Sun Discovers Dumb Terminals 605
Yahoo has a story about how Sun is practicing a sort of floating workforce - many employees have no permanent desks, they just come in and log on to a dumb terminal, err, thin client. Besides being a sneaky way to encourage employees to arrive ever earlier at work, it probably is cheaper to run the business off a few large Sun servers - at least for Sun.
Real brilliant. (Score:4, Insightful)
-Evan
Re:Real brilliant. (It is at least a step in the r (Score:2, Interesting)
Plus, it makes the IT departments job SOOOOOO much easier.
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:5, Interesting)
And from an admin point, I just finished patching 20 boxes for known security holes. Wouldn't it be great to just patch one server?
I don't think the point of this tech it to get rid of your desk, just to get rid of the concept of "Bob's computer".
"Hotelling" (Score:5, Interesting)
Here's a similar story, slightly off-topic, but illustrative of a similar corporate mindthink.
A few years back someone told me of how "Kal Kan", the american dog-food company, operates. The entire headquarters is run out of a large open space similar in size to a high-school gymnasium. There are no cubes and no offices. Desks were arranged class room style, in neat rows. Everyone, from the president on down, worked from identical desks and identical chairs. Everyone had a single 2 drawer filing cabinet in their desk. At night, the cleaners were instructed to throw away anything that was left on top of the desk. Fax machines, copiers, water coolers, and conference rooms were along the outside walls. Apparently everyone respected everyone's privacy and kept their voices down.
There is a certain comfort knowing that everyone at work is being treated equally. Hotelling is another way to bring that about.
I think it might be most useful for businesses where a lot of staff are always 'out of the office'. When I started out as a environmental consultant, I only had a couple of project files at any one time. A hotelling setup would have been ideal for us most of us were in the field half the time.
Re:"Hotelling" (Score:5, Insightful)
What a sad picture. I hope future of workplace does
not head in this direction. I hate cubicles! I like nice offices, possibly for 2-3 persons no more, with non uniform furniture. I like touch of personality in the office. I like wooden desks and shelfs. I like table lapms and filing cabinets. I like to be able to turn on music while I am working. I am programmer, not factory assembly line worker for god sake.
Here how I would do: I would allocate each emploee certain amout per year to furnish his office. He can chose whatever he wants from furniture and accessories within this budget.
Re:"Hotelling" (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:3, Funny)
Put pictures, dilbert doll, and filing cabinet in it.
Wheel it wherever you go.
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:5, Informative)
Not even close. The login process for each dumb terminal (with the swipe card) automatically sets your default printer to the nearest printer. It even routes your phone number automatically to the handset on your desk.
The brilliant bit is that you can pull your swipe card out, move to a different desk, put the card back in, and your entire desktop reappears without a single application lost. And your phone moved with you!
You just click on the username and it shows the floorplan with John's current desk location highlighted.
But it isn't! On a normal day you tend to work on dozens of projects. This system lets you move all the people in a specific project together, so you are sitting right next to the people you are working with. Two hours later you move to the next project on your list so you move near the people working on that project.
You're always sitting in close proximity to the people you're working with. A traditional desk-per-user system means you're always walking up/down stairs or between buildings. This new system means your desktop moves with you.
The downside is that your pens and manuals don't move with you. In practise this encourages people to work out of their briefcases, which is convenient for techs who spend most of their time onsite. It does away with the "damn, I left the important list of instructions on my desk back at work".
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:2)
Personally I like having my own desk. Actually I have 2 desks, a fourth of a "team-style" mega-cubicle. The cubicles are arranged so that people on the same project sit together.
My question to you about this whole fiasco is that who decides where you're meeting.. er.. moving for your next project? Should John come to your current desk and the rest of the team too? Or the other way around? Or are you just too lazy to walk?
This is actually pretty dumb. People who do real work often have binders full of documentation, etc in binders at their desks. Tell me you're going to cart around those circuit boards you've been fiddling with and debugging all day from desk to desk. Yeah, right.
I hope Scott Adams rips Sun a new one in the next few Dilberts
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:2)
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:2, Interesting)
Uh, yeah. I have about 70 books in my office, a filing cabinet, and maybe a half dozen project binders. That's a big assed briefcase to haul around.
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:2)
But it isn't! On a normal day you tend to work on dozens of projects. This system lets you move all the people in a specific project together, so you are sitting right next to the people you are working with. Two hours later you move to the next project on your list so you move near the people working on that project.
Whats ironic about that statement is that you are touting a great networking capability for its ability to bring people physically proximate.
Part of the idea of a network was that you could collaborate without being face to face. You can send these things called emails, you can share files over it, etc. Works great for me. I dont particularily want to be next to people who are going to be interupting me alot.
Are you sure people are going to use this roaming ability for work? Maybe theyll just sit next to friends to socialize (apparent primary function of most business-types), which is the typical case for human self organizing systems. (see any school cafeteria) Coding particularily does not require long-protein exchange.
In fact its possible to do a very good programming job without ever having seen the people you are working with in person. This roaming stuff seems all downside to me.
