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New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback
One of the seemingly eternal questions in managing personal computers within organizations is whether to centralize computing power (making it easy to upgrade or secure The One True Computer, and its data), or push the power out toward the edges, where an individual user isn't crippled because a server at the other side of the network is down, or if the network itself is unreliable. Despite the ever-increasing power of personal computers, the New York Times reports that the concept of making individual users' screens portals (smart ones) to bigger iron elsewhere on the network is making a comeback.
Now, the terminals that work has had since 2003 are back in vogue. Awesome.
Why do I M2 everything negatively?
its all in the upkeep, It is cheaper and easier to maintain a bunch of servers, and have a bunch of lightweight computers hooked into it than to maintain a individual machine per EVERY person. While there will always be things that having a individual machine is better suited for, for those people where all they need is internet, database access, and word processing, it makes little sense to not just maintain that stuff on a secure server and farm it out to everyone else. I have been pushing this for years in our school district, its only been now where the people who get to make the decisions are finally listening.
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
...or, well, it would have been first if I wasn't on a thin client waiting 15 ^%*^&# seconds for a keystroke echo.
Yay! People rediscover the advantages of thin clients! How long until they rediscover the downsides...
You just got troll'd!
Is now just a bunch of generic PCs in smaller form factors. So in essence you're sticking a network layer between the rest of the computer and it's video card. So instead of network outages (which are inevitable) crippling just network operations, they now cripple everything including your ability to keep typing your office documents or looking at the email you've already got.
It's annoying as hell, but if my network craps itself I still have a working computer in front of me and I can still do a subset of what I was doing before. Not so with thin clients.
<tinfoil mode>
Of course they want to take the actual computer away from you, they want to have control over you. If they could, your "computer" would be a mindless terminal to a Big Brother Approved mainframe that spied on everything you did.
</tinfoil mode>
Dumb clients, fat clients, thin servers, retarded paywalls.
Classical Liberalism: All your base are belong to you.
When you have customers with thick clients, sell em thin ones cause they are "better-er".
When you have flogged off all of your customers with a thin client, the new thing is a "better-er-er" thick client.
Whole thing sounds like very simple 101 style marketing. Why try to sell someone something they have? Convince them what you have is better. Total no-brainer imo.
Moved to http://soylentnews.org/. You are invited to join us too!
We're gonna need them, what with the economy cratering!
How about a netbook-style device which could offer limited functionality on it's own for email, web, basic office apps (say a boot image updated from the central server when connected), and used as a thin client at the office plugged into a docking station with proper display(s) and keyboard+mouse? Best of both worlds?
.: Max Romantschuk
We have recently adopted a phased approach of deploying new thin clients as our estate of traditional desktops hit retirement. After having seen several false dawns and uncomfortably proprietary solutions in the last 15 years, it was only now that we have been happy enough with the whole solution (thin client HW, network connectivity, back-end virtualization SW) to take the plunge.
There are now a range of HW clients (we use ChipPC).
There are a couple of viable virtualization systems (we use Citrix Xen, without the presentation server "tax").
We've chosen a dedicated virtualization hardware appliance on the back-end from 360is.
Finally I can sell all the Wyse 120 terminals I have in the garage! If you want me I'll be high-rolling at the casino for a couple of weeks...
Task Mangler
My clients are all obese, and show no intentions of slimming down; what am I doing wrong?
No, but I did throw granola at a deaf person once
Oh yes its back the battle that everyone has been waiting for its the Rumble on the Desktop, the fight of the century, the challenger is the undisputed next year champion, fighting out of California by way of Finland it is the Penguin himself, Tux "next year" Linux.
And now the champion, dominating in the 70s, losing form in the 80s, disappeared as a recluse in the 90s and the start of the century but now he is back to claim his crown. With the black trunks and green trim its Thin "Latency is a Bitch" Client.
Lets have a good clean fight to finally decide who will be declared the Desktop champion of 2009.
This fight is sanctioned by the ODC (Optimistic Desktop Council) and will be fought under rules of low data, huge assumptions and a complete lack of understanding on the total size of the market.
An Eye for an Eye will make the whole world blind - Gandhi
There are plenty of downsides too. While it might be easier to maintain, it is also easier to fuck up. Someone does something that breaks a piece of software, now the whole department/company/whatever doesn't have it rather than just that person. A network outage is now a complete work stopping event rather than an inconvenience. Special software installs for special tasks are hard since that software has to be tested to make sure it doesn't hose the server.
