectively removing feature-bloat. I trimmed some fat and incrementally increased responsiveness on a laptop XP installation, and later on a VMWare install.

regural?

[bodrell]

And in some installations I built, the "servers" were actually regural 1GHz desktops
Add it handled regural tasks just fine.
If the servers or network break in regural fat-client environments, you will also have problems.
What happens if the server goes down in a regural fat-client environment?

I thought "regural" was some leet hacker term that I wasn't aware of, because you used the word so frequently. It wasn't until a google search for the word turned up results on "regural expressions" that I realized what you meant to say.

Win TS is great because they stole it from Citrix

[segoy]

"Microsoft made a deal with Citrix to license some of their technology, and they put it into NT4 Terminal Server Edition."

You got this one wrong:
During the days of NT3x, Citrix licensed the OS codebase to which they were going to make custom modifications and sell as a separate, non-competing product. This continued into the NT4 days.

When M$ saw how popular this product was, they wanted in on the action. They threatened not to license NT5 to Citrix unless Citrix _gave_ them their code to incorporate into thier own product. In effect, M$ put a gun to their heads: your code, or your business.

Citrix has remained a force in the marketspace simply because they are so much better at this then M$ can hope to be. Even with the leg up with having all their code, M$ has never come close to the Citirx offerings.

I have previously consulted for a very large company with a _VERY_ large Citrix implementation. Think tens of hundreds of servers. The project I was involved with was converting their legacy application data and business rules into an application that would run off of a subset of this farm. It was a lot of fun, and some great work.

On the downside, there were some problems with the thin clients- serial devices didn't always work without some banging on the case, printers were always dodgy on the day we brought them up (though after 20-30 minutes, the administrators had then working), and in locations where the pipe was very thin (dial-up), we did have performance issues.

That having been said, the company doing this was saving millions of dollars a year (after paying the consulting costs and expenses) simply on maintenance and support. Previously when they'd roll out an enhancement or bugfix to an app, it would involve sending a crew of technicians out to a number of remote locations, and having them install the new app. Yeah, in the offices they would use SMS, but a good 40% of this company's machines were remote from main offices, and most didn't have nearly the bandwidth to D/L ~800MB of new application code in a reasonable amount of time.

After we came through, between 3 and 4 in the morning, a technician or two would install the new code on the handful of impacted servers, and voila, everyone's taken care of.

Okay what does LTSP give me.

[baggins2002]

I have not tried LTSP, but I have tried running VNC on a server system to try to get some idea of what it might be like. So far I haven't been impressed enough to think some magic in LTSP would make things better. Could someone explain where the performance enhancement would come from. The client was running RH9 on a 533Mhz 256 MB 32MB video 100MB ethernet( on start up didn't open any apps other than VNC). Server was 1.33 GHz with 768 MB . I also tried it on a 150 MHz Pentium with 64MB of RAM W98 client 10MB ethernet (this sucked big time, but this computer and 2 others like it were the reason I was looking). The first test se seemed to be okay but with the other systems it seemed to be worse than running on the native OS.
Since they are still getting some use out of these computers I have left them alone, but I keep thinking that this would be a great place for LTSP. These computers are primarily being used to run a web app and occassionally run excel (maybe I could run this via wine).
Looking for some help or where to find it and thoughts on this idea?

Re:Okay what does LTSP give me.

[Mincemeat.net]

There is plenty of documentation regarding LTSP. There are several distros that you can use. LTSP can be added on to just about any distro. K12LTSP and SkoleLinux are two that I have used that don't require extensive configuration during installation. For the most part they work out of the box and you do your hacks afterwards. There is plenty of documentation to help you get started, to troubleshoot and extend.

I think that the real advantages of thin clients are not only applied directly to you. They are applied to your technology related costs and those who use your computers.

