A friend working for AFTAC just south of the Cape said that the reason they're always told is that in the late 50's, early 60's, Melbourne area wasn't on the Hurricane tracks. Even a couple of years ago during the bad season, they only got brushed with one. Locating it near Miami would have been a bad idea, as that gets almost all of them. (or so it seems)
Until she finishes night school, updates herself, and tells you that all of your drivers are out of date, so you'd better update them if you want to continue to run with her. She'll keep you around, because, you know, legacy support, but you'll know the difference.
...And then you realize, you are so ready for Solaris 10.
OTOH, it's good to see someone still championing Slackware. I was always kind of bummed that Yddragsil went under, if for no other reason than watching users try to pronounce it.
Years ago he was quoted in Forbes saying that his job was to make sure Microsoft had a fair share of the software marketplace, and that share was 100%. Be wary of him, but he drank the Kool-Aid a long time ago. By now it's been incorporated into his DNA, so it's probably good that he's beyond the age when he'll be reproducing more.
Those problems seem to be more common with older film-holders. Every now and the a batch just doesn't work right. And you're right, I've calipered mine as well, and only pitched a wooden Graflex.
I have a C220 as well, which tends to end up perched on a tripod. So for many purposes (not perspective control) it ends up going out ahead of the B&J. OTOH, I prefer to work in color, and getting sheets of that developed around here is an effort.
1984 would be good. We'd get VAX 11/785s, VAX Cluster, Digital CLI (where all languages could call the same system calls. Do your low-level OS programming in FORTRAN!), an OS that understands batch queues and security, and the Great Orange Wall. And, if you absolutely had to have something other than a VT240 on your desk, you could buy one of those new-fangled Macintoshes, and hook it up to the VAX via serial cable or modem.
If you worked in some off-brand department occupied by Univacs and DataGenerals, my condolences. The world of DEC was pretty hard to beat. (unless you were DEC, in which case you couldn't market eternal life.)
If you are (or can imitate) a student, you can get it for half that. You can then sleep soundly knowing that Adobe won't release a bugfix that also puts a boot on copies with illegal serial numbers.
You should really use Aperture, though. Lightroom just doesn't use enough resources for you to convince the SO that you need that Quad-Core MacPro + $1600 video card.
Providing that your film-holders are all in spec, putting the sheet at the same plane as your ground-glass, that the guides are holding it flat, and that you aren't one of those wierdo's who's stashed a freezer full of Super-XX from the 70s(nice tones, but hardly sharp) or shooting Efke 25 (for any LF stopped down for depth of field, exposures long enough that rocks get bored and start to fidget) You might actually get sharper pictures from a decent medium-format, just due to film-flatness issues. Calumet roll backs, Pentax67, or RB 67s are pretty cheap, and have the same aspect ratio (roughly) as 4x5. Plus you can afford color film for those.
Besides, 4x5 is generally too small to contact print. You really need to try FP4+ in 8x10.
If you got an enlarger big enough for 4x5 for $75, I'm impressed. Btw, just yanking your chain. I have a couple boxes of Agfapan 100 in 4x5 stashed away for a trip when I'm inspired and on my game.
Doubtful, since that's a pig. Probably Electric Pencil and an ADM3a. Why pay for the green lightning if you're never going to use it?
Re:7 centuries isn't feasible for humans
on
Interstellar Ark
·
· Score: 2, Insightful
Just idly, think of what skills you won't be able to practice for all those centuries, that you'll need on the far end. Mining comes to mind, and resources will be limited, so not a lot of new metalworking is going to get done either, nor advances or even maintenance of electronics fabrication. You can extrapolate this down the line, and unless someone finds a way to freeze the crew, and then thaw them out with their contemporary knowledge intact, you're running the risk of dropping off an, at best, 18th century agrarian society with some 21st century artifacts. (not that those artifacts, whether computers or just books will be in such great shape after 700 years) Good luck getting the landing-craft down if you've only ever driven a horse and buggy.