I could keep going, if I wished. Now that isn't to say that means the thin client model is bad. In fact we are hoping to do it for our instructional labs at some point. What I'd really like (and there are VM solutions to do) is that not only would we have thin clients, but a student could use a laptop as a thin client too and load our image from their home or whatever.
However, the idea that they are just cheaper/better is a false one. They can be cheaper in some cases, in others you can easily spend more. Likewise they can simplify some thing and make others more complex.
There isn't a "right" answer between large central infrastructure and small distributed infrastructure. It really depends on the situation.
All I will say is if you are looking at doing this at your work as you suggest be very, very careful. Make sure you've really done your homework on it, and make sure you've done extensive testing. I don't think it's a bad idea, but be sure you know what you are getting in to. Just remember that while people get whiny when, say, an e-mail server goes down, if the terminal server goes down and NOTHING works, well then people go from whiny to furious in a second.
It's the same kind of deal with virtualization. It is wonderful being able to stack a bunch of logical servers on to one physical server. However if that one physical server dies you can be way more fucked. You have to spend a good deal more time and money in making sure there is proper redundancy and backups and such. So while packing 10 servers on 1 using VMWare Server (free) might be nice and cheap, you also might be creating a ticking time bomb. You then might discover that putting those 10 servers on a small cluster with a fibre channel disk array and VMWare Virtual Infrastructure (not free) solves the reliability problem nicely, but isn't quite as cheap as you thought.
Just something to be careful with. At work we have both sorts of things. We've got individual desktops, and we've got thin clients (though we actually got rid of most of those). We've got individual servers, we've got virtual servers, and so on. All methods have advantages and disadvantages. I am not a zealot either way, just warning that a change from a decentralized to a heavily centralized infrastructure isn't something to be done lightly. You solve various problems, but introduce a host of new ones.
In particular hardware reliability is something you want to keep in mind. You for sure want an "N+1" situation with your terminal servers, perhaps even more than that. You can't count on the hardware being reliable. Hopefully it is, but I've seen even the real expensive, redundant shit (like a Sun v880) fail with no warning. When it's the be all, end all and all work stops when it is down, that just can't happen.
Thin is in.
too many dumb users (ok I am being too harsh here, too many uneducated users) these days. Thin clients = less freedom, which in case of most users means they'll make fewer mess ups.
This means less boring maintenance work for IT people, in large companies especially.
Unless you've got a lot of bandwidth to spare, Flash will kill performance.
there was a short period bridging the vt100 terminals to the sunrays from 1997 to 2000, where the University library installed personal computers for accessing their network.
No, seriously. This is non-news.
The transition to personal Computers stopped long ago. I can not remember to have seen an institution in the last five years switching to a PC-based infrastructure, but i see since approx. 2001 a rise of thin clients in larde organizations. The organizations for which this pays off will get smaller and smaller with time and in a few years we will have gotten rid of the infrastructural maintainance and support Hell the PC still presents.
I gave up my workstation 3 years ago and have been running on a remote X-server (Redhat) over NX. All of my design software runs off the computational servers anyways, and the NX server is just for running virtual desktops for 10 people at a time. My tasks are not graphic-intensive, and even if I had a local workstation I would want my jobs running on the fastest available machine.
My PC runs office and a NX client, and feels like a thin-client.
I believe most engineers run like this these days. It makes working from home easier too.
New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback
But in Texas they're as fat as ever.
You should (would) have seen the posts from the "I'm using Vista you insensitive clod" bunch.
;).
They're still waiting for the cancel/allow box to show up
1. Actually, regardless of whether they are making a comeback or not, or what their advantages and disadvantages may be, this is probably just a PR story. Just like the "The Suit Is Back!" that got traced back to a PR agency a couple of years ago.
PR loves to masquerade as news because it bypasses your BS filter. An ad for Men's Warehouse suits gets looked over, a piece of news that you won't get hired unless you wear a suit, tries to replace your premises with theirs and let you take a leap to the "I must buy a suit" conclusion. Or better yet, to the even better conclusion, "I must only hire people in suits 'cause everyone else is doing it." There are a lot of sheeple out there who only need a "The Herd Is That Way -->" sign to willingly enter someone's pen and be sheared like "everyone else".
