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Ellison to Push Linux NCs
sneakyfrog writes "Larry Ellison of Oracle made a (supposedly real this time) announcement claiming he would fund an NC effort with boxes running Linux.
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AND they would like nothing more that to get us to dl the OS everytime...total control..an X term is one thing but anyone stupid enuff to get one of these for home use deserves the BS that will inevitably be fed the'owners' of such hardware. Ellison is a putz and has been proved so wrong so many times....He advocates a shitty DB so why not a shitty NC solution
If the NC is going to run Linux, why continue the bondage to the x86 legacy?
Do not RISC processors generally have better performance per square centimeter (discounting research/development, marketing, and manufacturing scale costs) than x86?
Do not RISC processors have lower power consumption (at the same frequency/processing power)? (A small immediate benefit for NCs, but a long-term benefit for the processor designer since development costs can be extended into later embedded uses [which do tend to demand low power consumption] of the design.)
gee that sounds like the companies wet dream...oops you NC only has 16 meg..oh well our 'new' software needs 18...buy a new 'low' cost NC....hahahahah this is a suckers bet if I ever saw one....
I agree with most of what you're saying. PC managment isn't perfect by a long shot, and could be a lot better.
Remote managment was added to PC systems because of the threat that NCs posed. I suspect that any improved NC will have it's features copied into the PCs, and the NC itself will disappear.
Replacing 1/3 of an organisation's PCs would (in most cases) make things harder, as there would now be TWO different systems to maintain. Maybe if you were large and single site, or you had to support the back-end platform the NCs relyed on anyway....
I *Could* see a Linux distribution that was designed to be remote managable working though. Current systems (telnet, X-sessions) work fine for remote managment of single boxes, but remote mass-managment has a way to go yet. It would counter many of the proprietry hardware and network speed issues in my original post. There is still the issue of application availability, user re-training
And before anyone suggests Citrix for Windows Apps, it's just as hard to tie down as individual PCs, and much less reliable (one user's blue-screen is everyone's problem!) Good for dial-up access though.
I recall when I first went to college. They had hundreds of computers all over the place (mostly Pentiums), and not a single one had a hard drive. They booted from a network server, mapped all the drives out, and ran just fine, all through the network. Admittedly, they used a bunch of custom software, and MS-DOS 5-6, but I'm sure it wouldn't be hard to do something like that with Linux. But it'd be just as pointless.
You see, about 2 years later they started scrapping that whole idea, because the fact was you couldn't get any actual work done that was useful. You could run Windows or XWindows if you really wanted, but the network traffic got so unbearable that usually, you didn't bother. They became e-mail checking machines and that was about it.
Storage is cheap, administration can just as easily be done by some good scripting. No need to waste your bandwidth by an obscene amount.
The NC is dead, man. Rest in peace.
---
- Give a man a fire and he's warm for a day, but set him on fire and he's warm for the rest of his life.
Netscape stinks as a browser, it's slow, buggy and looks particularly bad under Linux (primarily because of the font issues under Linux).
Presumably this thing is aimed at the low end. I know I can't stand to use Netscape under Linux. Will the average user notice how much worse browsing looks on this thing than a PC?
Hopefully KDE will get their browser to a useful state someday (although that won't solve the font problem).
> I could open up 4 xterms and display more informaiton that you can with just a dumb text terminal.
:-). Seriously, GNU screen or virtual consoles would be better in this example, let X Window be X Window and serve apps where graphics are a fundamental and essential component.
At a cost of maybe 30x the RAM
> FLT. Flashing Led Terminal.
Heh. Where can I get one? Mmmmmm...das blinkenlights...
---------------------
---------------------
John 3:16 - God's Public License
Oh my. Please stay away from my network. That's the kind of attitude that has created the TCO debacle many companies are struggling with right now.
Grumble, grumble, grumble
Actually, all your web surfing and e-mail go through the company servers anyway; thus privacy still exists only to the extent the company chooses for it to exist. In other words, your privacy is often protected by policy, not technology.
With a well-configured server (e.g. Samba or the likes and a umask of 077 (or 037 with well-chosen groups)), though, employees can still have a great deal of privacy (and protection) from one other, and now you can have backup and recovery strategies that make sense (among all the other advantages of NCs or other thin clients). Don't want the company reading your files? Encrypt them.