So, we probably aren't going to go until we can have the same crew that left be the one that arrives. Then, as others have pointed out, if we can build a habitable environment capable of traveling to E. Eridani, Tau Ceti, or any of the other nearby possibly suitable stars, we can build environments which don't travel, sit in orbit in our own solar system, and are simply lived in.
By the time we're worried about our own sun going nova, necessitating our leaving for elsewhere, we'll have long since gone extinct, and been replaced a few dozen times.
It's rare for an entire machine like that to fail. More likely is 1 processor board, or similar subsystem, which you can design for (I didn't get a result back, try again) in software, and, like the T3E which shipped with redundant processors, in hardware as well. If you have enough processors, you could stripe your job across several, so if one doesn't return a result, a second one will. Now, locating your only one of these machines in California might not be the best idea (we had an earthquake which started a eucalyptus grove fire, but don't worry, the mudslide put it out), but it's unlikely that you'll lose an entire one.
Just to geek out for a moment, picture a system large enough to finally troll through all of that data NASA brought back from the Mariner missions, and cross-reference it against what they get daily now from the various Mars probes. Finally turn all of that data into information, as the blog says.
(1) "Perhaps it fails the reliability test" and (2) " In as far at it is an experiment in the creation and indexing of information by millions of users around the world: it plain works."
Not to pick, but if (2) is true, then shouldn't (1) be as well? Otherwise, it's an experiment in whether you can get people to create and label data (which you can), not whether you can get them to create and index information (which remains to be seen). It's whether what's there is reliable that completes the transition to information rather than noise. Useful is nice as well, but somewhat more subjective. Unfortunately, your disdain for "experts" is part of the problem. On many subjects, there really are people who know more than the rest of us. If I have a choice between reading Knuth on Algorithms, versus some 1st year c-sci major who just wrote a quicksort, I'll take Knuth, and if you're interested in your programs running efficiently and correctly, so will you. Wikipedia rewards the one of them with more time on their hands to do rewrites and reversions (the 1st year), rather than the one who actually knows the subject at hand (Knuth), but has better things to do than monitor articles for vandalism.
Take for example the page on organometallic chemistry (for instance) which is adequate, though hardly complete, and containing what practictioners would consider several errors (most bioinorganic compounds, which are straight coordination complexes, are not "organometallic"). Missing from the history is the discovery of ferrocene (which very senior I-Chems consider to be the birth of modern organometallic chemistry), basic catalytic processes such as SHOP, Monsanto Acetic-Acid, or the Tennessee-Eastman variant of the above, carbenes, carbynes, metathesis, etc. Admittedly, this subject is of less general interst than Anna-Nicole Smith, but it seems that it deserves more than the 1/4 the verbiage, one footnote and 2 external references versus the latter's 64 footnotes.
Maybe rename it to eclectipedia and have it openly and joyously admit what it is? A large, eclectic jumble of facts, opinions, and unprocessed raw data of interest to the authors, and maybe of interest to anyone else.
I'm thinking in terms of MD simulations, and time-steps/hr. (or Nanoseconds/day). Even more so, I'm really thinking of QM/MM simulations with better than semi-empirical for the QM part becoming more routinely available.
Yes, I know it's self inflicted, but despite my best attempts trying to avoid it (I speak Solaris and program in Fortran, I cannot fix your laptop), I ended up spending hours cleaning up grad-student, post-doc, and faculty laptops afterwards. The worst were the ones who allowed their teenage kids to use the machines while waiting for them. As for user education, you notice that you got paid, and are still being paid by the other side. This implies that when it comes to user education, Windows users can be amazingly... dense. Kind of like dogs that don't learn after the first porcupine. You did that, you got stuck. Are you going to do it again?