For anyone who's not sheeple, this is a non-story. Whether _you_ need a server instead of PCs or not, depends on what _your_ needs are and what _your_ employees are doing. Use your own head.
The only ones who need an "everyone else is doing X" story are those who have to follow a herd to feel secure.
Hence, the love PR has for this kind of story.
2. Over-simplifications like "all they need is internet, database access, and word processing" were false when arguing why grandma should only need an old 486, and tend to be just as false for a company. So you'll have to do some analysis if for a particular company that is indeed true, or just glossing over what's really going on. (Or even wishful thinking by some IT guy who feels his job would sound more important if he was overseeing a server.)
E.g., a lot of companies have salesmen who go with a laptop to various customers to give a presentation and try to win a contract. Are you ready for the case when that guy you're trying to sell insurance doesn't have internet to connect to your server via VPN? Are you sure that those server side apps' files can be converted flawlessly to MS Office or whatever those sales guys have on their laptop?
It's just one example where goimng, "bah, they only use database apps and word processing" is glossing over a more complex problem.
3. The argument for saving costs is a good one, and far from me to advise wasting money. But you have to be sure that you're actually _saving_ money across the organisation, not just saving $1000 in the narrow slice you see, at the cost of causing $1,000,000 to be lost in workarounds and lost productivity somewhere else. Entirely too much "cost cutting" lately is the latter kind of bullshit theatre.
E.g., if someone costs you $100,000 per year -- and I don't mean just wage, but also electricity costs, building rent, etc -- saving $1000 is nullified if it drops their productivity by as little as 1%. Saving a few hours per year of an IT guy's work can be a very bad trade off, if it costs that guy as little as 5 minutes total per 8h work day to put up with the quirks and delays of the centralized system. (480 minutes a day, times 1% is 4.8 minutes.) It can add up very easily to that. It only takes wasting 1 second per form through some web-app instead of letting that guy massage the data locally in Excel or Access(*), to add up to more than that in a day. A close enough approximation can very easily be approximative enough to actually turn the whole thing into a loss.
(*) ... or whatever F/OSS equivalents you prefer. This is not MS advocacy, so fill in the blanks with whatever you prefer.
And as you move higher up the totem pole, things get even funkier. If a salesman is doing contracts worth millions of dollars with those presentation, I hope you better save a _lot_ with that centralized solution, because it only takes one lost contract (e.g., because he couldn't connect) to put a big minus in the equation. E.g., if you're going to pay a CEO tens of millions per year, and actually believe that his work is worth every cent (heh, I know, but let's keep pretending,) then... again, you better be damned sure that you don't drop _his_
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
And later in the year, when the corporation I worked for lost 10 million because one of their customers went bankrupt, I, by chance, got to sit in on a bigwigs meeting.
After announcing the loss and accompanying layoffs, he actually followed it by saying "And I don't think suggesting thin clients will help us out of this one."
Man, it was so hard to keep from laughing...next time I hear that, and it sounds like I will hear that again, I think I'll just risk my job and have a big belly laugh.
Could have told you that was coming (Score:4, Insightful)
by falcon5768 (629591)
Your sig:
"Slashdot, where telling the truth is overrated but lying is insightful."
Yay! People rediscover the advantages of thin clients! How long until they rediscover the downsides...
I first got the computer bug seriously when I was in college, and took some courses requiring the use of dumb terminals in our computer center... they were running off a DEC minicomputer running Unix, and I was hooked. I learned to do a lot using those old green and orange screen terminals, and to this day, I wonder if most businesses wouldn't be incredibly more productive if they went back to simple no-GUI dumb terminals... with text email and Lynx browsers.
Think about it. How many employees now blow off hours at a time during the workday by playing solitaire, going to MySpace, releasing the latest trojan into their LAN via email attachments...
Even with a GUI terminal, if it was stripped down and wasn't Windows based (and had drastically limited Internet access), I think a lot more would get done around offices.
Life is hard, and the world is cruel
From physics, it's obvious that centralized computing is more energy efficient than distributed one. The longer distance you have to move energy (that encodes the information) to compute the results, the more energy you need. Also, centralization allows for better resource sharing.
The only issue is who pays for the costs. Mass production of computers allowed to decrease their costs to the point that distributed systems were cheaper than centralized ones. However, as the demand for computer power grows, energy spent on computing itself enters the equation, and the times will change again.
