Jon 'Maddog' Hall On Project Cauã: a Server In Every Highrise

Qedward writes with an excerpt at TechWorld about a new project from Jon "Maddog" Hall, which is about to launch in Brazil: "The vision of Project Cauã is to promote more efficient computing following the thin client/server model, while creating up to two million privately-funded high-tech jobs in Brazil, and another three to four million in the rest of Latin America. Hall explained that Sao Paolo in Brazil is the second largest city in the Western Hemisphere and has about twelve times the population density of New York City. As a result, there are a lot of people living and working in very tall buildings. Project Cauã will aim to put a server system in the basement of all of these tall buildings and thin clients throughout the building, so that residents and businesses can run all of their data and applications remotely."

Comments

Thin clients

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I know you're making a jobs program. Replacing this crap will cost even more money.

Re:Thin clients

[LordLimecat]

Thin clients should basically never need to be replaced until they HCF, at which point theyre much cheaper than your average desktop.

Re:Thin clients

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Thin clients should basically never need to be replaced until they HCF, at which point theyre much cheaper than your average desktop.

Unless the vendor doesn't support some update that you need because of a change on the server side(either a sufficient version bump that the protocol isn't totally interoperable, or something like moving from Citrix to VDI).

At work, we've had nothing but nightmares with HP's support for their thin clients. One of their WinCE models had a mystery timekeeping issue that kept the clock stubbornly out of sync. After a couple of weeks of hammering they escalated it to engineering, who confirmed the problem and then told us they had no intention of fixing it. The next model ironed that one out; but the last citrix client that HP supports is old enough that Citrix support people start making nervous noises when you mention it, and the official solution for VDI is 'buy a new one'. They also have a Linux based build; but that has (and has had for at least four years, despite my attempts to find somebody who would listen) a pathetic excuse for a 'kiosk' interface that allows you to dump unsanitized commands directly to the shell, along with at least one trivial root-escalation technique). On the plus side, these things are just overpriced VIA x86 boxes with limited RAM and IDE flash-disk-on-module units, and a nearly stock AMI BIOS, so we were able to just spin our own minimal Linux image, and most of the thin client software vendors have an x86 linux client freely available.

The hardware has been sturdy enough, only a few deaths over the entire deployment; but it was massively overpriced for its specs, and HP must have recruited its printer driver team to make the software suck so badly.

Re:Thin clients

[KGIII]

What is wrong with thin clients? In this case, in this particular situation, it seems like they may be a good idea.

We used to use thin clients and rent time from a mainframe. Today, with everything being "in the cloud" and SaaS (or similar) we're just moving back in that direction though our "thin clients" have more power. When you use web-hosted email, an online word processor, or even a game online you're functioning just like it was with a thin client.

It's actually the trend, from what I am able to see, in that more and more things are moving into "the cloud" and are being hosted online. It has its drawbacks if connectivity is lost but that's a rarity these days in much of the world. Some of the various services have disruption avoidance or mitigation built in so that you can do your work and then sync it with the online functionality when you're connected again.

I would not suggest that they are the be all and end all, nor would I suggest that they're the solution for everything but, for many things, they're a perfectly viable solution. I had actually considered using some Wise thin clients, roaming profiles, and setting up my house that way so that a small box, monitor, mouse, and keyboard were all that were needed no matter where you were in the house. For a business (and I could see apartments as well) this could be quite viable and effective.

Anyhow, I'm not sure why you'd immediately conclude that this is a bad thing or why it would need to be replaced at all. Other than the fact that it is not new I can't see any reason to fret about it. There are lots of things that we do that aren't new, some of them even have good reasons behind them. Done properly this could be a very good thing and it certainly raises the value of an apartment if you can have devices like this in it. Additionally, this doesn't prohibit you from using a non-thin client but, rather, offers a low cost, low power, effective alternative as a value added service. I really can't think of any justified reasons to complain about this so I'm curious as to why you're thinking that the idea is bad and will need to be replaced.

Either way... That which is old is new again.

Re:Thin clients

[hodet]

Good grief, sounds like a great way to waste millions. So I assume you would need to purchase access off the system admin because it says that potential admins would apply for a government loan to purchase the hardware. So to access remotely you would have all of your stuff in your main building? What about redundancy and backups? Will this be the McAdmin's responsibility? I don't know but just provide me a port on your switch with a good uplink and a static IP and let's call it a day.

Re:Thin clients

[skids]

What is wrong with thin clients?

You spend the same amount of money on screen and UI hardware, and then shave a sliver of the total system cost off by skimping on CPU and RAM, then spend much more than what you saved on beefed up network infrastructure to accomodate the larger payload. Thats what.

Thin clients only make sense as a way to salvage older thick clients when you just happen to have next to no money to spend, and already for some reason have an overpowered network and server infrastructure. Or if your user base is so supid that they cannot be trusted not to throw them in the dishwasher.

Re:Thin clients

[Anonymous Coward]

Now I know you're making a jobs program. Replacing this crap will cost even more money.

Exactly.

And anyone out there still pimping the thin-client model should realize that any model that succumbs to fashion cycles or buzzword hype isn't a solid one. Several fashion cycles and a few hundred billion dollars wasted later, here the overwhelming majority of us sit, in front of good-old fashioned thick clients, still banging away on these square plastic things.

Re:Thin clients

[BitZtream]

The problem is that you're using the wrong thin client technology.

The thin client shouldn't give a damn what you do to generate the desktop, just its just a physical interface to a virtual world. There is absolutely no reason this can not be standardized.

Thin Keyboards should be using Thin USB, and Thin pointing devices using Thin PointDevice connections. ThinHDMI ...

Stop buying 'solutions' from vendors and by actual solutions better known as standards.

Would you buy a PC that required a specialized video cable and monitor, keyboards with their own unique plugs that only fit into that one specific model? Would you accept it if it required you to buy a special OEM adapter to plug in your speakers?

You aren't looking at the right problem. You're still buying proprietary systems which are DESIGNED TO LOCK YOU IN TO THEIR PROFIT CENTER and then expecting it to work as if its some sort of standard.

The technology is there, but vendors don't want anything to do with it as that turns the whole thing into a race to the bottom, and kills profit margins overnight.

Someone is going to have to create a OSS (not copyleft, something everyone can use) reference implementation of the system for everyone to copy. We need another BSD sockets library kind of solution. It doesn't matter who makes proprietary crap extensions 20 years down the road once the basics are covered WELL, and that everyone does them WELL because thats the minimum expectation.

Re:Thin clients

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

I'd be delighted if standards existed in this area; but they don't(to my knowledge, if they do, please let me know).

Keyboard, video, and mouse? Well, VNC is pretty antiquated; but at least it runs on almost anything. Your other options get thin, fast.

USB over network? Assorted proprietary implementations exist, no standard. (Even the capabilities of serial over LAN, as ostensibly standardized in IPMI, can be a bit...uncertain... from vendor to vendor and product to product).

Re:Thin clients

[KGIII]

They are easier to maintain from a central location, they are easier to backup, they are easier to use, and there are all sorts of other benefits that you're overlooking. Additionally, in bulk, there are savings to be hand when purchasing the hardware. Not to mention that there are any number of ways to connect a thin client and, as you mentioned, they needn't be specific devices so the roles can be easily filled by older hardware.

In other words, those aren't good enough reasons to simply naysay the idea in my humble opinion. This is quite viable and potentially valuable as it gives (I'm thinking this would be best suited for residential use, really, though I suppose some businesses could use the service) more access to more people. The information and freedom are great ideas and the expense is can be negligible.

I don't see too many businesses taking advantage of this. It doesn't seem likely. They'd just run their own service.

Anyhow, computers are expensive there - very much so. This is a way to get them into the hands of the people so that they can access the wealth of information that is online. It can be inexpensive and commonplace. The definition of thin client is so ambiguous that anything from a tablet to an old P3 harvested from a call center can fit the role. Letting perfect get in the way of good enough seems to be an issue here.

