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HP to release 3 thin clients PCs
According to an Article in InfoWorld, HP will release next week a new family of thin client PCs. Out of the 3 models that they will release, 2 of them will be with an embedded Linux core (the L & X models, and the G model with MS Windows CE) and they'll include Netscape Navigator for browser-based access to Java programs as well as access to Windows applications. The X series also includes HP's ChaiVM embedded Java virtual machine, providing access to applications hosted on Unix and legacy servers.
Oracle is also working on a thin client, so I think we will soon see some competition in the thin client area, where Linux will be getting much more attention, and more important - more Linux development. Who says competition is bad? :)
If i'm not mistaken didn't MS actually buy the winframe technology from Citrix to put into terminal server?
Microsoft actually owns part of Citrix. But that didn't stop them from playing hardball with Citrix. They essentially strongarmed Citrix into giving them their technology, and the reason WinFrame only supports 3.51 is because Microsoft more or less forced Citrix to do so, to avoid competition with WTS, despite the fact that in many ways WinFrame has advantages over WTS.
Microsoft is deathly afraid that a rise in popularity of products such as WinFrame would jeopardize their ability to force fat clients (bloated with other Microsoft products) onto the desktop.
Here's what really bewilders me - If you were to take, say, an E-Machine, which currently reails for about $400, take out the CD-ROM, Hard Drive, USB, Sound Card and Modem, and what do you have? Essentially, a thin client which could retail for about $225-$275. Why don't companies just sell netbootable Linux-on-a-flashram x86 small-form-factoredboxes for ultra cheap? Would it not be the same thing as these $700 thinclients?
The Slashdot FAQ doesn't allow comment posting and I think it would be a very good idea if it did. Although the normal type of posting wouldn't work because the comments would pile up overtime and make the feature useless. Perhaps allowing only registered users to post, and periodically deleting -1 comments would be a solution. If anyone likes the idea email Rob or someone who can do something.
It is one thing to have thin clients and it is another thing to sell them. OS/2 Warp Server and thin clients sell: http://www.computerworld.com/home/news.nsf/all/990 8231gad Rene
http://www.computerworld.com/home/news.nsf/all/990 8231gad
Getting it working with Linux . . . your problems most likely lie in fonts (At least they always have for me, whether I was connecting XFree to an HP-UX box, or an old Tekterm to XFree). The easiest fix is to run a font server and connect to that.
--Akeru
Let's hope that there's intelligent life somewhere out in space 'Cause there's bugger-all down here on Earth.
Yes, WinFrame is NT 3.51 only, but Citrix has now MetaFrame out, that runs on top of NT 4 (I don't know the real differences to NT TSE, but MetaFrame provides Clients not only for Win9x/NT but UNIX (not Linux though)).
It is scheduled to come out two days before Windows 2000.
JavaRing was an implementation of JavaCard API for smart cards. The rings were manufactured by Dallas Semiconductor
For more articles about JavaCard API go here.Smart cards are quite popular in Europe, where magnetic credit cards never got to the same level of popularity as in the US. Smart cards haven't taken off in the US because VISA and MasterCard are restraining competition.
I've got a dozen HP700RX X-terminals here (i960 processor) that work pretty snazzy. I need to find a decent i960 compiler and linker, and locate some libraries and start programming 700RX-specific apps. :-)
I've just been doing some research on Microshaft Windows NT Terminal Server and Citrix MetaFrame. For a SMALL 5 user installation (capped at 5 users, no more) I'm looking at $3500 in software alone. That's ridiculous. Are there any capabilities within linux to reduce this cost to the small business user? VMWare? WINE? Help!
Never underestimate the power of stupidity in large groups
LOAD "SIG",8,1
LOADING...
READY.
RUN
Random geeks sitting at home don't buy these things to play games or code. Big companies buy them to stick on clueless employees' desks so they can just "get the job done" instead of calling the IT department about their cup-holders being broken.
An other advantage of these thin clients is that absence of harddisks and big fans really reduces the noise in an office. Last week I visited a company who did have HP winCE machines all over the place. Never have been in a quieter office and was less tired when I went home.