So, while the Dow analogy is over the top (but we didn't have to invoke Godwin's law here), the justification for your doing that job still isn't sitting well from at least one of us who used to be the computer-everything for a group. (big Solaris machines down to why laptops made grinding sounds after being dropped)
Atomistic simulations of biomolecules. Chain a bunch of those together, and you begin to simulate systems on realistic time scales. Higher-resolution weather models, or faster and better processing of seismic data for exploration. Same reason that we perked up when the R8000 came out with its (for the time) aggressive FPU. 125 MFlops/proc@75MHz was nothing to sneeze at 15 years ago. If they can get this chip into production in usable quantities, and if it has the throughput, then they're on to something this time.
Of course, this could just be a single-chip CM2; blazingly fast but almost impossible to program.
Not everyone. Many of us were searching for the instructions or tools to delete the crap you were writing.
It's a pity that Tony "The Ant" Spilatro got done some years back, or I'd encourage you to go ask him to demonstrate his vice-grip to the head negotiation technique. Unless you joined that job intending to go white-hat, then you really should do something to atone for that job.
Your argument is similar to when Dow Chemical argued that it was patriotic for them to produce napalm, as anyone else would cost more and do a worse job, thereby screwing the taxpayer.
I remember an associate in grad school from CS, who said he hadn't seen a computer in four years. He was doing parallel algorithms on an idealized (PRAM) architecture, and real systems just got in the way. You probably should get some sort of degree for the resume points for when you're older and the PHBs are looking for reasons to replace you with younger and cheaper, but inferring from your question, you should probably look more on the engineering side. Real CSci tends to be applied math, though it takes a while for new grad students to realize this.
OTOH, it wouldn't kill you to brush up on your algorithms on your own time, then take some upper-level course in OS, networking, etc. They'd probably be interesting, you could use the knowledge, and you'll skip dealing with the layers of gen-ed courses designed to keep 18yr olds out of trouble and on their way to being somewhat educated citizens. (those courses are far from useless, but it's nice to be able to pick and choose from the advanced ones, and not have to take Psychology for Physicists with 1000 other students because the registrar said so)
Or, you could do the Apple version of PC/Linux people, and wait until people decide their old G4 is worthless, steal it from the dumpster, put some more memory into it, and install your copy of OS-X. In that case someone paid Apple the extra money, but not you, and you've put off buying a new machine for a few years to come (which deprives them of the income from a current model). In that light, the family pack to stay legit is a reasonable investment, especially as it helps fund further development of the OS. This is better than the WindowsXP familiy pack, at $209* number_of_old_copies_you_own, or $300*number_of_pcs.
Yes, Apple can be expensive, and I'm sure that if they were as big as Microsoft, they'd be far worse to deal with, because Steve J. is so much more creative than Steve B. However, they aren't, so they can afford to be a bit customer friendly.
Not really. At one job a PC failed before I came in one morning, and while everyone agreed that in fact no matter what you did it didn't even try to power up, rather than take it to the repair shop (downstairs in the same building), they waited for me to come and declare it officially dead before they took it down to the shop. They didn't want me to do it, they just wanted assurance from the technically inclined that yes, in accordance with all observations that six PhD's in physical sciences could make, that that machine was indeed truly dead.
So, yes, he should call the Geek Squad, who will declare, "yes and truly, this machine is junk", at which point he can replace it with a clear conscience.
Yes, the Cores are a proper upgrade to the PIII (and arguably what should have been released instead of the PIV), but for floating-point, the old PII/III/IV did suck compared to G4 and G5. Their only advantage was that you could afford to buy them in bulk and make up the difference by number of machines, rather than per-machine performance. The Core floating-point is now adequate, but still lagging.
Such a pity; I was hoping the MacPros would ship with dual-core Itaniums. Intel's last chance to make that chip sexy and desirable.
