Leo Laporte On UNIX As the Future

TractorJector writes "In a well-written interview with Mad Penguin, techmeister Leo Laporte (formerly of G4/TechTV fame) discusses his vision of the future of proprietary and open platforms: 'I think there's a lot of hope for Linux, although I don't think that Linux is the answer. I think that UNIX is the answer, in some form or fashion. It might be BSD, it might be Linux, it might be some third thing. But UNIX is such a well understood and smart to handle the issues that an operating system has to handle that it ultimately will prevail.'"

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[Anonymous Coward]

PC as a thin client browser?

I don't know about you, but that doesn't satisfy me and I think there will always be room for people who want a traditional desktop.

As a gamer and just fan of controlling the computer in front of me completely without all this abstractness, I don't think that everyone is going to bite on this kind of stuff.

I'm sure it has its place, but for everyone?

Re:Unix is not the Future

[AKAImBatman]

Perhaps the Network Stations were ahead of their time (i.e. like OS/2)?

That was certainly part of the problem. But as an admin who ran Citrix, I can tell you that the other half of the problem was Microsoft. After Citrix gained some initial momentum from their NT 3.51 product, Microsoft took notice and refused to license 4.0. Instead, Microsoft worked out a technology transfer deal where they would produce NT Terminal Server. Citrix was "allowed" to install their superior ICA protocol on top.

The result was that you had the initial price of Terminal Server, plus the price of each "Seat" (which was in number of users, not concurrent connections like Citrix), then the price of a full copy of Windows NT for each thin client that would access the system. If you wanted Citrix ICA, you then had to pay Citrix even more.

The result was that Thin Clients ended up costing *more* than a set of PCs, effectively killing the market.

Fast Forward to today, and we find that Windows now has the RDP client integrated and that Sun has been having reasonable success with their SunRay product. People are starting to become conditioned to the idea of thin clients. Wait a few more years for the WebApp revolution to shift all power away from windows and the time will be perfect to wretch the market away. ;-)