--
This is not my sandwich.
No nothing prevenents you !
Actually there is an open source project running which will give you the ability to build an X Terminal with Linux have a look at this
http://www.ltsp.org/
Cheers
According to this article here:
Ellison is planning on spinning off the NC offering as its own company.
Yes I am closely watching this project for a while seems quite promising !
I am sitting in the computer support office of a company which puts NT boxes on people's desks. These boxes are used for the usual suspects - Word, Excel, Powerpoint - but also for running Reflection to connect to a big old UNIX box which runs the core business application. I look after the UNIX box, which just runs and runs, which is how I have enough time to post on Slashdot.
The Windows support people around me have a hard time. They are constantly running around installing and upgrading software on people's PCs[1]. Either that or fixing the problems people bring on themselves by changing settings or switching off their machine while the drive is writing. 90% of the problems I have are with users changing their Reflection settings so they can't connect to the UNIX box, rather than with the UNIX box itself - I'd hardly have anything to do at all if they were given dumb terminals instead of Windows boxes to connect with.
It seems to me that in this kind of environment, NCs would make a lot of sense. No local data storage. No local configuration to be mucked about with by users. All the advantages in terms of reliability and manageability of dumb terminals, but with plenty of local processing power. So the data stays where it belongs - in the center - but the processing is with the user.
Just think what a difference it would make in here. Software upgrades? Just do it once. Users screw up their configuration? Well, they can't.
Not that it is ever likely to happen. Oh well. Life as usual.
[1] Yes, I know with NT you can go a long way towards centralised applications and protecting the workstation from the actions of the local user. In fact, I believe that this has been done on this network as completely as it is possible to do so. And users still screw up their PCs. And techies still have to go around to do upgrades - to make sure those precious DLLs are in C:/WINNT or whatever.
The whole network computer thing is old, and it is a dead end. It might look good in theory, but in reality, it just isn't practical.
foo,
-davek
6th Street Radio @ddombrowsky
Maybe good ol' Larry could take a look at Linux Terminal Server Project here.
It has not been done by what I'd call Linux experts (ahem), but sure it is interesting.
Now, if I only could find an IBM RIPL implementation that works on Token Rings cards... 8-)
Bye, Rob!
AniToolBox! An Open Source animation program!
If this is like anything else from Oracle..
.. Expect it to be expensive and complicated
I am anxiously waiting for someone to come up with a good *nix/windows terminal server solution. I can use X fine for working on our big Unix server here, but it would be great if I could ditch VM-Ware for a windows terminal..
Does anyone know of a Java/X based windows terminal client/server solution? (Besides Citrix..=) I have already paid for VMWare, I don't want to spend a fortune on Citrix... or Windows terminal server. (Citrix == WTS??)
A network computer appears to be nothing more than a glorified X terminal.
Although the technological idea behind this is sound, there is a problem with network bandwidth if the number of users becomes high.
I myself always thought that hard-wired dumb terminals were the best idea. Little maintenance, less power consumption, and no distracting things to play with. I also felt that monochrome screens were easier to read and did not affect the eyes as much. Modern GUI applications cause a tremendous loss of time, and generally produce dreadful output, particularly if the user has too much control over font placing. I also find that having to use a mouse slows the user down quite considerably.
When at home, I do all my web browsing with Lynx - albiet sometimes under X as I can run two large screens simultaneously. I don't need any more. Unfortunatly a lot of web sites require something better.
Graphical prettyness hides content, wastes CPU power and network bandwidth, and attracts people to sites for the wrong reasons.
What I would really like to do is to find a working ASR-33, and wire that up to my Linux box. I did find an old teleprinter at a boot-sale last year, but the only interface was an accoustic coupler.
The thing I want to know is, why did Ellison wait so long before announcing this? He seems keen to use Linux to attack Microsoft's dominance, and this is the obvious way to do it, so why didn't he announce such a project months ago?
--
Xenu loves you!
Note: There seem to be two things called NCs
:-) ) with PCs
-A- The "Reincarnated X-Terminal" Type
Such as the NCD explora (alright, they *can* run some local apps, but they mostly don't)
-B- The "Reincarnated diskless workstation" Type
Such as the Sun Javastation
I couldn't be *certain* which were being talked about here, so I have tried to address both. Please bear in mind that some of the below points don't apply in both cases however.