Easy, same way I handle it at our office with our terminal server: "You can't do that."
Employees have no business copying CDs worth of data to (or worse, from) the office. In the eight years since the implementation of our terminal server environment, I have had exactly zero cases where there was a legitimate need to copy large amounts of data from the terminal server.
Your computer at work is for working, not playing games when you think nobody is watching. Almost all of the complaints I get from employees wanting a "real PC" instead of a thin client revolve around their desire to screw around on the clock without being detected.
In 100% of the cases where the employee was granted a PC instead of a terminal, later investigation revealed unauthorized usage within one month, ranging from forging call sheets to play flash games to a salesman using over 75% of the company's total internet transfer in one month at myspace.
'And to start using your new terminal, you will now have to wear flares'.
Some concepts should be revisited - terminals (unlike flares) are indeed one of them.
Catapultam habeo. Nisi pecuniam omnem mihi dabis, ad caput tuum saxum immane mittam.
My company uses a mix of fat and thin clients. IT gives a few choices between desktops, which costs the department money, and then there are 'free' (to department) thin clients. In actuality, the thin clients cost more when actually purchasing. Don't ask me why Wyse charges $800 for a mini-itx system with 1gb/ram and 1gb of flash, running a VIA C7 1.2ghz processor when the device runs just a Citrix client anyways. I personally prices a comparable mini-itx system, with a tiny case, for ~60% of what Wyse charges (with more memory, CPU, and storage). The boxes are still technically fat clients, but they've just been crippled down so only the smart enough people can run applications natively on the device. The boxes are also set to write protect so that no changes can be committed by anyone except local admins (or remotely maintenance of course).
Most applications can work okay through this method, however there are some that still can't work over thin clients. Even running big Excel or Word documents poses a lot of lag. Also, the video cards are old (S3 Virge anyone?) that when trying to output to dual displays, it looks like total crap on one. Some issues arise when deploying specific applications for a handful of individuals as well, by request.
All in all, they are great overall if you can get away with them. There is a tremendous power saving since the box doesn't use much memory running the Citrix client, the processor doesn't get taxed since it's mostly idle, and the whole power consumption isn't much more than a single 10-15 watt hard drive. I'd say the display is the most power hungry item in this case, but set to standby when not in use.
Considering the current state of the economy, ALL clients are bound to be thin.
It's been about 10 years since the last time they were hyped. Besides, all the yammering about "computing in the cloud" has the thin-client folks excited.
Thin clients don't have to mean less power available at the desktop, infact when coupled with VMware or other virtualisation technology thin clients can be as powerful as any on-the-desk solution.
The problems I hear mentioned here about network outages causing company wide problems in terms of disruption are just silly, any decent enterprise these days has a resilient network, I can't remember the last time we had a system wide network outage, they just don't exist anymore, any outage is limited to possibly a single department or other localised area of the network.
I'm currently in the middle of rolling out Sun Ray ultra thin clients for an enterprise I'm employed with, over 800 desktops at one site alone and for ease of management UTC can't be matched. When combined with NetApp it's a simple case of restoring a machine from a snap clone if a user screws up his desktop, takes minutes and the support techies don't even need to leave their desks.
Then there is the green thing, why pay for CPUs, memory and hard disks at each and every users desk, the majority of which are less than half utilised? Thin client solutions are almost always more efficient in terms of energy use and with the rising price of energy these days an enterprise can save a fortune in its annual energy consumption.
So the thin client is about cost and ease of management, not just about restricting end users abilities, hell we even have a software development team using UTC and if they felt restricted I can assure you they'd moan!
One thing that always annoys be about some of the non technical people at work(I work for a product testing lab) is that they have this strange urge to save stuff to there desktops and My Documents folders on there local machines. Because were a smaller org we have a hodge podge of computers that are not all setup in a uniform fashion so its difficult to make sure everyone is on the Domain and doing it The Right Way . So I see some combination of thin clients and virtualization as the solution to this. I still hate how Windows apps save 75% of user specific data in 25 random places that may or may not link to there User folder, making roaming a pain. I can not think of one major Linux app that doesn't save user setting to the home directory of the user.
I'm a principal in a firm of about 150. We've just gone thin client. Our consultants told us that it was the way to go. I had reservations but I have no qualifications (just a general interest in IT stuff) so who was I to argue?