Re:Thin clients

[LordLimecat]

I'd be delighted if standards existed in this area; but they don't(to my knowledge, if they do, please let me know).

They are. Use a floppy boot disk, boot to a PXE thin client.

For example, 2x software has a solution that does this.

Re:Thin clients

[Anonymous Coward]

VNC (RFB actually) has had an ongoing run of protocol extensions and you're more than welcome to add your own to support things it doesn't today. It's by no means antiquated. You need to stop thinking if something was invented years ago that it is obsolete or antiquated. DC electricity is hundreds of years old, AC electricity is at least 100 years old, yet we still use it.

Re:Thin clients

[MikeBabcock]

Actually your argument supports thin clients because screen and UI hardware doesn't need to upgrade with newer software so when you go from that old version of some CAD package to the new version, you upgrade the serve r(if at all) and the clients get a newer faster package with *no* work at their end. The other option is to upgrade *every* PC when you need more power to run a new package. Having done PC upgrades most of my life, I see the value in a thin client system.

Who's going to administer that?

[jandrese]

Is the landlord going to run the server farm? This sounds like a support nightmare to me.

Re:Who's going to administer that?

[rjlouro]

According to the article:

"Each server system will need a systems administrator, who will be the point of contact for any technical issues, and who will be able to change and manage the programs to meet the needs of his or her customers in the building.

People interested in becoming a systems administrator will be able to do their training online and, once they have been certified, receive a license from the government that will enable them to get a bank loan for equipment and installation."

Re:Who's going to administer that?

[jandrese]

That really didn't answer the question though. All that says is "you'll need an administrator", without really laying down a framework for figuring out who it should be. It is a certainty that the landlords will be looking for bottom dollar bids on this extra expense that they don't know much about. He'll probably be charged rent for the space the machines take up, as well as power bills and whatnot, making the whole service more expensive than just buying a PC and running it in your apartment/office/etc... Apartments don't have IT departments to fall back on like most people who buy thin client setups.

Re:Who's going to administer that?

[KGIII]

I know that some apartment buildings will often have a resident who gets a larger apartment, cheaper rent (or no rent), maybe a special parking place, and they get these perks because they perform maintenance tasks. Often times they'll be a plumber, HVAC person, carpenter, or similar. Maybe they plan on offering something similar? I could also see (a lot of landlords own more than one building) them hiring an IT person who takes care of all of the buildings for them.

It seems like a good idea POTENTIALLY. If it is done right then it will be quite a valuable add-on service to offer your residents. I have had similar ideas in passing in the past because I've thought about the business of renting and have thought of ways to make my buildings stand out above the rest of them. Many of the ideas that I have had have been technical in nature and this is one of them.

Keep in mind that this is something that is becoming simpler as time goes on. Gone are the days when servers are administered by warlocks with caldrons, potions, runes, and arcane knowledge. The tools are becoming simpler and more effective. The backup and restoration processes are becoming more effective and less prone to error. The familiarity with computers is growing as computing devices become more embedded within society itself.

Also, another thing to keep in mind is that this isn't a requirement. This isn't limiting folks in any way. This is just provisioning an alternative that is low cost, low hassle, and enabling more people access to more information. I'm not sure where the downside is to this. This does, of course, assume (a big assumption) that things are done properly.

Re:Who's going to administer that?

[SenatorPerry]

Maddog has brought these devices around to several conferences (I believe an AMD Geode?). It is a few kilowatts an hour for a mesh network. As Jon says, the idea is to take a few individuals in the area and train them to install the devices and ensure the backhaul experience is good. The subscribers in the area pay a small maintenance fee to the individual that provides the service, which is aiming to provide a network where the infrastructure isn't available. In other words, you are describing an Internet Connection per a single apartment building. Maddog is describing a single Internet Connection shared amongst hundreds with the available bandwidth pretty low for each user. It will allow for individuals to get to websites (designed for 56k) and some locally hosted instructional material that is on the mesh network. It isn't for Hulu or Netflix. Many of the users will only have cell phones with wifi for access. Jon is really passionate about this topic and he has done his legwork. It would not suprise me at all to see this project a success.

Re:Who's going to administer that?

[BitZtream]

...

You don't get it do you?

'System Administrator' is now roughly equivalent to 'Sanitation Engineer'. It was only a matter of time before this happened. This person is no different than any of the other people that take care of the building. Buildings don't just sit there, even without thin client setups. You have electricians, HVAC, plumbing, all sorts of other maintenance issues to deal with, and this really isn't anything different.

You have have to come to grips with the fact that being a system administrator is not impressive anymore. Computers have this neat way of allowing a few really intelligent people to make programs that allow fresh from the kiln bricks to do amazing things.

Re:Who's going to administer that?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Is the landlord going to run the server farm?

Certainly not - the landlord will just rent space to the 'IT guy'.

DEAR GOD WHY?

[Gothmolly]

Why would you ever want to do this, as opposed to letting the people choose what to run?
What possible benefit is there to this plan, other than to centralize and monitor user activity?

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[Anonymous Coward]

Why would you ever want to do this, as opposed to letting the people choose what to run?
What possible benefit is there to this plan, other than to centralize and monitor user activity?

He's called "Maddog" for a reason you know.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[cbiltcliffe]

Why would you ever want to do this, as opposed to letting the people choose what to run?
What possible benefit is there to this plan, other than to centralize and monitor user activity?

Your question answers itself.
Brazil's government has seen all these NSA/CSEC revelations about warrantless monitoring of citizen's communications, and they're jealous. But, since Brazil doesn't have the infrastructure in place to do it, they had to come up with another way. Having the citizenry run their applications on government controlled...errr....privately managed servers is a way around it.

Tinfoil hattish? Certainly. But then, that's what the paranoids got called a week before the Snowden/NSA announcement....

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[extraqwert]

Because of the insane import tax, personal computers are very expensive in Brazil. Maybe this project would help people who cannot afford buying a computer.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[jedidiah]

> Because of the insane import tax, personal computers are very expensive in Brazil

Except a terminal is generally nothing more than a castrated personal computer. Not only that but they quite often end up being MORE expensive.

By the time you've got good enough display and network hardware, you're already a good deal of the way towards having a complete general purpose machine.

And it's not just terminals. Everything is really a PC these days. Except they are locked down and running something other than the x86 architecture.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[Coeurderoy]

In practice it would be more like a "cyber café" in each high rise, people would be able to buy about the cheapest PC even second hand possible, and still be able to do something usefull.
And the "administrador" would probably want to make sure that even people who do not have a PC can be their client.

So in the specific economical setup of Brazil it does make sense.

JMH is not suggesting that nobody should own a PC or that everybody should be forced to go through a government proxy...

What he is suggesting is that people who prove that they are able to provide some services, and that they are not crazy perverted killers can get support from the government to get a small business loan to open a kind of specialized cyber café....
It might even work...

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[Coeurderoy]

Not really, positivo and some others are reasonable competitive and paraguya pirate imports about the same prices as here.
in addition people by on "long term credit/rental" wich still makes it "very expensive" but "affordable" (not that it is good for the economy, but people do have computers, but they could have more)...

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[Coeurderoy]

yep, but a terminal can be a crappy second hand PC or a cheap chrome book and still be able to run an office suite and some reasonable browser...

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[evilviper]

Except a terminal is generally nothing more than a castrated personal computer.

A terminal can be an EXTREMELY old and very low-end computer. Hell, it could even be a $50 tablet plus keyboard.

There's no question that shared building networking would be more economical. Consider the cost of each tenant buying a DSL or Cable modem, versus a single router for the building, and some cheap gigabit switches with CAT6 (or maybe even WiFi) to each apartment.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[johnjaydk]

Except a terminal is generally nothing more than a castrated personal computer. Not only that but they quite often end up being MORE expensive.

I have pretty good experiences with using Ras Pi's as X terminals. Feel free to call them expensive.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[Anonymous Coward]

Ever hear the joke about George W and the Brazilian soldiers?

9am, Oval Office. George W. Bush, 43rd President of the United States, the Decider in Chief, enters and greets his national security team.