What is your company paying admins versus machines? If I can de-hire or reallocate 1/3 of my $40K/yr + benefits humans, and replace them with $25K machines, then my net costs go down. If I replace PC's with their several hundred watt power-supplies with something running on 60watts or less, then my power and cooling of offices goes down as well, generally much more than my server room goes up. (let us remember that the servers are generally running on 208V as well, which is more efficient) U. of C. did that switch to LCDs and SunRays because retrofitting the room with the additional cooling for tube-monitors was prohibitively expensive, even given the cost of LCD's in the late '90s. In a similar manner, I switched out the firebottles in the lab, and noticed the cooling became a lot more manageable during the summer when we were threatened with brown-outs.
As far as do a lot less, since the vast majority of the working world uses a web-browser or similar interface to access a remote database, makes spreadsheets, and types unreadable memos in Word, the lower functionality of the dumb-term doesn't really matter. Once again, easier maintenance, less to break, and less for the employee to mung makes them rather desirable. Frankly, if we had fibre to the curb in this country, there are a lot of people out there who should have WinTerms, LTP, or SunRays in their homes, and let someone else worry about the anti-virus, security, backup, etc. Probably not *you*, but the Great Untrained, certainly.
Actually, it isn't. If you're doing this right, then you've set up some form of clustering and failover with redundant machines, the same way you run RAID arrays rather than single huge disks, or don't base large commercial web-sites on one standalone machine. If you add in that now the end-user can't access the server, even indirectly (no cd-rom, ports, etc), and the devices lack moving parts like harddrives, then cost of management goes way down. In the end, this is actually ideal for large companies. Having supported stand-alone desktops in a small environment (60 desktop systems), I would say that unless you're harnessing the compute power of those desktops when they're not being used (Folding@Pfizer, for instance) then the cross-over point of easier is around 2-4 machines for Windows, maybe 8 for Unix.
I saw U. of Chicago do this with SunRays years ago for public spaces in the library, and it works beautifully for anything other than intensive 3-d rendering. Unfortunately, too many IT departments are dominated by people who only look at the up-front cost (I can buy a PC for what that thin-client costs), and not the entire life-cycle.
Slashdot Mirror
A friend working for AFTAC just south of the Cape said that the reason they're always told is that in the late 50's, early 60's, Melbourne area wasn't on the Hurricane tracks. Even a couple of years ago during the bad season, they only got brushed with one. Locating it near Miami would have been a bad idea, as that gets almost all of them. (or so it seems)
It won't matter, because Steve Jobs will release the iNavy, which everyone will upgrade to instead.
As said somewhere here previously, by someone else, "10,000 warheads, incredibly small."
Until she finishes night school, updates herself, and tells you that all of your drivers are out of date, so you'd better update them if you want to continue to run with her. She'll keep you around, because, you know, legacy support, but you'll know the difference.
Probably NASA's fault anyway. "No... Gentlemen, I do not believe we'll tell them that."
...And then you realize, you are so ready for Solaris 10.
OTOH, it's good to see someone still championing Slackware. I was always kind of bummed that Yddragsil went under, if for no other reason than watching users try to pronounce it.
Yes, but not with his 73-year old partner. Ballmer seems to be stabily married.
Years ago he was quoted in Forbes saying that his job was to make sure Microsoft had a fair share of the software marketplace, and that share was 100%. Be wary of him, but he drank the Kool-Aid a long time ago. By now it's been incorporated into his DNA, so it's probably good that he's beyond the age when he'll be reproducing more.
Those problems seem to be more common with older film-holders. Every now and the a batch just doesn't work right. And you're right, I've calipered mine as well, and only pitched a wooden Graflex.
I have a C220 as well, which tends to end up perched on a tripod. So for many purposes (not perspective control) it ends up going out ahead of the B&J. OTOH, I prefer to work in color, and getting sheets of that developed around here is an effort.
1984 would be good. We'd get VAX 11/785s, VAX Cluster, Digital CLI (where all languages could call the same system calls. Do your low-level OS programming in FORTRAN!), an OS that understands batch queues and security, and the Great Orange Wall. And, if you absolutely had to have something other than a VT240 on your desk, you could buy one of those new-fangled Macintoshes, and hook it up to the VAX via serial cable or modem.
