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

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?

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: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.