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New York Times Says Thin Clients Are Making a Comeback

Posted by timothy on from the dialectic-materialism dept.

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.

4 of 206 comments (clear)

  1. That "true computer"... by The+Master+Control+P · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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>

    1. Re:That "true computer"... by inKubus · · Score: 4, Interesting

      The Linux Terminal Server Project is actually pretty good. And useful for a variety of things beyond just saving dough on the desktop end. Remote access is one that comes to mind. Sure, you could have a bunch of X terms, but this will work with ANY box with a PXE (hell even Netboot) NIC. You don't need virtualization or any of that garbage. UNIX was designed as a "multi-luser" operating system ;), back when mainframes were last in vogue. Xwindows is really quite good over a slow network and has been for DECADES.

      Now, I want to stress that I am a proponent of terminals in only certain areas. A public library computer bank. A factory environment, where you want your server safe and securely away from sparks and heat. A customer service environment where the employee is only doing one or two things. My business ops people would have real computers for the reasons you mentioned. I want them to be accounting and developing even if the server is down.

      --
      Cool! Amazing Toys.
  2. Re:Could have told you that was coming by Bazman · · Score: 4, Interesting

    Seven hundred?!?! Microsoft had a web page where you could put in your client requirements and they would tell you how many Win 2003 TS machines you would need to support these clients. I don't think we ever got it down to fewer than 10 users per server - how did you manage 700?

    Currently we have four servers for about forty seats in our labs. They don't get much usage, and people don't seem to notice they're sharing a machine with the other 10 people on that row of the lab.

    I'd give thin clients to everyone, but then someone in an office of their own will tell us they really need Skype, and they really need a web camera... I suppose these things could be connected to a thin client and forwarded over USB, but it's not something we've tried...

      The other show-stopper is where users need admin rights for particular software. It does still seem to happen, mostly with big important pieces of software like our finance system or student records management. It may just be it needs to write to the C: drive so we could bodge it with access rights, but we don't want to screw up the installation so the user gets admin rights. Now, could we do that on a shared Windows 2003 TS box? I don't think so. With VM tech we could give them a VM of their own to play with though...

      VM tech has also helped us deploy Linux and Windows to our labs. Previously we had say four servers running Linux and four running Windows, and if the lab session needed Windows then there were four Linux servers sitting idle, and the users crammed onto the four Windows servers. With VMs, we stick a Windows and a Linux VM on each server, then the users are more spread onto the eight servers. Win.

  3. You should be asking "Why?" by Suzuran · · Score: 4, Interesting

    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.