If you worked in some off-brand department occupied by Univacs and DataGenerals, my condolences. The world of DEC was pretty hard to beat. (unless you were DEC, in which case you couldn't market eternal life.)
If you are (or can imitate) a student, you can get it for half that. You can then sleep soundly knowing that Adobe won't release a bugfix that also puts a boot on copies with illegal serial numbers.
You should really use Aperture, though. Lightroom just doesn't use enough resources for you to convince the SO that you need that Quad-Core MacPro + $1600 video card.
Providing that your film-holders are all in spec, putting the sheet at the same plane as your ground-glass, that the guides are holding it flat, and that you aren't one of those wierdo's who's stashed a freezer full of Super-XX from the 70s(nice tones, but hardly sharp) or shooting Efke 25 (for any LF stopped down for depth of field, exposures long enough that rocks get bored and start to fidget) You might actually get sharper pictures from a decent medium-format, just due to film-flatness issues. Calumet roll backs, Pentax67, or RB 67s are pretty cheap, and have the same aspect ratio (roughly) as 4x5. Plus you can afford color film for those.
Besides, 4x5 is generally too small to contact print. You really need to try FP4+ in 8x10.
If you got an enlarger big enough for 4x5 for $75, I'm impressed. Btw, just yanking your chain. I have a couple boxes of Agfapan 100 in 4x5 stashed away for a trip when I'm inspired and on my game.
Doubtful, since that's a pig. Probably Electric Pencil and an ADM3a. Why pay for the green lightning if you're never going to use it?
Just idly, think of what skills you won't be able to practice for all those centuries, that you'll need on the far end. Mining comes to mind, and resources will be limited, so not a lot of new metalworking is going to get done either, nor advances or even maintenance of electronics fabrication. You can extrapolate this down the line, and unless someone finds a way to freeze the crew, and then thaw them out with their contemporary knowledge intact, you're running the risk of dropping off an, at best, 18th century agrarian society with some 21st century artifacts. (not that those artifacts, whether computers or just books will be in such great shape after 700 years) Good luck getting the landing-craft down if you've only ever driven a horse and buggy.
So, we probably aren't going to go until we can have the same crew that left be the one that arrives. Then, as others have pointed out, if we can build a habitable environment capable of traveling to E. Eridani, Tau Ceti, or any of the other nearby possibly suitable stars, we can build environments which don't travel, sit in orbit in our own solar system, and are simply lived in. By the time we're worried about our own sun going nova, necessitating our leaving for elsewhere, we'll have long since gone extinct, and been replaced a few dozen times.
It's rare for an entire machine like that to fail. More likely is 1 processor board, or similar subsystem, which you can design for (I didn't get a result back, try again) in software, and, like the T3E which shipped with redundant processors, in hardware as well. If you have enough processors, you could stripe your job across several, so if one doesn't return a result, a second one will. Now, locating your only one of these machines in California might not be the best idea (we had an earthquake which started a eucalyptus grove fire, but don't worry, the mudslide put it out), but it's unlikely that you'll lose an entire one.
Just to geek out for a moment, picture a system large enough to finally troll through all of that data NASA brought back from the Mariner missions, and cross-reference it against what they get daily now from the various Mars probes. Finally turn all of that data into information, as the blog says.
(1) "Perhaps it fails the reliability test" and (2) " In as far at it is an experiment in the creation and indexing of information by millions of users around the world: it plain works."
Not to pick, but if (2) is true, then shouldn't (1) be as well? Otherwise, it's an experiment in whether you can get people to create and label data (which you can), not whether you can get them to create and index information (which remains to be seen). It's whether what's there is reliable that completes the transition to information rather than noise. Useful is nice as well, but somewhat more subjective. Unfortunately, your disdain for "experts" is part of the problem. On many subjects, there really are people who know more than the rest of us. If I have a choice between reading Knuth on Algorithms, versus some 1st year c-sci major who just wrote a quicksort, I'll take Knuth, and if you're interested in your programs running efficiently and correctly, so will you. Wikipedia rewards the one of them with more time on their hands to do rewrites and reversions (the 1st year), rather than the one who actually knows the subject at hand (Knuth), but has better things to do than monitor articles for vandalism.