I do volunteer work in a low income housing project that provides a computer center so that the residents can have access to computer resources (Internet, printers, office applications, graphics, IMs, etc). It is very modest and also underfunded. The thin clients, 10 total, that the residents use are P133s with 32MB or RAM, S3 video, SB16 compatible sound, floppy and CDROM. The server is an Athlon 2600 with 1GB SDRAM, 80GB SATA and gigabit ethernet.

When I came to this organization, the server was a P233MMX running Windows Server 2003 with 160MB SDRAM and a 6GB hard drive as a proxy server and router. The workstations were all running Windows 2000 Pro. Disk thrashing was going to shorten the life of these systems. The OSes were too bloated for the hardware and there was no print server. I ran an audit on the software licensing and did not like what I discovered. Worse yet, the organization did not have the financial resources for modern systems or full licensing.

It took 25 minutes for all the desktop systems to get to a desktop and 3 minutes just to launch any program. There had to be a better way. One month into the job with full support of my boss I was allowed to bring in an Open Source solution. Now spend the majority of my time developing, teaching and administering instead of fighting with bloated OSes and malware.

LTSP gives me more time to help people learn to use software applications and networked resources at a lower cost. With a minimum of training, my clients can get thier computer related tasks done just as quickly as working with Windows.

K12LTSP, which is currently based on Fedora Core 3, runs quite well. Instead of using KDE as the graphical environment, I use IceWM due to the lower resource usage. While KDE was adequate, I get better overall performance using IceWM and I have a little more control, through obfusication and permissions, over what software the residents have access too. If an application isn't available in the main menu, it can be added in about a minute or started from an xterm. IceWM has already been skinned to look similar to Windows 95/98/XP and MacOS, so when someone new comes in, they're aren't totally lost. UI customization is allowed for those that know how or are willing to learn. Local floppy and CDROM is provided through Samba and now there is actually very little I have to do other than show people how to use the software and, of course, administer the LTSP server, the print server and the router.

Not everyone is a business user. I'm sure that the majority of us can agree that Average User requires, at minimum, an Internet connection, web browser, email client, instant messenger, word processor and a printer. OpenOffice replaces Office, Firefox (with Flash and Java) for IE, Kopete for AOL, ICQ, MSN, and Yahoo messengers, Scribus instead of Publisher, Kontact for a PIM, Thunderbird for Outlook Express, The GIMP instead of Photoshop, Adobe 7 (standalone and browser plugin), plus the entire games collection and KDE Edutainment collection (great for kids) and other utilities and miscellaneous applications. Most folks that use the computers are content with a web browser and office suite. Occasionally, I have to show people how to use the floppy and CDROM; a task that takes less than 2 minutes and these people are not just casual users, they're doing more than surf the net and checking email.

The performance enhancement comes from being able t

Re:Okay what does LTSP give me.

[baggins2002]

Thanks for the information. Wish I had some mod points.

Self-Centeredness?

[Moraelin]

Basically most pro-thin-client posts I see in this whole thread are self-centred admins thinking that the whole company, nay verily the whole world, revolves against them. The whole purpose of hardware, software, and infrastructure is to make _their_ life easier, even if it means dragging everyone's productivity in the basement.

100 users served by a quad-opteron, and displayed over a network? With a whole 160 meg RAM per user? Ooer. Now that must make it painful to even recalculate a spreadsheet or scroll through a complex Word document. And I've actually had to support Java programs over VNC or terminal server. Man, now that was a pain.

Have you even _tried_ using a complex spreadsheet over a thin client in that setup? I'm guessing you didn't. Hint: we're not talking about using a file server for 100 users. We're talking actually running 200..300 Windows programs on that server at the same time.

We're also talking at the very least _millions_ of GDI/X/whatever operations pushed through the network per second, just to display all those programs. Yay, way to stuff the infrastructure.

So luxury for whom? For _you_ maybe? Yay, your life was simplified, at the expense of making everyone else's job hard. That must be such a big win for the company. Not.

Here's an idea: your job, lame as it may be, is a support job, not an end by itself. IT in a corporation is one thing that doesn't generate _any_ money by itself. Its _only_ job is to support those who actually bring the R in ROI.