My thoughts are as follows
1. Price
- Non-standardness Raises the price
- The price gets kept down only by removing essential functionality.
- PC prices get reduced to match NC price gains.
- Type As require hefty servers which are expensive and depreciate quickly.
2. Administration
- NCs usually introduce a new, and different way to administer the Applications on them.
- By the release of the NCs, PC software had cought up with any new ideas in it. I suspect this will be repeated in the next round.
3. Speed
- Transferring all your programs and data across the wire always winds up slower than reading them off a local disk. Much better to pre-transfer them to local storage, and load from there.
- Type As are terrible for any multimedia application. And too many standard applications have multimediaish bits in them.
3. Maintainence
- PCs are easy to replace. Changing brands may be difficult if the environment is really tied down, but being locked into some propritery technology is worse. (this applies more to type Bs)
- Networked PCs can work in some sort of limited "stand-alone" mode if the network dies.
The concept of NCs has been useful, however. It has forced software vendors into creating products that make WinTel PCs less of a nightmare to administer. I use Novell's ZENWorks a lot, and it can be used to provide "NC-like" administrability (have I just made a new word?
Another Idea PCs might usefully steal now is to make a machine at a lower price by only having iMac type expandability. Most corporations and govt. depts don't care about expandability for most of their PCs.
So, I guess although I think NCs will die, their useful components will be merged into PCs.
This are ment to be very low-cost solutions, so they probably won't have too much RAM. X + Netscape is real memory hog, and users will definetly be runnig more than just that. So what do you do when you run out of memory? Since these things don't have a hard drive, swapping is not an option. "Error - not enough memory to run application."? yuck.
The NC is already here and it has absolutely nothing to do with Oracle or Linux or Windows or the "NC platform" etc etc etc etc.
It is ANY system with a web browser. The web browser is the "new universal interface" in the same way telnet still is.
Build/modify your applications to be web enabled and you have a NC available application. And I don't just mean Java here (PHP, CGI, ASP etc).
This announcement is completely irrelevant and about as near to useless as you get these days from the big boys.
Deleted
So what you are saying that it's much more practical to support a X-NUMBER of machines with X-NUMBER various settings.. etc?
:1
... other than that.. cheep cheep cheep.
I been in companies where we have used both.. our R&D uses X windows runing on a single linux box..
That -one- box is backed up daily..
That -one- box is upgraded occasionally..
That -one- box -never- has problems.
I could setup a linux box and have it running in minutes without so much as my K-Desktop theme...
Not to mention, I could get near same performance out of a 486 with 64 megs of ram as I do with my PentiumIII-500 w/128.....
I simply append onto the end of my startup script
X -query 192.168.1.1
and thats it...
of course I use Xwindows on my own machine because I can.. but the point is, we have StarOffice installed for any interaction our group needs w/business apps.. we have a Postscript TCP/IP printer..... etc.
No problems..
I have VMWare installed on our Linux Server as well for when we need to use PC-Anywhere to (more often than not) work on our NT-Servers at the server farm, or use other misc. Windows admin tools.
Right now we operate with almost 0 IT support...
Oh, and the cost of all that software and setup? Well, we paid for our VM Ware and our NT Workstation
I have also seen a similar setup with the Citrix Winframe software, and frankly.. I think it is damn neat..
If we had a real reason to -need- to be running Windows on our desktops, I would almost demand some type of terminal solution..
I would hardly call it unpractical or archaic.. especially when one PC (Not mainframe) can serve that.. You forget that a normal PC is quiet powerfull... and obviously more than theory.. because a lot of companies use it.
$.02
Could anybody with more insight please explain to me (and probably to others, too) what _fundamental_technical_ obstacles exist which prevent you from building a nc-server network with one big and several small standart pc's and your favorite linux distribution?
I mean Xfree, nfs/code etc, nis/kerberos, telnet/ssh. Not every package mentioned is perfect, but I want to know about fundamental problems. Isn't - in this context - the "network computer" just a buzzword? Take a large ramdisk and boot over the network using something as nilo..