"Hello, national security team. What news have you for your Decider?"

"Well, sir, since our last briefing there has been activity in Iraq and Afghanistan you should be aware of."

"I understand. Go on."

"First, there was an airstrike in Afghanistan that killed between 10 and 200 people at what our troops thought was an Taliban Calisthenics Camp. Unfortunately, it turned out to be a wedding party."

"Price of freedom, I suppose. Go on."

"Also, three separate incidents at checkpoints left 9 dead and 23 wounded, all of them civilian."

"Force Protection is paramount to me, you know that. Go on."

"Yessir. Also, in Iraq, a couple of our newly-appointed Iraqi Parliament representatives have been caught trying to assissinate a couple other of our Iraqi Parliament appointees."

"Er, price of democracy?"

"Probably. Finally, I have the sad duty of reporting the deaths of 3 Brazilian members of our Coalition forces. They died of exhaustion after doing the Macarana for 28 hours straight."

At that, the Decider went quiet. No one knew what to say, or why it had happened. Ever since the Freedom Wars had begun, he had remaind stoic about the cost in Coalition of the Willing Deaths. But now, only silence.

"Sir?"

More silence.

Finally, after what seemed like 23 minutes, he spoke.

"H.. how many is a brazillion?"

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[Lumpy]

Yup they work great. the trick is getting the netboot working the way you like it so you dont have to manage any storage on the device.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[KGIII]

Value added service where people can just add that to their rent and not have to worry about it. Additionally, why would you assume that this is limiting in some fashion? It doesn't prevent people from using their own devices. It just provisions a low power, easy to use, form of connectivity. Think of it like an apartment complex including central air conditioning, electricity, or other appliances.

A computer has become just that, an appliance, and it is being seen and used as such more and more. Much like they provide a refrigerator and stove, they'll be providing a thin client, monitor, keyboard, and mouse. It's a value added service that makes sense for a lot of people probably. I think it is an excellent idea to at least experiment with.

Face it, us geeks are no longer special and the computer is the equivalent of a toaster. This is just giving people the option to have the devices in their home with no need for them to do anything more than turn it on and have connectivity. It's a viable idea though it will be interesting to see how it plays out.

One of the important things to keep in mind is that this is, in no way, limiting anyone. This doesn't prohibit folks from having their own devices and their own connectivity. This isn't being forced on anyone but is a service that they may opt to invest in. It provides information to people, exposure to technology, and gives them the chance to be heard online. I can see no justification for complaining about this.

This isn't meant as a slight, you're not the only one to jump to the conclusion that this is bad without really vocalizing any reasons as to what makes it bad. Somehow we've gone from a community that advocated a computer in every hand, connectivity as ubiquitous as water - maybe even more so, and education for the masses to a group of people who seem afraid that our conclave is going to be made obsolete because of the commonality we once vied for. I do not understand this. My first thought was, "This is an excellent idea - connectivity and devices made simple." Then (after scrolling through the MyCleanPC stuff) I found nothing but naysayers who seem mostly afraid of this because it takes away from their specialness because the computer has become a common household appliance. I do not understand that. I do not understand that at all. I absolutely welcome comments as to why or how it has become this way.

Hell, if anything, think of how nice it would be to pay for your rent by simply maintaining this for your landlord. Also, keep in mind that this isn't limiting anyone. Instead of fixing the plumbing to help pay your rent you can be the building's IT manager who logs in and maintains accounts to pay your rent. It is really important to keep in mind that this doesn't limit anyone either. They're still free to have a desktop, a cell, a tablet, a laptop, or no device at all. Since when is the idea of more computers and more connectivity a bad thing? The complaint certainly shouldn't be about thin clients, we've been using them for years and we're even using our regular devices as thin clients all the time. The only difference is that we're no longer renting our time from a mainframe with money - we're paying for the compute cycles with our personal information and our eyeball's attention to advertisements.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[KGIII]

This! Thank you! Wow... Seriously - thanks. I was starting to lose hope.

It seems the naysayers are (and there are a lot) just afraid that this takes away their specialness. This strips them from their ability to hide behind the curtain and play with the switches. After all, if just plain old normal people are going to be doing this then anyone can do it if they try. If they don't need to go get their devices cleaned up they don't need the services from the IT repair shop. If they can just have a PC as a refrigerator type of device they don't need special services, cleanups, to be sold new devices, or even be geeks to access the internet. This will lower the bar to entry...

What bothers me, though I guess confuses me is a more accurate term, is that we have traditionally (as a community) been proactive advocates for getting the internet and the freedom it offers into the hands of more people. We have traditionally maintained a very clear advocacy policy of striving to get more people online, to ensure they had access to the information, and to give them the chance to speak out online and be heard. We've been proponents of putting devices into the hands of people who probably would have been better served with being given access to water but, no, we've been convinced that giving them a computer and internet access was as valid a concern. Now, suddenly, we're concerned? Now, all of a sudden, this is a problem?

I have only made it to this point in the thread. The vast majority of on-topic comments have been negative. They've been stretching for reasons to complain. They have been imagining situations where this is too expensive, where it is too difficult, where it is a problem. My only guess for the reasoning is that they're afraid. The computer is an appliance now. The internet is no longer our place to control. The loss of control and the loss of something to be proud of or something that makes them unique has made them (us, we're a part of the community too) fearful and resentful.

What the hell happened?

It's too expensive - find a way to make it cheaper.
It's too difficult - make it easier.
It can be monitored - so can't anything, teach encryption.
It is centralized - so isn't everything else.
It is limiting - no it isn't, they can still have their own devices.
We're scared, we're no longer special wizards - cool, soon you can pay your rent by maintaining your apartment's servers.

These used to be problems to overcome (or trivial problems). Now they're reasons to quit without starting and to call the idea stupid. Seriously, this would have been seen as awesome, inspiring, and a wonderful thing on Slashdot not that long ago. What the hell happened?

I don't like this sir, I don't like this one bit. Harrumff!

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[BitZtream]

No you haven't. Or at least, we have different definitions of 'good experiences'. The RaspPi without the new accelerated Wayland is unbearable with local connections, let alone remote.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[bill_mcgonigle]

Why would you ever want to do this, as opposed to letting the people choose what to run?

Nice strawman, but the people do have the choice of what to run. The linux-based thin client is just a much less expensive choice for them. The IT guy will help out the Mac and Windows users too, at his regular rate. Since he's just a few floors away, he's the natural choice for service.

What possible benefit is there to this plan, other than to centralize and monitor user activity?

To reduce costs, bring computing to the masses in Brazil who do not currently have access to it, and to create jobs. Brazil has a lower cost of living than here - not everybody has to be a highly paid corporate drone to fund the warfare machine in Brazil.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[burisch_research]

Shared networking, yes that's far more economical. Put a few ethernet ports in each apartment -- great!

But that is NOT what the OP is talking about. The thin client model is ludicrous.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[evilviper]

The thin client model is ludicrous.

It can work, just as shared networking can work (but doesn't always). A $50 7" tablet as a thin client would certainly work, and you certainly won't be able to get a decent computer + monitor for that price. The only question is how much the monthly fee for the service will be. If it's not significantly more than the cost of internet access, I could see plenty of people being interested in buying-in to the service.

How about every block of 8 apartments share a single computer, with just HDMI and USB cables going to each room? Then the cost of computer access for each is only the price of a monitor, and they'll get full-speed access to the GPU for gaming and video playback. That's undeniably more economical than everyone buying their own computer, though it's not quite a traditional "thin client" model.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[burisch_research]

Fair point, but getting the software to play nice with such a setup is not currently viable ...

Also, your $50 tablet is actually a fully-fledged computing device. I wouldn't really call it a thin client. All it needs is an internet connection.

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[evilviper]

getting the software to play nice with such a setup is not currently viable ...

It has been viable for over a decade. Plenty of groups have done it:

http://linuxgazette.net/124/smith.html

And Microsoft is jumping on the bandwagon:

http://www.microsoft.com/windows/multipoint/

See the Wiki for more:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Multiseat_configuration

Most interesting is Fedora 17 automatically enabling it when appropriate hardware is connected, which should mean RHEL7/CentOS7 will, too.

your $50 tablet is actually a fully-fledged computing device.

