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. "

Comments

NCs *are* a good solution....

[sparks]

...but we all know that being technically good doesn't necessarily mean something will be a technical success, especially in the convention-bound world of corporate IT.

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 NC is already here.

[Colin Smith]

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.

Re:The NC is already here.

[Tet]

The web browser is the "new universal interface" in the same way telnet still is.

Nope. It's a universal interface for simple applications. Anything that requires conditional processing is out unless you go the Java route, and given how slow/flaky the JVMs in most browsers are, that's probably not a good plan. JavaScript and DHTML help to some extent, but they don't go far enough. Try changing the entries in a form menu based on an earlier action in anything other than Java. PHP can do it, but only with a page reload which is unacceptable for performance reasons. I'd love to do a web font end for my current application (which is written in Tcl at the moment), but it's too complex to do without using Java (which we're not allowed to use anyway, because we don't have enough Java expertise on site to support the applicaiton).

A question...

[platypus]

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.

Year of the NC

[fuerstma]

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.