So making the admin's job easy at the expense of crippling everyone else has got to be the dumbest business proposition ever.

If that job is too lame for you, hey, find something else to do. God knows I'll be one who doesn't miss all the useless admins who don't want to do their job.

Re:Self-Centeredness?

[Master Bait]

100 users served by a quad-opteron, and displayed over a network? With a whole 160 meg RAM per user? Ooer. Now that must make it painful to even recalculate a spreadsheet or scroll through a complex Word document.

Is there no shared memory architecture under Windows? Really?

Here's an idea: your job, lame as it may be, is a support job, not an end by itself. IT in a corporation is one thing that doesn't generate _any_ money by itself. Its _only_ job is to support those who actually bring the R in ROI.

My job is to budget IT, and it is very expensive to pay well-trained people to have to run around fixing people's 'my computer keeps crashing!' issues and rolling software updates. That has been eliminated and IT is happy and the users are happy because their desktops don't crash.

Your idea of networked terminals seems to be keyed to the misnomer that a bitmap of the display is shot over the network from app server to screen. This is incorrect. The app shoots graphics primitives, not bitmaps over the network. We rarely pull more than 30,000 packets per second over the network of 63 users.

Re:Small buisness (CUPS)

[seanyboy]

Serious Question. Would CUPS work in an RDP environment? We have Terminal server machines available on the internet. Usually, users access them via a variety of Home and Office Environments. We expect our users to be hidden behind NAT, on dial-up connections and/or with a variety of printers. It's also important that users can only see the printers loaded on their own machines. We currently use EOL which works over the RDP stream, but if there is a better solution I'd love to give it a try.

Re:This won't work

[valenti]

Could you describe in more detail the components?

Ok, the client is an old PC running Xfree. Sounds reasonable.

And Win2003 with terminal services enabled. So you need client CALs for TS, right?

And Office is installed on the server. Do you need some sort of additional license to run that on clients. Seems like you must, but I've never checked (thinking there is no way MS would allow it)

And finally, I don't understand the functionality you get by having a webserver and telnet server on the client?

Oh, what country are you in?

Re:Answer - we've done it already

[TeraCo]

They shouldn't be allowed to have their own settings because it is not their fucking computer. It is our computer, we let them use it to do the JOB we pay them to do.

That's no reason to force them to adjust their printer settings every time they need to print.

Re:Small buisness (CUPS)

[Buelldozer]

Citrix Metaframe does this too. :-)

WebTV?

[quarkscat]

Lets see... unified interface (IE), thin client,
network enabled, server-based apps and storage.
Yessiree, Bob. It's WebTV.

This is bound to tie in very nicely with (1) broadband internet, (2) DRM like Palladium, (3) profit center for metered applications, (4) profit center for remote storage, (5) automated updates. The TCO calculations suddenly become quite easy to make, and the business/user just deals with a monthly bill, just like with their cellphone(s).

What's not to like about this?

Re:This won't work

[El Gordo Motoneta]

> Could you describe in more detail the components?

We use a slightly modified version of what PXEs offers. See http://pxes.sf.net

We added some patches to rdesktop to fix some bugs (the patches themselves
taken from the rdesktop devel list), we added a better web server (coded by
me), modified the init scripts so the thin clients use host names according to
the company standard, and a lot of tiny things to help make it even more
transparent to the user.

> And Win2003 with terminal services enabled. So you need client CALs for TS, right?

Right.

> And Office is installed on the server. Do you need some sort of additional license to run that on clients. Seems like you must, but I've never checked (thinking there is no way MS would allow it)

Yes. there's no difference between running office remotely or locally. You need a full license for every thin client.

> And finally, I don't understand the functionality you get by having a webserver and telnet server on the client?

They are only there for troubleshooting. If John calls and tells you his
computer is crashing, you ask for John's cubicle number, telnet to
TC[cubicle_number], and you can see which processes are running,
check the logs for obvious problems, and so on.