Tell me what is the difference between it and Slashdot FAQ? Second if you care /. so much it's time to get a user name.
CY
I already had my Java in a ring two years ago. Still waiting for my Linux....
yeah but the $700 linux model will actually run without crashing! -- RickB
We hope . . .
I've had several user names, which I've abandoned.
It's unaccessable several times a week from Finland after 5pm. During the day it works fine (cause people on the other side are sleepy).
You're describing what you would do with bailing wire and a lot of sweat work. What HP is providing here is something companies can buy by the skid and deploy by putting them on the desk and turning them on. Think bigger than what you can do with a screwdriver.
hey! I'm one of those clueless employees. You're just jealous cuz you don't get cool toys.
Because of the noise, and I have two of them in the UltraSparc in front of me, and it is a desktop so it is *really* in front of me. I also have a cheasy PC in my cubicle that adds to the noice, though it is somewhat less. That is at least one reason that I like notebook computers, but they have the problem of screen size. If you have gotten used to 21" screen it is pretty damn hard to go back to 17" or even sometimes a 15" (yuck!).
Im a dedicated Linux user but navigator just plain sucks. Its unstable and slow. Christ,. how long is it going to take them to figure out a push technology that works? It REALLY pains me to say this but M$ Internet Explorer has 'em beat. Aaron
What have you been able to do with the Java in your ring?
I have no idea what they mean by "New brand name" as I have a HP Entria X Terminal from like '94 or something... (Still trying to get it to work with Linux...)
Must every company (re)announce "new" products just so they can get more PR?
Using Linux is great, but this isn't new.
__
ipsa scientia potestas est
"knowledge itself is power" - Francis Bacon
Navigator may blow, and Internet Explorer be ok but at least navigator opened up there source code to create Mozilla wich in my opinion kicks Internet explorer assss.
No no no. You run a manageable OS like Linux and store all data on a file server. That way the user can't screw up the software and since the hard drive contains no user data (only OS and applications), you can replace them just as easily.
So, HP's doing the bailing wire and sweat work instead. Maybe I should produce these for companies that don't want to do anything, and compete with HP. :-)
There is no K5 cabal.
I am not the real rusty.
Let's get some of those and build a beowulf! It would rock cracking RC5 while playing Quake3.
'nuff said. I'll believe it when I see a non-beta version of Mozilla, thanks.
Who the heck would want to run Netscape Navigator -- especially on a dedicated WWW client machine? Navigator sux. It's incredibly slow, crashes often, and its Java performance is less than stellar. They actually want to sell this product? Who's going to buy it? I feel sorry for the schmuck who buys this.
user computer costs. A machine over 3 years will
easily have at least 2-3K worth of support costs
associated with it. Cheap machines are big in
the home market. The business market really
doesn't care that much.
2. These machines are pre built, tested, and
have a known configuration. Hardware maintanence
and support is trivial for these things. The
significant cost of human support is cut to
a fraction for that of a PC. No HDD means
that each machine is _completely_ exchangable.
Imagine when a user has a problem with their box,
they take it over to the support office, and the
office gives them another box in 3 minutes,
and look at the defective one later. That's
productivity.
3. Software support costs are cut to the servers
and servers only.
--
Insanity Takes Its Toll. Please Have Exact Change
Care about electronic freedom? Consider donating to the EFF!
I don't think the original post was a joke...
Look, I run networks with hundreds of Unix workstations. Linux is a lot easier to manage than Windows, but the software on the local host still get screwed up, upgrades are still somewhat painful (especially since users have a tendency to turn off their PCs), and it still takes a lot longer to rebuild a Linux system than to power-cycle an NC.
I'm not saying that NCs are perfect for all applications, but for the simpler stuff (e-mail, web, word processing, spreadsheets, database clients) that has low bandwidth requirements, and where you have a lot of seats, they're great.
cjs
The world's most portable OS: http://www.netbsd.org.