Or don't use the all or nothing approach and use a local harddisc + apps over network.
I have an idea -- maybe Larry was secretly on the side of the fat clients all along, and the whole thing was a ploy to buy time for software vendors. After all, Oracle is a software vendor. The plan was for him to loudly and vocally proclaim himself an advocate of NC (which he did), and then to marshal the resources of the NC backers to his banner (which he did) and then to cause said resources to flounder badly (guilty) thus giving the incumbents YEARS to address the shortcomings in their offerings revealed by the NC concept. ^_^
Crusade against lame software! votezone.com
At the last show I went to.. Windows 98 or somthing (anything for a free day off work) they had some rather nifty workstations from IBM. Basically they were X Terminals with the WinFrame client in.. You could have your X app next to your Win app...
And I'm not at all surprised at he uptake of NT Terminal server. The licensing pushes the cost up more. You're basically paying for Terminal Server (which costs more than NT server anyway) + a WinNT workstation licence, even if you're using one of these terminals, or, in fact if you're using Win95.. Microsoft win-win situation..
May contain traces of nut.
- classrooms
- hotel rooms
- public places like airports, freeway rest stops, etc
- public labs in libraries
- and so on...
basically, wherever you don't have a one-to-one relationship between users and computers, NCs are a no brainer. when there is that 1-1, then i guess it's a matter of religious conviction: were ya raised on a single-user OS or a multi-user OS?our intention is not to replace LANs with some old relic mainframe system. we are merely attepmting to replace most of the viral bolated client programming that has infected individual workstations with a more manageable server based concept. in the past, we here have spent weeks developing *client-server* aplications, some complete with client side database connections; then spend months trying to deploy the application to the workstations; then spent a lifetime administering the constant problems. we now try (when it makes sense) to use something like server-side java with a browser front-end. nothing needed on the client but a browser and a jvm if using applets; kind of like the internet? maybe even kind of like a *gui* dumb terminal connected to a mainframe server. the server could even be an old relic maninframe server; an os/390 running websphere. a *network computer* is only a concept, it doesn't have to be a hardware replacement of a workstation.
I don't mind NCs but all the ones so far tend to be way too expensive for what you get.
You must be an old timer... But I bet I still have a lower acct#
of how Dilbert's boss really thinks: and here it is. Enjoy!
Does anyone feel like going to the lords of server admin and dba and beg them to install that one extra application that would save you weeks and weeks of stupid typing work, or extract that one query-result from the database that you really need?
No? Well get your own PC and start doing your own thing, and make sure to network it, so that you can still collaborate with the rest of the organisation.
Some people really think that users abandoned the mainframe in large numbers, just because it had dumb text-based terminals. Wrong. As a matter of fact, they left the mainframe, at the time, for a system that was text-based too (msdos). What really matters, is that the users rather help themselves, than be at the mercy of the autocratic, self-serving lords of the central system.
Since the nc brings back the situation that users desperately wanted to leave, it will continue to fail miserably.
Any company that installs NCs, will see PCs popping up all over. And users will have 2 monitors on their desktop, one for the NC and one for the PC; and in the end all the real data will reside in the PC, and the NC will just be decoration. A bit later, some smart company will come up with PC-based terminal emulation for the NC-server and the NC will disappear completely. Bye bye.
Since we've been through all that, I can only see totally brainless managers trying this again...
Please do think "backups", but from a different perspective. Just think about what can go wrong if you have to backup several tens or hundreds of PCs every night! There simply are too many potential problems, and as an admin, if you rely on such a system, you simply cannot guarantee anything about your backups.
For years now, central data storage has been a standard in any shop that takes its IT support seriously, independent of the NC drive
--
Linux user since early January 1992.
In a mainframe environment, the lords of the system are the user group. They decide over life and death. In a unix environment, the sysadmin wants to control your life. In an oracle environment, the dba is the guy to kow tow to. Regardless of all the crap they've produced in addition, in a Microsoft environment, the user is the lord of the system. They've dethroned the autocrats who think the center of the world is the server room. Users definitely prefer NT-admins and SqlServer dbas to their Unix and Oracle counterparts, if it were only because they tend to be so much more responsive the users' needs. Linux, on its side, will have to prove itself: if it goes the Unix and Oracle way, it will never reach the masses.