Yes, but as a "thick-client" it's a brutally low-end and very limited device. As a thin client, it's a high-end workstation, with huge amounts of memory, unlimited storage, etc.

And if a big market ever developed for thin-clients, you can bet these same tablet manufacturers would come out with even cheaper, stripped-down devices that are only good enough to be used as a thin-client. At what price point would you say it's a good idea? $25? $15? $10?

Re:DEAR GOD WHY?

[MikeBabcock]

A thin client system doesn't take away a lot of choices, it just centralizes them. There's no restriction on having a dozen OS clients on that server.

No, really.

[Impy the Impiuos Imp]

Would be useful in the US. Just don't forget the hardline feed into a secret room controlled by the NSA with "trust us" on the locked door.

Re:No, really.

[marcosdumay]

I was just about to ask if the server would be run by the Agência Brasileira de Inteligência*, but your post is near enough.

*The brazilian version of NSA, that following its NSA trainning, nobody ever remember that exists.

is this in use anywhere?

[Trepidity]

The concept in principle seems interesting, but are there modern examples of successful deployments of this kind? I've been at several places that have tried to roll out thin clients on everyone's desk, but those deployments have all eventually been axed in favor of just regular PCs or laptops on everyone's desk.

Part of the problem is that cheap computers are already pretty cheap, so moving to thin clients doesn't save you much, and adds more dependencies.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[Anonymous Coward]

It's way to expensive to put servers and a server room in each building and then provide thin clients (ultimately this is about saving money and improving efficiency), so lets think of a way where we can aggregate the servers in one place... oh wait.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[cbiltcliffe]

A local pet store has such a setup for their grooming dept.
It's a big-box chain, and the service counter has a thin client on it, with the server being, if I've been told correctly, a couple of thousand miles away.
Makes sense, as you don't want a dog groomer to have to worry about backing up data and keeping the machine updated with security patches, or have to hire a local IT employee for every store.

Other than situations like this, though, I've never found this setup anywhere else.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

I worked one place where they tried deploying thin clients. They were universally despised. Even people who needed nothing more than email and a spreadsheet, wanted to go back to their old computer. (In most cases the old computer was past EOL.) I even tried telling people that were getting a new all-in-one computer, and not telling them about the "thin client" they still found reasons to hate them.
By the time I left that job most people were back on PCs. You had to really piss off the boss to end up with one of the thin clients.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[Anonymous Coward]

So does about every automotive parts supply store in the US.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[ArhcAngel]

The concept in principle seems interesting, but are there modern examples of successful deployments of this kind?

OnLive?

Some would say it isn't successful but their issues were arguably more to do with Steve Perlman than the product itself.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[Lumpy]

That place must have had horribly inept IT for them to botch a thin client deployment.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[Capt.DrumkenBum]

Outsourced to Accenture.
Enough said I think.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[KGIII]

The VA hospital uses thin clients, they're all over the place actually.

Another thing to keep in mind is that a full blown desktop can be used (and often is) as a thin client. It just weighs heavier and takes up more space but the functionality is the same. Saas? Thin client. Web hosted email? Thin client. Sure, you may access them from full service computers but the functionality is the same.

I don't recall the thread but it was within the past few months where I had a decent conversation about this. This isn't even progressive (and can be done on the cheap, easily, and be simple to maintain) really as we're actually moving back towards the days of thin clients and renting computer time. More and more services are moving to servers located across a network. The thin clients are more powerful, offer more storage, and have more features but we're basically just paying for a lot of the CPU time with our private information and our willingness to watch ads. All this business about moving things to the cloud? That's just the same principle and functionality as we had years ago when we had terminals and rented time from the mainframe. Thin clients are just terminals and the mainframe is just accessed through the network, it's the same as it ever was. The phrase 'thin client' has a definition but the functions of it are pretty much the same as we use our regular devices these days. There's no difference between a thin client and a tablet, netbook, laptop, or even full blown computer when they're being used for the same thing.

Is this a bad thing? I wouldn't say so. I'd say that it fits the times and unless there's a compelling reason it will continue in this path for the foreseeable future. We are reaching the point where we have word processing online, email online, even hosted photo editing online has been around for a while (but I guess it is improving). I'd not be surprised to see CAD systems online. SAP, I think I am thinking of the right company, is pretty much SaaS which is the functional equivalent of a thin client accessing the mainframe to do work. Even in the old days we'd compose offline then use our rented time to crunch the numbers. Today we'd do it in offline mode and then save our work when connectivity is available.

Not much seems to change really. The speed, price, and technology used changes but the basic functions remain much the same. Our ability to work with larger datasets has grown. The capacity to HAVE an off-line computation device has increased but, well, mostly everything is connected to a network or the internet itself these days. Hell, as I mentioned above, I've even considered setting up my house with Wise thin clients but have opted to just continue with the devices I have on-hand or those that I buy - they just get added to the network here and that's in my house and not that unusual or geeky (I don't think).

If we take away the name and discuss the functionality there's little difference.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[BitZtream]

...

You don't get out much do you?

Lets see, heres the things that use thin clients that pop into my head:

DVM, Airport agents, high-end POS systems, Insurance agents.

Oh, and just to be pedantic, your web browser is exactly that.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[KGIII]

Why is it "way to [sic] expensive" to do this? It isn't as if they'll be giving these devices away probably. They'll be renting them and increasing your rent to pay for them. It isn't as if it is all that difficult or all that expensive. This isn't a complex rollout or anything. It's simply provisioning virtual machines to folk with assigned storage and connectivity. They'll have automated backups (I'd assume) and would really only need to have private storage space allotted. If they crash their user space they simply log out and log back in again. They save their settings and data to provisioned disk space and their profile is created when they log in. It is hardly expensive, difficult, or problematic. Additionally, the users will be the people paying for it. It isn't as if the landlords will be giving this stuff away for free. They'll rent the hardware, charge for the service, and likely allow a certain amount of storage space with increased space costing more funds. They'll likely do the same with bandwidth with tiered bandwidth allowances being available. They may even have varied throughput rates available, certain prices for certain time frames, or even offer choices in the operating systems.

Again, this isn't difficult or expensive. This isn't outrageous or new. This is old-hat technology being used in non-novel ways to accomplish a value-added service that will enable people access to information and the freedom to use the internet to reach out, speak out, work, or create. I truly don't understand how so many people have attacked this as if it is a negative thing. It doesn't even limit anyone as it isn't the only way to connect and nobody is being forced to use these services. They're optional ways to get low-cost access into the hands of more people. These aren't difficult systems to maintain, there can probably even be a company that remotely does the provisioning and management with local access being granted as it is needed. I understand that this city has an inordinate amount of people in helicopters (I was kind of surprised to learn this) but it would be trivial for them to send out a person to do hands-on work as needed.

And, yeah, it was neat to see/watch/learn about - they even have helicopter taxis I guess. I've never been to the city but I'd like to so I probably will at some point. I guess that they're not even that expensive to ride in, they save a lot of time as there is a lot of vehicle traffic on the streets. At least that was the information as it was portrayed in the documentary.

Either way, this isn't difficult or too expensive. It's, as near as I can tell, an excellent idea that has been a long time in coming. Hopefully it catches on and becomes something that reaches even more people. I wonder if it would be possible to bring a program like that to my area of the world? Specifically in low-income housing or housing that is based on ones income. I should give my representatives a call after taking a more complete and judgmental look at this program.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[HornWumpus]

Right after the .com bust I was hard up for work. There was nothing.

I still turned down Accenture even though they were coming to me. Talking to them made my skin crawl.

They wanted to end run a former employer, I was well out of non-compete and had written some of the code. I also knew where all the skeletons were and just how a few ranking hacks operated.

Reputation does matter. They are a resume stain. There was no amount I could have extorted from them, that would have made it, worth it.