It has been, to date, an unmitigated disaster. The system is slow beyond belief, and a couple of months down the track despite promises and changes and upgrades it hasn't got any faster. Despite a huge spend, we are now no faster than on our old totally outdated networked PC system. It is taking forever to get all the software we used to use up and running on the new system.
We had outage after outage in the first couple of months, not just crashing the odd PC but the whole firm. The downtime doesn't bear thinking about. Hopefully things are settling down now.
On the old system I might (as a keen amateur) have been able to fix something myself. Now, we are totally reliant upon our central IT people to fix any little thing that goes wrong.
Personally, the customisations and additional software and so on that I used to run are no longer available. I can be more productive on my home PC, connected to the firm's servers remotely, than I can be at work. At home, at least I can flick between a remote connection window and my own PC's OS with all the software and productivity tools I want, set up how I want them. I know IT people don't like personalisations because they introduce unknown variables and so on. However, from a power user's point of view I am now straitjacketed in an unproductive way.
Worked for a place that effectively tried to thin-client us (although they didn't call it that). It was horrible. It was one of the main reasons I left. Most of the guys who did the work and had earned the place stellar reputation (and earned well into six figures) did as well. Most of the team left in a 3 month period, and their reputation (and revenue) cratered. Even if they had been able to replace the team (they tried, failed) I doubt the system cost saving would have covered half the recruitment cost. Still, I guess they saved a couple of hundred per seat on hardware and support costs! Guess what guys - I studied hard for my quals, my market value is starting to get pretty good with experience, and I know how to do my job. I do it the way that works best for me, and I set up my tools to work for me. If some pimply IT support guy thinks they know better than me what is needed to do my job, they are welcome to try and do it. If they can't, they should just piss off. Their job is to give me what I need to do my job and bring in revenue, it ain't my job to work around them. I want a nice powerful machine, that is fully customisable by me for my needs. If I want non-standard software, or a bit of non-standard hardware, the correct response is (1) purchase; and (2) install - it isn't to try and standardise me on what works for someone else.
The pendulum keeps swinging between centralised systems ( "mainframe" with "dumb" terminals) and client server ( with smart or fat clients ). For standard applications like email and office productivity products from Google and Zoho offer good support ... in the centralised mode ... through what is now known as cloud computing.
However for specialist applications, one might still have to go for desktop based applications.
Insight into much, Influence over nothing !
Isn't it necessary to have been successfull in the past to make a "comeback"?
one user can execute a forkbomb and whipe everybody out, also the thin clients i have used are way underspowered and completely die when a group of people get on them, the huge memory needs of these computers make it unfeasable--why is computing allways done with small commoidy system?
They're not mutually exclusive..anyone who uses the web _is_ using their desktop as a thin client. Anyone who's using is using distributed computing.
My cloudy crystal ball says that what we'll see is a mix. Where appropriate and cost effective, apps will be on the desktop. Where appropriate and cost effective, on servers... and the 'thin client' software of choice will be
Whether you put a fat client on a PC or give em a thin client is irrelevant, it's still just a terminal when all is said and done, 19 times of of 20 connecting to a UNIX backend. (Yes that right, UNIX not linux)
And you will not convince me that you have some critical stuff going on that requires any sort of PC. If you do, pack it up you'll be fired soon.
Let windows do what its good at, on a thin client.
i work for a company that deploys MS terminal servers for large scale networks. i completely understand the benefits of a terminal server and the 2 major things a part of our sales pitch is centralized data and the low cost as compared to an actual PC ownership. but then i think about the fact that a good thin client still costs around $400+ and then the fact that MS charges terminal server licensing fees per client! and what's even more funny is that you need volume licensing for Office 2007 when installed on a terminal server. you used to be able to use Office 2003 for free and use only oine license. so ultimately, the fact that it saves you money is over. the only benefit left is that the user hardly has a chance of getting infected with a virus. but honestly, the Linux Terminal Server Project seems like a much better solution.
*plays the Apogee theme song music*
Not even a comprehensive list:
3Com 3Station: Failed too expensive when PC's got cheap after the 386 arrived.
X Terminal: Failed too expensive when PC's got cheap...
Java Station: Failed too expensive and too slow.
Sun Ray: Same S*** Different Day.
Every time somebody proposes this stuff, you can guarantee you're only 3 weeks away from a major price drop in desktops.