Take for example the page on organometallic chemistry (for instance) which is adequate, though hardly complete, and containing what practictioners would consider several errors (most bioinorganic compounds, which are straight coordination complexes, are not "organometallic"). Missing from the history is the discovery of ferrocene (which very senior I-Chems consider to be the birth of modern organometallic chemistry), basic catalytic processes such as SHOP, Monsanto Acetic-Acid, or the Tennessee-Eastman variant of the above, carbenes, carbynes, metathesis, etc. Admittedly, this subject is of less general interst than Anna-Nicole Smith, but it seems that it deserves more than the 1/4 the verbiage, one footnote and 2 external references versus the latter's 64 footnotes.
Maybe rename it to eclectipedia and have it openly and joyously admit what it is? A large, eclectic jumble of facts, opinions, and unprocessed raw data of interest to the authors, and maybe of interest to anyone else.
I'm thinking in terms of MD simulations, and time-steps/hr. (or Nanoseconds/day). Even more so, I'm really thinking of QM/MM simulations with better than semi-empirical for the QM part becoming more routinely available.
Yes, I know it's self inflicted, but despite my best attempts trying to avoid it (I speak Solaris and program in Fortran, I cannot fix your laptop), I ended up spending hours cleaning up grad-student, post-doc, and faculty laptops afterwards. The worst were the ones who allowed their teenage kids to use the machines while waiting for them. As for user education, you notice that you got paid, and are still being paid by the other side. This implies that when it comes to user education, Windows users can be amazingly... dense. Kind of like dogs that don't learn after the first porcupine. You did that, you got stuck. Are you going to do it again?
So, while the Dow analogy is over the top (but we didn't have to invoke Godwin's law here), the justification for your doing that job still isn't sitting well from at least one of us who used to be the computer-everything for a group. (big Solaris machines down to why laptops made grinding sounds after being dropped)
Atomistic simulations of biomolecules. Chain a bunch of those together, and you begin to simulate systems on realistic time scales. Higher-resolution weather models, or faster and better processing of seismic data for exploration. Same reason that we perked up when the R8000 came out with its (for the time) aggressive FPU. 125 MFlops/proc@75MHz was nothing to sneeze at 15 years ago. If they can get this chip into production in usable quantities, and if it has the throughput, then they're on to something this time.
Of course, this could just be a single-chip CM2; blazingly fast but almost impossible to program.
Not everyone. Many of us were searching for the instructions or tools to delete the crap you were writing.
It's a pity that Tony "The Ant" Spilatro got done some years back, or I'd encourage you to go ask him to demonstrate his vice-grip to the head negotiation technique. Unless you joined that job intending to go white-hat, then you really should do something to atone for that job.
Your argument is similar to when Dow Chemical argued that it was patriotic for them to produce napalm, as anyone else would cost more and do a worse job, thereby screwing the taxpayer.
I remember an associate in grad school from CS, who said he hadn't seen a computer in four years. He was doing parallel algorithms on an idealized (PRAM) architecture, and real systems just got in the way. You probably should get some sort of degree for the resume points for when you're older and the PHBs are looking for reasons to replace you with younger and cheaper, but inferring from your question, you should probably look more on the engineering side. Real CSci tends to be applied math, though it takes a while for new grad students to realize this.