The L and X series use an embedded Linux core and include Netscape Navigator for browser-based access to Java programs
Oooh, accessing java with Navigator. That'll be successful.
how long till i have linux on my watch??
It seems that MS might be losing some of the power that it once had with PC manufacturers. With the up and coming power of Linux - and major manufacturers choosing to install and support it as a reliable alternative to win32 products - one has to wonder when Microsoft will start to slash prices on their OS. I do not think it will be too long before MS realizes that NT wont be able to stand up to the pressures of Linux with its current cost/reliability issues are further scrutinized by IT shops in industry.
www.bluealien.org
www.bluealien.org
Prophets of the Blue Alien
Embedded Linux on machines from one of the largest computer makers in the world. MS is not gonna like this...
Geeky modern art T-shirts
Considering that a normal PC is about the same price as those thin clients, what good are these ?
Why opt for a 700$ machine that can only act as a thin client when you can get a 1000$ PC that is quite a bit more powerful, and can do everything the thin client can ?
Couldn't they just take their weakest normal PC, remove the floppy and CD-Rom drives, and pre-install thin-client software ? It'd do the same thing, except it'd be equipped with a hard drive for caching... It'd have a faster processor... It'd be far more versatile.
The model with windows CE is priced between 500-600 dollars, while the linux ones are under 700.
What's the CPU running these things and is HP going to make the Linux code available if it's something "non-standard" for Linux? (Like there are many CPUs nowadays that don't have fully functioning code in the standard kernel source tree....)
And, whatever the CPU might be, is HP going to make their JVM available for people who just want to just a solid JVM under Linux on whatever platform HP has built it?? No offense to the blackdown team, but it seems like Sun has been making it extra hard with the screwy way their quote-unquote open license for Java keeps developers from really sharing code patches such that porting efforts would probably work better in a closed environment like the sort you'd expect to find in HP's software labs.
I remember the days when Sun really was all about Open computing.
Naaah, it's pretty fast from Poland...
-jfedor
Seems like Windows people have just invented an X terminal...
Amazing!
-jfedor
It depends upon what you want to do. The basic problem you face here is that NT assumes single-user. If you don't want to use Terminal Server then you *will* need 5 copies of NT going. But here are some options.
If you really want to be able to throw the desktop remotely, look at VNC.
If the application that you are interested in can run on Linux (or has a Linux-friendly replacement), you can cheerfully install the application on one Linux box, run multiple copies of VNC server, and get the capabilities of NT Terminal Server with Citrix MetaFrame with the only software cost being the cost of the application. And your uptime will be better, bandwidth usage will be lower, and the result can be used from your choice of OS.
You don't even need VNC if you are willing to use it from a client that runs X-Windows. Any window can be thrown elsewhere. In a Linux environment *every* machine is the equivalent of NT Terminal Server. But unless you install software locally, Windows will not act as a client.
VMWare in Linux is mainly useful for dealing with a mixed Windows/Linux environment. With VNC you can throw a window elsewhere. However it will show up as a window containing Linux desktop within which you have a window whose contents are the NT machine. Can you say "blech"? For that set-up I would suggest using straight VNC on NT (unforunately you will then pay hardware rather than software).
Of course, as I mentioned before, in an all-Linux environment you would have had this functionality without needing additional software or multiple machines.
Regards,
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht
Its not worth it buying X terminals or low end unix boxes anymore when PC prices are so cheap. You could build a decent 466mhz celeron box with 64 or 128 meg of ram for the same price. Back when PC's were expensive and unix boxes still had the upper hand, it was worthwhile.
I have a list of easy features to request, and nowhere to request them. But an ongoing discussion would quickly turn unwieldly. Instead I would prefer to see a link for requests, with responses given and regularly interesting requests with answers returned.
:-)
In case anyone is interested, here are my requests:
- Allow the <CODE> tag.
- Replace leading white-space with (allowing indentation to work in Plain Old Text mode). I will even gladly supply the needed regular expression to do this.
- Add a simpler means of giving this kind of feedback.
Ben
My usual seat in the cluetrain is at A HREF="http://pub4.ezboard.com/biwethey.ht