Have a look at Linbox (http://www.linbox.com), which seems to have designed a nice solution with diskless stations + server running under Suse or Mandrake. The diskless 'Net stations' can seemingly run Linux, Windows, or MacOS as requested at the boot.
...Harlan Ellison said that these NCs are ugly pieces of [poop].
sup
I hope if they do this they at least take the time to install it on one of their boxes first. The documentation Oracle shipped us for Oracle8 for Linux was the Solaris documentation with a search/replace Solaris/Linux. The installer they shipped was broken. Gack. Am I smoking crack? Anyone else had these problems with Oracle/Linux. It just plain scares me that they seemed to assume the unix is unix is linux... YMMV
I don't know how many times I've heard that NC's are "the big thing" the last 8 years. But - instead of taking of - terminals has dissapeared more and more. PC's and workstations are replacing them.
Why does this happen? Well, as far as I can tell, there are several reason. One - the most obvious - being that people want the same system that they've got at home. They want to be able to install programs. They want to be able to set the system up to their preferences. The problem with this is of course managing computers with individual setups.
Also, there is a privacy issue. You cannot possibly belive that the workers use all the time *working*. They surf the web, they write personal letters, and so on. Furthermore -- they don't want this to be stored on a central server. They want it to be stored on "their" computer.
Another thingie. With one central server, the companys work is much more vulnerable - if an evilminded cracker breaks system integrity. Don't think "backups!!". If a cracker really want to be bad, he trojans the backupsoftware, and let several weeks pass, before he erases everything. The result? Several weeks worth of work lost. If workers store their work at individual machines, everything won't be lost at the same time. (But, it is a much greater chance of machines getting cracked from time to time).
Finally - I think the NC have a future at the workplace. it's much more easy to configure / maintain for the administrator. But - only in workplaces where the workers know unix. I don't think the NT users are 'ready' for this. They want everything to be the same way as 'at home'.
--
"Rune Kristian Viken" - http://www.nwo.no - arca
The original Oracle NC was a *486 running *BSD with a fluffy X-based GUI on top. What's going to make the 'new' Oracle NC any different? A *686 and *Linux?
IBM came the closest to the NC concept, with a box that actually ran a Java-based OS and had some Lotus Java productivity applications. I think the goal was to provide a replacement to their (apparently still profitable) mainframe terminal business.
As a point of trivia, the old Oracle Network Computer division has been spun off as "Liberate" (big building on US101), and no longer makes NCs, but instead set top boxes and webtv things. The article was unclear if Liberate whould make the new Oracle NCs.
Business. Numbers. Money. People. Computer World.
Network Computers duplicate ideas that have been pushed over and over again in the networked world. First there was the dumb terminal, then there was the X-Termal. These days there is the web / java terminal. They are all some form of network computer. When you get right down to it there is a "right tool for the job" problem. If there is something that is cost effective and gives you the applications you need, use it, by all means. Linux boxes running X, go for it. PC's runing an X server, go for it. Mac's running native applications, go for it. Mainframes with dumb terminals, go for it. The test of a technology is that the system administrators _AND_ the users are able to easily complete their jobs. If you have a system that is easy to manage, and easy to use, you have a winner. Those who are truely techologically clueful will be able to use any system. Those who are not will need something that makes the particular thing they need a computer to do easy, and each platform has their own strengths in that area.
This article doesn't suprise me at all. Oracle has been pushing this way for a while. They started pushing that way with NCI (They use FreeBSD) making an NC that runs under Linux wouldn't be that difficult. What Ellison really needs is the clueless IT manager going "oh! Linux Network computers! great *peanutbrainwhirring* linux == good *drool*"
Its what most IT managers do now with NT, soon it'll be Linux, after that who knows what.
Point being is that Oracle isn't stupid, they've already had a lot of the NC work done by NCI, now they just have to port the stuff over. They already have Oracle 8 ported to Linux, chances are they have their 'embedded' Oracle 8 ported over as well. Spending a few hundred man hours to port all their crap onto Linux based NC's is a no brainer. Its free money if it takes off.
I see even classic Slashdot is now pretty much unusable on dial up anymore.