... the truth is time and latency sensitive apps will always need "thick" clients, latency insensitive apps can use "thin" clients. These back and forth illusionary arguments ignore the fundamental need for redundancy of computational power in the hands of individuals who depend on them.
The truth is both are needed, they compliment one another and the needs of those who use them. Consider 3D rendering software like 3D studio max, you can do network renders and local renders, both are necessary depending on then needs of the person at the time they are using the application.
I mean, we've got a whole bunch of 'utility' apps, deployed off a thin client. Little things like document formatters, and password change utilities, and that kind of thing.
This saves us a lot of maintenance in terms of having the software in question installed, updated, backed up.
But mostly we're finding that for 'daily' usage apps, we're better off with a local install, with a network replicated datastore. Because... well, no matter how 'thin' you make something, you're still pushing bytes down a wire, and that has latency built in.
*shrug*. Having a Citrix server or 5 is a valuable utility. It's not a replacement, it's just part of an IT strategy. I suspect however, what will happen is the big sales plug of why it's great. Lots of manglers signing on the dotted line, and a whole bunch of people ending up with something that isn't the right tool for the job, but that gets railroaded through anyway because someone will look stupid if it fails.
So no change there then.
I always wonder why hybrid clients aren't popular. Client machine boots off the network but runs locally. Each user gets a clean image and burns their own CPU cycles. Storage and configuration is all on the network.
Bigtime Consulting - "We're the best because we cost the most"
I read the headline and thought of course now all you need is web front ends and cell phones/PDAs and presto you've got a "thin client." ;) If it's a web front end on a PC, you can still make sure your folks have those essentials like office & what ever else windows apps your place finds that it can't live without. Heck, cell phones/PDAs even have office functionality today. That sales man can use his laptop or if worse comes to worse his PDA/cell phone to pull that much needed power point presentation or even read his e-mail.
This always seems to go in 5-to-7-year cycles, but this time it might actually stick given the always-on, always plentiful bandwidth we're getting now.
Thin clients are amazing in situations where you have an average office-worker PC doing a single task (call center, POS, reservations agents, etc.) You can connect them to the terminal server of your choice. If the users really need a true computer, you can give them a virtual desktop or blade PC (By virtual desktop, cutting through the hype I mean access to a sufficiently-powered VM.) When you have many hundreds of these same PCs doing the exact same task, it's stupid not to at least consider thin clients.
The only drawback is that you actually have to start managing your network like people did back in the mainframe days. You can't have a bunch of hacks throwing in whatever updates, applications and patches they want whenever they want. Companies typically don't want to hear about this -- they hear "get rid of 10000 PCs" from the salesman on the golf course and don't realize it means you just shift all the complexity to the back end. If you're ready for it, it's definitely a cost and time saver. If you're not, you're bound to have a day where users go home early because they don't have a "computer" that works.
Arguably, most PCs aren't very useful without a network connection. However, having a device with some offline storage makes my train commute bearable. I can catch up on reading articles, edit a document, etc. without having to be on the network.
Thin clients are definitely overhyped now, but I can definitely see the day where most computing devices in end-user hands look more like a cell phone than a laptop. I dread that day because I hate typing and reading on a 4-inch LCD. Eithe way, like I said above, it might stick now that network access is less of an issue for most people.
Overrated on accident.
Backups and/or file storage should never be done locally. IMHO, all user profile data should be on a local SAN or file server of some sort.
As an example, a friend of mine works for a company with a highly overpaid IT dept. The users have absolutely no shared drives to transfer large files. They have to email them, which confers a file size limit, not to mention incredible version conflicts and massive PST files. They force users to store critical files on their local hard drives, and the machines perform a ghost backup every night to a secondary internal drive, because the System Admins don't want to be responsible for network security. While I personally think those kinds of policies are really stupid, I will also admit that they do account for hardware failure and rogue network activity in a proven fashion.
However, I just had to ask her, "What happens if your computer is stolen?"
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
I worked exclusively through thin clients for a year at my last job and absolutely hated it.
It was slow, and ungainly and every now and then - from a few hours to a couple of months - someone else's X session windows would pop up on my screen. Wonderful in an environment where we worked with secret (as in classified as) information. We knew the problem, and the IT guys could usually fix it in a few minutes, but the fix always seemed to be temporary somehow.