Also I was glad to have the former employer in my rear view even if it meant other compromises. I kind of thought of it as a huge mass of technical debt, trying to reach out and grab me.

In the end I followed my gut. It would have turned out badly. I have a little problem with authority.

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[pakar]

You are probably thinking of putting a server-rack in the building or something? Not really needed... Lets say you have a big building with say 200 apartments... That could easily be taken care of with a couple of simple servers... dual cpu with 24-32 cores each.. 144Gb ram... A couple of internal disks for booting and applications and then some shared storage..... We bought a couple of servers (dual cpu with 24 cores and 144Gb ram 2x500Gb disks with raid-1 setup ) refurbished for about 4k euro about a year ago.....

If people are using simple terminals for web/mail and other such tasks it requires soo little in terms of performance you could get away with quite a small setup...

Some rough numbers with everything in the building..
10000/12/3/200 = 1.38 Eur for server-cost. (Counting on less than 1k Euro for cooling of those 2 servers. (2 x simple AC) )
300/12/3 = 8.3 Eur for terminal
100/12/3 = 2.7 Eur for cabeling (paid off after 3 years)
Salary for the admin 10 Eur (no idea what a normal salary is there) and he will earn (200*12*10) = 24000 Euro per year if everyone joins in.
Internet connectivity for the building 300/200 = 1.5 Eur. (you should be able to share a 100Mbit connection on 200 apartments. Don't know the price so estimated it to 300Eur..)
5Eur for misc things like equipment replacement, billing, rent of room for servers etc. (5*200*12 = 12000 Euro per year)
So total of 28.88 Euro per apartment per month.. Compare that to buying a computer for ~600Eur (16.6Euro per month + internet 15Euro = 31.6 Euro)...

Don't know the price for electricity there, but that should be fairly minimal and could probably be included in the "misc" group...

What i have not counted on here is licenses, but for mail+web+word-processing and other such simpler tasks you could get everything going with free software.... Even the "terminal" could in that case be used for some of the simpler processing like the web-browser.. Cheap Intel Atom with 2Gb of ram + monitor could set you back maybe 200-250Eur including monitor.. when bought in larger quantities... No idea about their ARM based machines the article wrote about...

I think i used some bloated numbers in my calculation, except for the salary since i have no clue about what would be normal there, but you could probably cut the server-cost in half.. 100

Also for the ones that buy's their own computers he could sell internet-connectivity for extra profit...Ie no terminals to lease etc, no need for extra cpu/memory in the server(s) etc....

Some other extra services he could provide at a small extra cost:
- Internet connectivity to people with their own computers.. (almost pure profit..)
- WiFi access in the whole building for phones/tablets etc. (almost pure profit.... add some costs for wifi-routers... Could be done on the cheap with commercial OpenWRT based solutions..)
- VoIP service to the whole building. (He could even rent them the wired/wireless phone..)
- VoIP-based Fax-service. If fax arrives it's printed on a shared fax and delivered to the apartment, or sent out as PDF to the person's mailbox. For outgoing faxes it can be done as PDF being sent or going to the shared printer/fax room and scanning the paper into the account the person has on the servers.
- Shared printer-service. 0.1Eur per sheet..
- Collaborating with other such residences offering WiFi to a large area and then sharing the profits for this extra service.
- Collaborating with other such residences buying a cheaper/faster connection, that is then shared between them.
- Offering backup-services of user-data. (1Euro per month or so... 1*200*12*3 = 7200Euro.. For that he could buy quite a nice disk-based solution + offsite tapes..)
- Collaborating with other such residences that are close by and sharing more of the infrastructure for lower costs..

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[pakar]

Terminals can be good, but it all depends on how it's all deployed and what things that are used...

There are several versions... (my own alias'es for the different versions, don't yell :] )
1. Thin-client.. All it does it display an image sent from a server..
2. Thick-Client... Everything is run on the client but all code is stored on the shared server. CPU hungry app's can be run on the server.
3. Fat-Client.. Everything runs on the client and everything is stored on the shared server. The system-image is cached on the client for better performance. (overlay-fs or similar)
4. Thin-PC.. Everything runs on the client and everything is stored on the shared server. The system-image is cached on the client for better performance and user-data is stored on the client as well but mirrored to the shared server via a gluster/AFS or other cluster based file-system.

In terms of costs 1,2,3 can be fairly cheap.. In terms of performance options 3 or 4 are very good... Option 4 can also be used in the case when the main server is down.

With option 2,3 the user can also choose to install extra applications, but would need some type of block-deduplication to reduce storage-costs.
With option 4 the user can install extra applications into their local storage.

With option 1,2,3 the administration can be done centrally, with option 4 client-specific administration might be needed depending on the setup.

With option 1,2,3 all user-data is stored on centralized servers so replacing a terminal is simple and will not result in data-loss.
With option 4 user-data is stored on centralized server and on local HD. Can result in data-loss and can cause strange issues for the users depending on usage.

The balance you will have to make is if it's cheaper to get good nice and fast servers with redundancy or if it's cost-beneficial to have slower servers and faster clients and also how much the administration will cost for the different setups.. The more client's you have the more money you save on option 1 but also the less performance for the users..

Re:is this in use anywhere?

[cbiltcliffe]

I assume you mean DMV, not DVM....
That's US-centric. The Canadian - or more specifically, Ontario - equivalent is the MTO. They use desktop PCs at every office I've ever seen. That's not to say it's not just running a telnet client to a remote app, but since I haven't seen the screen, I can't tell for sure.
Insurance agents around here use the same desktop PC running a thin client app to the remote application. That way, they can also use various internet resources when head office screws something up and the application isn't available.
Airport agents....doesn't surprise me, but I haven't flown anywhere for over 10 years now, so it's not exactly fresh in my mind.

Finally

[cangrejoinmortal]

This minicomputer fad is coming to a rightful end.

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

yeah really.. we don't want the average user having access to such hardware.. all he should have is his locked down, government monitored cell mobile device, right?

Re:Finally

[Nutria]

Huh?

Re:Finally

[iggymanz]

haha. I run a microframe with multiple VMs myself. I'm never going to trust "The Cloud" to not lose my data, nor to have sufficient resources when I need them.

Re:Finally

[mikael_j]

This sounds more like an attempt to return to the minicomputer era.

Perhaps you meant to say that the microcomputer fad is coming to an end? Of course, I doubt it's accurate to describe it as a fad...

Re:Finally

[Anonymous Coward]

The cloud is just like a HD... It can fail at any time as any other storage can..... So keep backups...

Re:Finally

[iggymanz]

people have never gone into my house and stolen my hard drive and backups, however the cloud.....

Re:Finally

[MikeBabcock]

We've only had household PCs for a couple decades and sales have dropped off like crazy. Tablets and smartphones? They're selling like mad.

Re:Finally

[mikael_j]

But tablets and smartphones aren't minicomputers.

...but can it run Crysis?

[JustNiz]

Nuff said.

Re:...but can it run Crysis?

[ArhcAngel]

yes it can

Re:...but can it run Crysis?

[JustNiz]

Sorry but gaming in the cloud is a sucky idea. In order to stream it the graphics have been very compressed so the picture quality is noticeably worse, also there is way too much extra latency compared to playing the same game running locally.

Re:...but can it run Crysis?

[ArhcAngel]

So you were being facetious? You really didn't care that it was, indeed, possible.

I don't disagree with you but it is possible and if it this or nothing then I'd take this.

Re:...but can it run Crysis?

[pakar]

Gaming in the cloud does not have to suck.. Strategy-games don't really require that low latency... It's mainly the FPS games...

Re:...but can it run Crysis?

[pakar]

Oh, forgot... There are also some quite nice things that can be done.. Like time-staping the input of the user and having the server do corrections to correct for the lag.. Can result in some graphics-glitches, but if you have a latency of 30ms that should be minimal for the user..

Also, you could stream some of the graphics as pure OpenGL commands for better graphics for the most visible items..

H.265 could be a very nice addition to reduce the bandwidth needed for good video.. 4Mbit should be more than enough for good 720p.