OTOH, it wouldn't kill you to brush up on your algorithms on your own time, then take some upper-level course in OS, networking, etc. They'd probably be interesting, you could use the knowledge, and you'll skip dealing with the layers of gen-ed courses designed to keep 18yr olds out of trouble and on their way to being somewhat educated citizens. (those courses are far from useless, but it's nice to be able to pick and choose from the advanced ones, and not have to take Psychology for Physicists with 1000 other students because the registrar said so)
Or, you could do the Apple version of PC/Linux people, and wait until people decide their old G4 is worthless, steal it from the dumpster, put some more memory into it, and install your copy of OS-X. In that case someone paid Apple the extra money, but not you, and you've put off buying a new machine for a few years to come (which deprives them of the income from a current model). In that light, the family pack to stay legit is a reasonable investment, especially as it helps fund further development of the OS. This is better than the WindowsXP familiy pack, at $209* number_of_old_copies_you_own, or $300*number_of_pcs.
Yes, Apple can be expensive, and I'm sure that if they were as big as Microsoft, they'd be far worse to deal with, because Steve J. is so much more creative than Steve B. However, they aren't, so they can afford to be a bit customer friendly.
Not really. At one job a PC failed before I came in one morning, and while everyone agreed that in fact no matter what you did it didn't even try to power up, rather than take it to the repair shop (downstairs in the same building), they waited for me to come and declare it officially dead before they took it down to the shop. They didn't want me to do it, they just wanted assurance from the technically inclined that yes, in accordance with all observations that six PhD's in physical sciences could make, that that machine was indeed truly dead.
So, yes, he should call the Geek Squad, who will declare, "yes and truly, this machine is junk", at which point he can replace it with a clear conscience.
Yes, the Cores are a proper upgrade to the PIII (and arguably what should have been released instead of the PIV), but for floating-point, the old PII/III/IV did suck compared to G4 and G5. Their only advantage was that you could afford to buy them in bulk and make up the difference by number of machines, rather than per-machine performance. The Core floating-point is now adequate, but still lagging.
Such a pity; I was hoping the MacPros would ship with dual-core Itaniums. Intel's last chance to make that chip sexy and desirable.
What is your company paying admins versus machines? If I can de-hire or reallocate 1/3 of my $40K/yr + benefits humans, and replace them with $25K machines, then my net costs go down. If I replace PC's with their several hundred watt power-supplies with something running on 60watts or less, then my power and cooling of offices goes down as well, generally much more than my server room goes up. (let us remember that the servers are generally running on 208V as well, which is more efficient) U. of C. did that switch to LCDs and SunRays because retrofitting the room with the additional cooling for tube-monitors was prohibitively expensive, even given the cost of LCD's in the late '90s. In a similar manner, I switched out the firebottles in the lab, and noticed the cooling became a lot more manageable during the summer when we were threatened with brown-outs.
As far as do a lot less, since the vast majority of the working world uses a web-browser or similar interface to access a remote database, makes spreadsheets, and types unreadable memos in Word, the lower functionality of the dumb-term doesn't really matter. Once again, easier maintenance, less to break, and less for the employee to mung makes them rather desirable. Frankly, if we had fibre to the curb in this country, there are a lot of people out there who should have WinTerms, LTP, or SunRays in their homes, and let someone else worry about the anti-virus, security, backup, etc. Probably not *you*, but the Great Untrained, certainly.
Actually, it isn't. If you're doing this right, then you've set up some form of clustering and failover with redundant machines, the same way you run RAID arrays rather than single huge disks, or don't base large commercial web-sites on one standalone machine. If you add in that now the end-user can't access the server, even indirectly (no cd-rom, ports, etc), and the devices lack moving parts like harddrives, then cost of management goes way down. In the end, this is actually ideal for large companies. Having supported stand-alone desktops in a small environment (60 desktop systems), I would say that unless you're harnessing the compute power of those desktops when they're not being used (Folding@Pfizer, for instance) then the cross-over point of easier is around 2-4 machines for Windows, maybe 8 for Unix.
I saw U. of Chicago do this with SunRays years ago for public spaces in the library, and it works beautifully for anything other than intensive 3-d rendering. Unfortunately, too many IT departments are dominated by people who only look at the up-front cost (I can buy a PC for what that thin-client costs), and not the entire life-cycle.