Not to mention you're costing productivity for people like me who tend to work very rapidly via esoteric hotkeys, and rapid fire keystrokes, and using the keyboard buffer to issue commands to dialogs, context menus, windows that haven't yet appeared. One of my earliest employers once described seeing me work at a computer as "really making that thing sing". So sticking me on a slow machine or dumb terminal is costing you my productivity and happiness. And it's not like a decent machine $1500-2000 is really that big of a deal spread out over the several years it will last. Especially if it's one more straw kept off of the camel's back that keeps me for looking for another job and costing you domain knowledge and experience with your unique problems when I leave.
IMO, thin clients should be reserved for "guest" users who will only be temporarily using your network where no degree of customization or where speed is not important. Like an interactive presentation or a library, or some temporary event.
Question everything
Employees have no business copying CDs worth of data to (or worse, from) the office.
Including on-site sales or support visits with clients who do not subscribe to high-speed Internet access? Or do on-site employees' terminals connect to the terminal server through 3G mobile broadband? Or did I miss something you wrote about your company's line of work?
Right, just try watching YouTube on Firefox with a Pentium 133.
What is the business case for not blocking YouTube and Google Video at the office terminal server's web proxy?
Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback...
Thin clients? Just how bad is the economy down there in the USA, can't you afford food?
None of our sales guys give enough of a shit to visit client sites, which is probably why we are going bankrupt. But to answer your question, we have a small pool of laptops, preloaded with a standard image, that is joined to the network and sent with a salesman when they do go out. They're allowed to copy data between the laptop and the network, but they have to sign out the laptop, and I get an audit trail if something stupid happens. So far this is only used to go to conventions.
The thing with this sort of arraingement is that yeah for certain classes of users it is a good approach. The problem is that then the IT department makes the assumption that hey it is good for everybody. The problem is not everybody has the same needs.
Personally I work with a bunch of software very specific to automation engineering. Some of which is copy protected up the ying yang. There is no way for such to run off the server.
The other issue is IT department lag. Often what is "Their Standard" is so far behind the curve as to be useless. One example being a PDF reader which IT thinks one should be perfectly happy with a version two major revs old. A version that doesn't even support the insurance forms from the company providing part of the benifits package. Let's not even get into E-Mail clients that can't deal properly with the thought that not every body in the world you communicate with has a brain dead E-Mail program. I could go on and on but the one conclusion I've come to is that most IT departments are just plain lazy when it comes to maintaining contemporary functionality. That should have been LAZY!
Dave
For the kid at the Papa John's register, they never left. Meh. At least they're using linux. Not like Jimmy John's... those rotten windows using sandwich slingers... At least the guy at the Papa John's register doesn't have to walk half way across the store to answer the phone. His computer updates with the caller id info, address, previous orders, etc. Jimmy John's is locked into more expensive out of control system. Now what does this have to do with thin clients? Well, in a logistical food delivery sense, the thin client rocks. In a business or college environment, the cutting edge of technology can be a little much for the little boxes. I like using a terminal... more than drinking mountain dew. That isn't always the case for everyone, as there are billions of computer preferences out there. I can't wait for the day when everyone on earth has their own linux distro... distrowatch headline of the day: 7billion and counting.
Is a VT-100 terminal a "thin client"?
What about a PC emulating a VT-100 terminal? What about a browser that reads a language in many ways similar to ANSI?
Seriously, folks.
As a developer of web-based workflow automation solutions, web-based is definitely the way to go. It's quick, simple, high-performance, nothing to install, cross platform, centralized, easily administered, and on, and on, and on...
For our type of product and problem set, doing *any* of it client-side is the problem! Software the coordinates the activities of many people *should* be network-based, because it's about a network of people. And if you take a look at many of your spreadsheets, word documents, and the like, you'll find that a large percentage of them are, in fact, "human network" administration tools done badly.
EG: Memos that need to be circulated, and signed by all staff for compliance. Memos should be circulated via the employee login to the system. When they've read it, they hit a checkbox and click the "submit" button. Then it's easy to see compliance by querying a database. (and maybe producing a simple table showing who has/hasn't checked the box) Rather than pay a staffie to go around and do compliance with a bunch of checksheets, you pay a programmer to do it once - for every memo that will need to be circulated thereafter.