Re:...but can it run Crysis?

[JustNiz]

assuming you already have a reasonable PC, none of your suggestions result in an experience that is as good as running locally.

If it ain't broke, why 'fix' it? especially by replacing the thing that already works with something that gives a overall worse result.

Re:...but can it run Crysis?

[pakar]

I was commenting on what the actual article was about... And saying that some games could be run this way on thin/thick clients...

The BASEMENT?!

[Anonymous Coward]

Did no one learn anything from Hurricane Sandy, which flooded all those basements?

Re:The BASEMENT?!

[marcosdumay]

No problem. São Paulo is underwater for 3 months every year. They probably know how to handle that.

Re:The BASEMENT?!

[Thornburg]

Project Cauã will aim to put a server system in the basement of all of these tall buildings

(emphasis added)

Did no one learn anything from Hurricane Sandy, which flooded all those basements?

I came here to say this. I'm thinking you might want to put them a little higher up in the building, although I have no idea what the floodplain in Sao Paolo is like.

Re:The BASEMENT?!

[Anonymous Coward]

creating up to two million privately-funded high-tech jobs in Brazil, and another three to four million in the rest of Latin America

Not a problem! The more it floods, the more jobs. Ideally they'd be drenched 24/7, ushering in an era of economic growth and stable employment for everyone!

Bad Idea..

[Anonymous Coward]

So a mainframe? I'm sorry, my landlord won't fix a kitchen sinking into the ground. They're sure as hell not going to maintain a server.

Re:Bad Idea..

[KGIII]

Yes, you don't pay enough to have more than a slumlord so it is a bad idea for everyone. That is completely correct and an excellent use of reasoning. I applaud your logic skills and wish to subscribe to your newsletter.

independent contractor and loan for equipment soun

[Joe_Dragon]

independent contractor and loan for equipment sounds like a disaster waiting to happen.

Will the the independent contractor have to take responsibility for any thing that happens and for any data lost even when they are not at fault?

Fedex has tried this stuff with there drivers and at times if they drop off a package and get it stolen / lost due to no fault of there own they may have to be out of packet for makeing up the cost of the stolen / lost package.

NSA's wetdream

[Anonymous Coward]

Make sure you also use the special browser with hacked certificates.

Does it run Multics?

[Anonymous Coward]

Sounds a bit like a "computer utility", no?

The cloud is in the basement

[davidwr]

The cloud is in the basement, but the WiFi balloons are in the sky.

No wonder I can't find anything, I keep looking for the cloud in the sky and WiFi in the coffee shop.

Re:Cleaner!

[Anonymous Coward]

You're clearly not the original McCoy. The MyCleanPC spam used to have much more clever humor embedded to it.

wage is only a small part of this other things mis

[Joe_Dragon]

wage is only a small part of this other things missing are the need for 24/7 techs (maybe not in all buildings but the work load may be pushing it for 1 man) some some buildings may need 2-4+ people on each shift.

Cost of hardware , buildings network upgrades, buildings needing cables to be rerun, ect.

Power back , ups, ect.

Let's say a building has a lot of dsl and or cable lines now for some thing like this to work may need to have fiber put in or a big mess of multi IP routers hooded to banks of DSL / cable lines.

Subscribe!

[AdamThor]

Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe! Everything a subscription! Everything an ongoing revenue stream! Lock people in, charge them forever, everything, everywhere, everywhen! Keep them paying! Continue to innovate? That's just not a practical ongoing business model.

Re:Subscribe!

[Anonymous Coward]

The phone, mobile and cable companies would probably disagree with you. After all, if you need more revenue you can just add below the line fees.

Re:Subscribe!

[Anonymous Coward]

Continue to innovate? That's just not a practical ongoing business model.

That's true, it's not.

Re:Subscribe!

[RabidReindeer]

Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe! Everything a subscription! Everything an ongoing revenue stream! Lock people in, charge them forever, everything, everywhere, everywhen! Keep them paying! Continue to innovate? That's just not a practical ongoing business model.

Give a man a fish, he'll eat for a day.

Teach him to fish, then let him discover that the only lake around is your private property. But you'll rent him a boat and fishing rights on a daily basis.

Re:Subscribe!

[Anonymous Coward]

Subscribe Subscribe Subscribe! Everything a subscription! Everything an ongoing revenue stream! Lock people in, charge them forever, everything, everywhere, everywhen! Keep them paying! Continue to innovate? That's just not a practical ongoing business model.

False. Every time a monthly fee is required, the business in question grows exponentially until it flatlines absorbing or "merging" with competitors. There is no need to innovate, improvements are getting the majority to rent everything, not consumer choice. Occasionally a media type will suffer, but the same companies are owned by mega-corps further up the food chain, and the money ultimately flows regardless of what stream the masses prefer. Music, games, TV, movies, drugs, images, sports teams/franchises, all feed to the same few pockets that buy your politicians.

Serves you fucking right, stupid stupid sheeple.

Re:Subscribe!

[pakar]

Paying for a simple service like this can be good in places where people cannot afford to buy a PC, or don't want to shell out with lots (for them) of money.

The benefits of this is that even poor families can get access to a whole new world of possibilities and learning new things.... Education for the population is *always* good. Take a look at the OLPC project and what it's all about...

The wealth of a country does usually match the curve of the it's population education-level.. So as the population gains new skills their wages will go up and they can start afford real computers and this business-model will be over and/or converted to a ISP model for internet-connectivity..

Why? To create a ton of sys admin jobs

[Zontar_Thing_From_Ve]

Each building will need a dedicated system administrator, so while this theoretically benefits Brazilian society, the main purpose is to provide employment for these new system administrators. Based on what I know about Brazil, I wouldn't bet very much on this working out as planned.

It's been tried

[Animats]

About a decade ago, there was a fad for "smart office buildings". The concept was that companies would get their computing resources (or at least their networking resources) from the building landlord, It didn't work out well. Property managers are terrible at network operation. The landlord mindset of doing minimal work on maintenance and the data center operations mindset of 24/7 availability were too far apart.

Re:It's been tried

[HornWumpus]

Don't take anything from landlords except square footage.

They can't even provide cleaning services with staff that won't rob you blind. Landlords have no incentive to sweat the little stuff. They know you aren't going to move over a stolen laptop/week.

Don't let them bundle _anything_ into the lease. Let them maintain the toilets and other common areas, nothing else. They shouldn't even get a key to the suite.

Re:It's been tried

[Anonymous Coward]

They shouldn't even get a key to the suite.

They can't not get a key...they own the building.

Re:It's been tried

[Anonymous Coward]

They shouldn't even get a key to the suite.

They can't not get a key...they own the building.

Then change the lock. Where I live it is perfectly legal (and expected if something of value is inside) for the renter to lock out the owner.

Re:It's been tried

[KGIII]

It has been my experience that, if you can, build... It is far less hassle to deal with the loan from the bank and contract out your own maintenance and cleaning services than it is to deal with some management company who are more interested in the bottom line than they are in providing quality services. And you're spot on about the theft...

I don't see this as being a great thing for businesses, and I don't see businesses making a lot of use of it, but I could see it being great for residential. I could see it as being wonderful for business use but it just doesn't seem likely. The building's management service could do the telephony and provision thin clients, connectivity, and storage. Software could be provisioned online for many business needs. Those needing greater than what is possible over the 'net can have full blown PCs.

As I said, I don't see it being great for businesses. Could it be? Absolutely. Will it be? If the culture in Brazil is anything like the culture here then it is quite unlikely to be as good as it says it is on the package. But, it has that potential so I say we should wait to see how it turns out. Assuming you're smart with your lease and include non-payment as an option for violations then you should be good to go. It remains to be seen though - I'd not dismiss it out of hand though, certainly not without giving it a go. They've managed to accomplish some neat things there - including fairly inexpensive (comparably) taxi helicopters and things like that. I say we watch them and root for them, this could turn out to be an excellent idea for them.