I've had the (unfortunate) opportunity to play around with a version of the original NC (remember the first time Larry tried this ?). I had always surmised that these were no more than a glorified X-terminal. My suspicions were confirmed when, upon power up, the old familiar X root desktop appeared for a few seconds.
Apparently, the manufacturers of these NC's simply bootstrapped some browser on top of the X client and continued producing their X-terminals with this new facade. I remember the late 80's glory day(s) of the X-terminals and am somewhat perplexed at this re-emergence of a solution that doesn't expand upon the X-terminal, but rather limits it to java-based applications. Real network computers with the real ability to run X-based apps have been around for nearly 20 years now, and they work.
Let's look back at "Oracle" Ellison's predictions, in chronological order:
1994 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1994 to be the year of the Network Computer" - PC Week
1995 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1995 to be the year of the Network Computer" - PC Magazine
1996 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1996 to be the year of the Network Computer" - Network Computing
1997 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1997 to be the year of the Network Computer" - Thin Client Today
1998 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1998 to be the year of the Network Computer" - Farmers Journal Quarterly
1999 - "Oracle chief Larry Ellison proclaims 1999 to be the year of the Network Computer" - Linux Journal
I hope Slashdot doesn't become another magazine to fall into this moronic trap of falling for every Oracle press release. Overall, prophet Ellison has proved himself a little short on vision.
www.jackasscritics.com
So what do you do when you run out of memory?
The solution is to not run out of memory. Since NC's are really glorified terminals and the real apps run on the server you know how big your app is before you start it running - the app on the NC app is just a big fancy XTerm or whatever. On the other hand, if you also support Java capability you just toss any code that doesn't fit in cache any more and reload it as necessary - for most users this won't happen (put in enough memory so it doesn't happen) and network traffic won't increased very much at all - perhaps it will still be less than the db accesses that happen constantly when the apps run on PC's.
Life's a bitch but somebody's gotta do it.
Maybe, but I doubt it. I don't know many people who want to replace their NT box at work with 98 because that's what they have at home.
They want to be able to install programs.This is absolutely the Number 1 thing you don't want users to be able to do.
They want to be able to set the system up to their preferences.I don't see any reason NC's prevent this. I certainly am able to configure my own themes and desktop layout under X.
Also, there is a privacy issue. You cannot possibly belive that the workers use all the time *working*.Having your files on your own box doesn't help. Unless you have permissions on the file system. But the server allows you to set file permissions too, so I don't see what the difference would be.
If workers store their work at individual machines, everything won't be lost at the same time.Storing your work on your own PC may be fine for a very small company ( less then 15 employees). But in that case, NC's probably wouldn't be a viable solution. Show me any large company that would keep employee's work on their local hard drives? The idea is preposterous.
-Brent--
After reading a few posts here I think that everyone is missing the entire point of a GUI.
Everyone statues that using a GUI is slower thatn using the console. While this is true the purpose of a GUI is to make learning to use programs easier. Take any Microsoft product. They all have File, Edit, and Help menus. You can go to just about any product that they have done and they all have then and they are all in the same place. This makes going from Excel to Word, to Project adn other programs a bit easier for yes 'newbies'. This uniform interface is something that does not really exist in command line interfaces. For each command line program you have to learn a new set of commands. While this is fine for many of the Linux and UNix users out there as they are accusomed to this way of life. Many people who are new to computers, are really not intereseted in learning that much about computers.
If you ever watched/read Dilbert, think of his boss. Do you really think that Dilberts boss cared one way or another about grep -i or rgrep -ir? NO! He'd want a simple GUI that he has to learn very little to use.
Now to get back on topic. NC's NC are in a way similar to the old Unix dumb terminals. However in the case of an NC the true idea is to make them smart terminals. They should have a cpu a little memory, and no hard drive. Basically a diskless machine. If the network application is done in perl, or cgi then chances are the network computer will nt be doign to much. However if the applicaiton is done in Java nd the whole system is set up correctly it should use its own cpu, which is what is supposed to make it smart. THe difference form setting up a network copmputer and a diskless machine is supposed to be cost and space. A NC should be small, as it has very few parts, and disposable.
I have yet to try these and am actually wondering if there is anyone out there that is uisng them and what results they have?
just my 2 cents...IMHO...
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