EG: Sales figures obtained verbally from many staff members that are to be summarized before the planning meeting at 10:00. Sales figures should be queried directly from the invoice database to eliminate user error and forgotten transactions. It should be generated on demand DURING the meeting at 10:00, not compiled 48-60 hours in advance on Friday!
Thin client is here, has been here, and has been growing in use for some time when you consider that the client itself is irrelevant if the protocol (HTTP) is thin enough. And it is.
I have no problem with your religion until you decide it's reason to deprive others of the truth.
THey are moving to light weight, thin clients here at my company too. We have about 5,000 desktops and they think many of them can be thin clients. For those who only do office work, email and light work processing they don't need a big computer. Others do.
One of the things people like about the thin clients is that they can sit down at ANY workstation, sign on and the desktop is right there. This is great if you go into conference room and make a presentation. First you in you office fire up Power Point run through the slides then sign off. Then in the conference room sign on and power point is ready to go right where you left off.
But because w are an enginerring company, many of us have specialized needs. So half the company can't move to the thin clients
Your use of the word "terminal" reveals you as with-it technically and out-of-it marketwise. As you correctly perceive, "thin clients" are not clients, because they don't run a local application making requests to a remote server. They're terminals: they blindly display whatever graphics the "server" ("host" is a better word) sends them.
And as such, they're not really thin either. True, there's not a lot of hardware on the user's desktop. But it takes a lot of network bandwidth to keep that display up to date. I think of them not as thin clients but thick terminals. But "thin client", though technically bullshit, is well established — we're stuck with it.
I pine for the real thin clients, the Java-based network computers Sun and Oracle tried to sell 10 years ago. It was a great idea, but it had no chance of succeeding. Even if Java had been ready for prime time (the basic platform still needed a year or two of shaking out, and the GUI libraries have issues that have still not been properly resolved) there was too much lock in by existing client OSs (Windows mostly, but also others, including some from Sun). So what we ended up with is technology that allows people to continue to run their old OS, only on a centrally managed "server". It's only called a thin client because it addresses the same market.
It works, but I still hate it. Such a brute force networking approach offends my delicate sensibilities.
but here goes...
The ThinLinx device shown in the New York Times article has been significantly enhanced over earlier versions and we will be using it in the very near future to provide our Linux Point of Sale development platform to customers. The very low cost of this device, its very low total cost of operation and our POS development platform will be priced at a fraction of the cost of any other company using Windows and PCs for their POS system. We will also provide a BSD solution for anyone who prefers it. We have been at this for a very long time and will use the ThinLinx ARM device to replace the mini-itx platform we have been using since 2003. POS on the ThinLinx embedded ARM devices is fortified with modules such as rsync, cups, X and SSH, while notably avoiding the overhead of Java, desktop managers and relational databases. We look forward to a handheld version, too.
I don't want to have to use an X-terminal again. There's piece of mind knowing my data is in a box sitting in front of me.
And I'm not dependent on the SLA's of someone joker's network to reach my data.
VDI, where the desktop is a virtual machine in the server farm, is becoming big because of the ease of maintenance and deployment. Thin clients or re-purposed legacy equipment are a great way to access these VM's, but I've always had a hard time figuring out how to expose local serial and USB devices to the remote virtual machine. Anyone here know of a good free/OSS way to do this? I think once there is a common way to do this, IT shops will use VDI more and more.
I have used Thin Clients in the past. Years ago they were almost as expensive as a PC. I realize that the management/maintenance cost for these is usually much lower. I have been reading posts and I think the answer is it depends on the application as to whether thin clients make sense. One thought I had about this is why not if you have thin clients have a small server appliance in a localized area for every 10-20 thin clients which then replicates function to central servers. That way there is more redundancy in the system. Is it more expensive? Maybe, but keep in mind that a mid grade server appliance could handle most of the local traffic and processing and also provide redundance from the central server. More complex though. A study of this is in order I think. Not sure if its a great idea or not. A second thought I had is about these motherboards a few of which now have a small version of Linux that loads by startup. You could build a cheap Thin client from one of these using a case, powersupply, NO hard drive, integrated video, a monitor and keyboard and mouse. This would be then a machine that could do some local processing using the onboard linux such as perhaps a web browser, email client etc, but then of course it would have RDP/Citrix or Xterm, SSH or whatever terminal server/remote access protocol that you want to use to access the distributed system. I mean you could build one of these fairly cheaply and have the benefits of distributed AND centralized computing.