An important part, and equally important for residential, is that this not be limiting. This needs to be a add-on service which one can opt out of if they don't want it. So long as that's the case I see nothing wrong with it. Even for business use, make sure you have a good lawyer read the terms, it could be viable. Uptime contracts are important in this case too and you'd want to ensure that they had good security measures in place but those can be defined contractually. Rather than just an early termination clause for violations (the expense of moving is too great over small violations) one needs to include a non-payment clause. If they fail to maintain the provided amenities per the standards set in the contract then one doesn't pay that month's rent, not just not paying the amenity fees but the entire rent. That should give sufficient motivation and help ensure the quality of service is maintained.

Terminology

[seanthegeek9306]

Someone is taking "cloud computing" far too literally.

Old is new again

[ArchieBunker]

Every few years someone discovers the client/mainframe model.

Re:Why? To create a ton of sys admin jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

Cause they're monkeys? They'd still the trackballs from the mice, let alone the servers themselves.

go read about it, bottom line performance

[Anonymous Coward]

you can put some big servers in the building and then have people use cheap, power sipping displays that don't have any local data so if they break you just swap them out.

nothing is preventing people from running their own computers, this is just a cheaper way for them to get good access.

He also combines the computer/TV/phone access into one unit.

It also helps that the per-person units are ARM systems that are able to be built entirely in Brazil (including the CPU design)

Re:Why? To create a ton of sys admin jobs

[Anonymous Coward]

So system administrators become the janitors of 2015?

For more information

[cluening]

Jon gave a talk at LISA a couple of years ago about this same project:

https://www.usenix.org/conference/lisa11/project-cau%C3%A3

Are we at this point in the cycle?

[nitehawk214]

Every 10 years or so everyone wants to go all Thin Client.

Last one was Web 2.0, before that was the Java Thin Client machines, before that mainframes with green screen terminals.

"All this has happened before, and all this will happen again."

Basement? Really?

[xs650]

Unless they are in a city with no chance of flooding, either natural or from infrastructure failure, a basement is dumb place to put that equipment.

Last I heard, Brazil was mostly wet and the infrastructure reliability left something to be desired.

The folly of thin servers has already been mentioned by others.

Re:Basement? Really?

[Anonymous Coward]

And it makes it easy pickings for robbers. They just break in and take the big servers and all the data for all the building. bye bye data! How long before everything will be restored? Loss of customer and employee data if used by businesses. What a great idea this is. If just for casual web surfers no big deal, but the money will be from business.

Depends on the environment

[Sir_Eptishous]

In a lab setting, thin clients can be a good alternative. There usually isn't a lot of room on the benches, and there are chemicals and what not all over... It is easier to deploy and manage a thin client in a situation like that, especially where space is a premium.

My bad experiences with thin clients are that sometimes an app that everyone is running on the server end crashes somehow, and there is no way to correct the situation except to restart the server the app runs on. Sometimes that could be done gracefully, other times, more frequently, everyone would need to exit their remote sessions, wait until further instructions, then log in again. If there are lots of folks logged in, and they all have to exit because one app on the back end crashed that can cause serious consternation.

Re:Depends on the environment

[pakar]

My bad experiences with thin clients are that sometimes an app that everyone is running on the server end crashes somehow, and there is no way to correct the situation except to restart the server the app runs on. Sometimes that could be done gracefully, other times, more frequently, everyone would need to exit their remote sessions, wait until further instructions, then log in again. If there are lots of folks logged in, and they all have to exit because one app on the back end crashed that can cause serious consternation.

That is why running a thick-client can be a very good alternative... The app runs on the actual client but without the need of local administration and storage..

the point of thin clients

[Anonymous Coward]

Is not efficiency - it is trading flexibility for conformity with less maintenance overhead.

This only suits certain user profiles - works great in companies if you are in a position to say 'no' to your userbase - which depending on ur position may be ok or not. Personally I use a mix of thin desktop clients for majority and managed laptops for management.

For domestic i don;t see it being a good idea.

Linguistics bugs

[allandouglas]

It's amazing how often Sao Paulo (or, better: São Paulo) is misspelled as Sao Paolo. I think it is a bug in the linguistic engine of the people. The same that causes Python to be written as Phyton. Ignorance alone can't explain it all because educated people also make this error.

Re:Linguistics bugs

[Anonymous Coward]

Isn't that just a simple orthographic mistake? There is no difference in pronounciation.

Ortography is quite insignificant, most languages of the world don't even have a writing system.

Flooding

[Anonymous Coward]

Don't put the servers in the basement. Put them 10 to 20ft above the ground water level.
NYC had major problems with water from Sandy getting into downtown building and doing major damage to the electrical and building computer works

An odd idea . . .

[Kimomaru]

This feels like a jobs program, hard to believe that this will be useful. Honestly, people should learn to build their own servers (or get their kids to do it). A server can cost as little as 50 bucks these days (Cubieboard). If he wants to do something useful, he should give every tenant their own static IP. Seems pointless.

Re:An odd idea . . .

[Anonymous Coward]

He's been talking about this for years, but it seems to be all that -- just talk. No organization, no infrastructure, and basically a "install it and they will come" approach.

DON'T PUT SERVERS IN BASEMENTS

[Medievalist]

Seriously, wtf? Maddog knows better than that.

In any really tall building, servers belong in the middle floor - which is probably already a service floor, if it's an intelligently designed high-rise building.

Cable runs decrease in density, thickness, and length when you put the servers in the center of the served area. It's also the safest single place in regards to disasters such as floods, hurricanes, civic unrest, and lightning strikes.

It's cheaper and more reliable to put servers in the middle of the middle floor.

Re:DON'T PUT SERVERS IN BASEMENTS

[Kimomaru]

They're not going to sacrifice space on floors that can be rented. Anyway, the whole idea is stupid.

Re:DON'T PUT SERVERS IN BASEMENTS

[Anonymous Coward]

They're not going to sacrifice space on floors that can be rented.

Yet another reason to put them in the middle of the middle floor, which is typically an equipment space anyway. You do realize you need pumps to get water up into high-rises, right? And massive blower systems for the HVAC? And elevator motors? Nobody sane puts all that in the basement, it's grossly inefficient and costly to do so.

So tucking a 50 Terabyte redundant server in there too should be no problem... in fact, in a modern building there's already a BCS in there for use during fires and it probably has several servers in it to run the fire detection and alarm systems, the smoke blower systems, etc... even in an old building there's probably a cable TV head-end somewhere near the middle of the building.

Re:DON'T PUT SERVERS IN BASEMENTS

[bananaquackmoo]

So... how exactly is he going to connect to ground fiber if not from the basement?

Re:DON'T PUT SERVERS IN BASEMENTS

[bananaquackmoo]

(A legitimate curiosity question. I agree with the rest of what you said, I'm just ignorant on that bit)

File sharing platform

[Anonymous Coward]

As a student, I used to live in a shared house with about 6 other students/young professionals.
The owner of the house also lived there and had a bit of a vice for buying shit on eBay.

When I moved in, he showed me the computer system he had in the basement. It was the largest server set up I've ever seen outside of a professional setting. It ran Windows Server (once configured by one of the old residents, and later in need of maintenance) and everyone in the house had a remote terminal there.
The system was mostly used for illegal downloads, which ended up in a shared repository for everyone to get. You learn a bit more about the people you live with than you'd like - the owner had some really weird taste in porn.

Anyway, since I had a decent laptop, I never gave the system much use. It was convenient for letting downloads run through the night, but other than that, not much else. The security and privacy implications alone kept me from using it for anything worthwhile.

I wonder if there's actually any real usefulness to this project. I like the idea of terminal-based computing in principle, but I've yet to see it successfully applied in real life.
Most likely it'll end up as a file sharing platform for the residents and not much else.

HCF explained

[justthinkit]

Pick one, I don't think it matters which one:
.

Highest Common Factor (as opposed to lowest common denominator)
Hispanic College Fund
Health Care Facilities
High Cycle Fatigue
Hybrid Coordination Function
Hart Communication Foundation
High Capacity Feeder (copiers and printers)
Hundred Cubic Feet
Historic Charleston Foundation (South Carolina)
Halt and Catch Fire (Hacker's Dictionary)
Hospitals Contribution Fund of Australia
Health Care Foundation of Greater Kansas City (Kansas City, MO)
Hawai'i Community Foundation
Host Controlled Family (Rockwell chipset modems)
Half Circle Forward (motion; gaming)
High Cost Fund
House Conservatives Fund (Political Action Committee)
Host Command Facility
Heparin Cofactor
Horizon Christian Fellowship
Hardcore Fan
Hybridoma Cloning Factor
Hepatitis C Foundation
Harper Court Foundation
High Carbon Ferrochrome
Hotline Center Foundation
Hot Channel Factor
Hook Content Formula (enumerative combinatorics of Standard Young Tableaux)
Higher Cortical Function
Hardened Compact Fiber
Hardware Configuration Facility
Hard Copy File
Host Computer Facility
Human Care Foundation (New Delhi, India)
Health Care Fraud
Home Credit Finance
http://acronyms.thefreedictionary.com/HCF

Re:HCF explained

[jfengel]

Presumably he meant Halt and Catch Fire, a joke assembly language instruction from the good old days when (a) people wrote in assembly language and (b) catching fire was something done by the CPU rather than the battery (and the idea that such a device could be powered by a battery that didn't require a truck to carry it would have been a joke of its own).

Re:Why? To create a ton of sys admin jobs

[geekmux]

So system administrators become the janitors of 2015?

Given the hoarding capability of the average user, does this really sound far off? Have you seen the shit filling file servers these days? Not to mention litigation threats held over everyone's head for breathing wrong in the PC workplace, which creates nightmare situations where users keep everything "just in case".

File servers filling up? It's literally easier to justify and budget a new file server than it would be to get 100 users to STOP what they are doing for even 2 hours and go through their e-hoard to clean it up. Sound like a perpetual nightmare of hardware upgrades rather than true data management? That's because it is.

Why a server rather than a router?

[jfengel]

The only thing that the building has in common is geography. If you're going to take those responsibilities outside of your own device, why not just stick them in a remote data center and be done with it? Why should the building manager want to do anything other than route the bits between you and that center?

If the distance is too great and creates latencies, the solution isn't some server for the building, but some local CDN installation. Perhaps it would be in the building itself, or just in the neighborhood. It wouldn't necessarily be a bad thing to have my Google Drive or Netflix Instant cache or some AWS instance. But let the professionals manage that, which is a whole massive headache of its own.

The only hardware a building manager should need is the part that is geographic, the hard wire that leads to the rest of the Internet.

Re:Why a server rather than a router?

[Anonymous Coward]

+1 router only

though i didn't even read the summary in full. the parent's comment first line caught my eye and yes i agree.

Re:Why a server rather than a router?

[Anonymous Coward]

There is no possible way the latency across a city scape could be too high for thin client services unless you put too much slow equipment between the terminal and the server. City-wide metro ethernet will have lower latency than IP (layer3) networks and more than adequately provide the required low latency.

Re:wage is only a small part of this other things

[bill_mcgonigle]

Let's say a building has a lot of dsl and or cable lines now for some thing like this to work may need to have fiber put in or a big mess of multi IP routers hooded to banks of DSL / cable lines.

The incumbent telco is supporting this project with fiber pulls. The 'IT guy' is part ISP salesman on commission.

I'll bet...

[unixisc]

My /etc/hosts file will block all the viruses that MyCleanPC claims to remove from entering in the first place /meme>

Re:I'll bet...

[armanox]

Including mycleanpc.com....

Re:Why? To create a ton of sys admin jobs

[bill_mcgonigle]

So system administrators become the janitors of 2015?

What's more reliable, a windows PC, or a garbage disposal?

How about a Linux PC vs. a washing machine? I'm a fan of both, but the washing machine needs less maintenance.

Drop Dead

[WOOFYGOOFY]

Think I am going to have my info exclusively on your server? Really? Think I am going to let you be the intermediary to every keystroke I make? Really? Think I want to share a cpu, graphics , RAM and storage with everyone else in a multi-family building?

Here's the real computing problems I have - my CPU is not fast enough, my programs are I/O bound and I don't have enough RAM to never have to go to disk.

All this is a shitty solution in search of a problem so this guy can get rich.

Sun tried this (sunray!) 15 20 years ago now. It tanked then. Then oracle tried it. It tanked, It's not what people want. It serves no purpose. It's the opposite of personal computing.

Here's what these types don't get. My computer and it's contents are semantic in nature. They MEAN something to me. They're more personal to me than any diary; they're as personal to me as anything has ever been.

So no, I actually don't want to be reliant upon your shared disk. No, not at all.

one of the many things that sound incorrect here

[Anonymous Coward]

"12 times the density of new york city"...let's see:

per wikipedia:
NYC 10,640/km2
Sao P 7,216.3/km2

Maybe 'mad dog' was thinking of Kowloon Walled City?

Efficient?

[Anonymous Coward]

If it's efficient, it will eliminate jobs, not create them.

DUH!

or give everyone a fucking ipad

[decora]

thin clients are the pet projects of totalitarian, control obsessed douchebags the world over. the thin client always fails, in the end, because it represents the 'abesntee landlord' school of it management.

let people own their own shit. let people fuck with their own shit however they want. let people have their own little outpost in cyberspace. dont try to fucking control everything.

Re:or give everyone a fucking ipad

[MikeBabcock]

And everyone should service their own car and own their own property ... And yet apartments and condos hold a vast majority of the world's population because efficiency is more important than personal control.

Past use by date?

[countach]

Isn't this an idea that would have been incredible 15 years ago, but now is past its prime? A cheap computer can be purchased for the same price as a thin client. In fact, most thin client machines are more powerful than computers were 5 years ago. So what's the point?

Re:Past use by date?

[benjamindees]

I had the same idea 8 years ago. I was going to put a server in every office building, and offer internet access and tech support to small businesses. It was past its prime then too.

Re:Past use by date?

[pakar]

It all depends on the available funds for the potential customers and the cost-difference between thin/thick-client and a real PC... So the prime-time for some specific tech might differ with many years between places... It all boils down to what people can afford to pay and the benefits they might get with it.

Sao Paulo less dense than NYC, not 12x as dense

[stomv]

Sao Paulo: 18,690/sq mi
NYC: 27,550/sq mi

Keep in mind that the denominator is "land" in the city, not total area -- this brings NYC down from almost 500 sq miles to just more than 300 sq miles.

Source: wikipedia

São Paulo, not Sao Paolo

[Anonymous Coward]

I can understand Sao Paulo as not every keyboard can or are congured to generate "ã" but the why people keeps writting "Paolo" is a mistery to me.

Depends on where the demarc is.

[Anonymous Coward]

If the provider won't extend the demarc to the equipment room (many will) we just run it right up the main service chase. If you need an amp, it goes in a hermetic case with power fed back down from the UPS in the equipment room, so that it can continue operating underwater.

Re:wage is only a small part of this other things

[pakar]

Making a 3 server redundant cluster should be easy... Just depends on how the solution will look.. Dumb-clients can be tricky... Thick-clients just need some remote cluster-fs they run everything from and a file-share for user-contents.

With thin-clients: (dumb-clients)
Simple UPS - 1k Euro
6x Servers 2k each (3 extra for failures)
2x storage 2k each.
VMWare or similar solution with that has HA so each user actually have their session running on 2 machines in case of failures... (no idea of cost)

With thick-clients:
Simple UPS - 1k Euro (probably overkill)
3x Servers 2k each. (one extra for failures..)
2x Storage 2k each. (6Tb should be enough for 200 users unless they are storing movies and stuff)
= 11k Euro

No need for 24/7 tech's... Running a system like this would probably take up ~1-2h per day, on average, in administration (backup's/upgrades etc).... The rest would be on-call for system failures, and with a HA solution there would not really be a need of more than 8-24h 'time to fix'.... That's the beauty of thin/thick clients... If something happens for someone they just reboot and reload the standard image... User contents are just files on a file-share...