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:3, Funny)
So let me get this straight...
I don't know whether to laugh or cry.
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:5, Interesting)
Bah! An efficient workplace requires people who know how to work with eachother, relationships, context, the right ammount of routine balanced against variety.
The mass-produced interchangeable part paradigm works very well with machines. Since the dawn of the assembly-line, corporate wonks have been trying to do it with people, and with miserable results.
Yeah, sure, incentivize your interchangeable drones to come to work earlier and enter a FIFO queue of interchageable work terminals. Looks great on paper.
I can see several things happening. First, the obvious worst-case scenario is where people feel (justifiably so) that they are being treated like robots, and a sense of disatisfaction, isolation, and anger sets in. You'll never know if you're sitting next to the guy who's gonna go postal today.
Second (and far more likely) the traditional type of social organization will start to impose itself on the system. People won't regard this arrangement in the nice, neat, theoretical way that management would like. People will exchange the possibility of a "better" cube for the *same* cube each day to provide continuity. There will be people who "save" cubes like people save seats in bars and churches (Theoreticly anybody could sit at Norm's seat at Cheers, but in practice, nobody does).
Unless they are shift-workers, people will "mark their territory" and after a while people will start saying stuff like "oh, that's Jane's cube" if some other person tries to sit there.
If management tries to deter this by enforcing a policy of cleaning cubes at the end of the day, the anger thing might happen, or people might bring "personality packs" that they set up and tear down at the end of the day.
Then, management might have start forcing employees to log in at a different terminal each day, thus wiping away the last vestige of this territorial pack mentality.
What of these packs? Well, there will be tribes of course. Over there in the corner, that's the JVM tribe, there's the sales tribe, the object modeling tribe, etc. Why would a salesman want to sit next to an object modeler? How do you know where to point the nerf gun if the territory keeps shifting? It would be like Afghanistan. Friendly nerf fire casualties could skyrocket until the system works itself out.
Once the territories are established, leaders will emerge, hierarchies will form, etc. It's inevitable.
The system they are describing, in and of itself, is not necessarily bad. It could in fact, be a much better framework in which to establish cliques and hierarchies than simply *assigning* places to people.
However, if it's coupled with an attempt by management to overturn the normal social order, they are just wasting their time and actually making things worse. Nevermind all this network stuff. Face-time still matters. Your online friends and co-workers just aren't the same as people you actually have lunch with and throw things at.
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:3, Insightful)
Basically, the folks at Sun aren't morons and won't try to impose this sort of chaos on people who will tend towards order. Instead they take the chaotic situation of people who are either moving around a lot or frequently on the road or at home and try to simplify that experiance. Prior to this system being in place, probably 5-10% of sun's offices were drop in offices. Anyone could use that space. The flexibility that gave folks was so appealing they enlarged the program to a new level for certain groups of people.
Re:Real brilliant. (Score:4, Interesting)
[1] for a group of 6-8 people, we kept two offices. this was really useful for when you were doing work that required serious concentration, or if you had to make a private phone call. they were seldom used.
the setup worked great. there were typically 4-6 people in the lab. the theory of being able to pick any terminal did slowly evolve into people having a "normal" terminal, where people would leave manuals and such. evey once in a while, you'd walk in and there'd be someone passed out on the couch (if you were a loud sleeper, you used one of the offices, which also had a couch in it). we had one guy who telecumuted from halfway across the country, and was on-site for one week a month; after the second visit or so, he stopped getting a hotel and lived out of the office (thankfully, we had showers in the basement). whenever someone walked in who wasn't normally there who wanted to show/ask us something, or who we wanted to show/ask something, she'd just log in and go.
your reaction was not unheardof among people neighboring our odd lab. but you're describing very much a worst-case scenario, and is impacted by a number of factors, probably most strongly by how management (we pretty much managed ourselves, basically appointing one of us as an acting manager) treats it. in our lab, personal decorations were encouraged (everyone was expected to bring at least something in, and people hung a flag of choice around the perimiter of the ceiling - the lab quickly got the name "the Flag Room"). management needn't force people to move around, but should encourage people to sit by whoever they're working with at the moment. if you work with the same group of people on a long project, it makes sense you'll sit near each other for a good while. management should tell people not to do anything that prevents people from logging in at that terminal, though.
the results of this sort of environment are that you form a stronger community with your co-workers, and you get all the beifits that go along with it. your code (or other work) is of better quality, because it's dramatically easier to say "hey, what do you think of this?" than it is when you even have to go to the cube next door. the two private offices recognize the occasional need for real privacy (which cubes don't give at all, despite the illusion of). you form a social bond with the people you work with, too, which is just sort of a nice side-benifit. and you tend to be right next to the people you're actively working with, moving to another lab to work with a different set of people (although there were only two like this in the building i know of).
Re:Fortune (Score:2)
digi(.com) i believe makes isa and pci serial port cards that you hook to 'port collectors' that come w/ 16 serial ports. you can daisy chain up to 16 of them to get 256 ports i think.
Snow Crash (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Snow Crash (Score:3, Insightful)
I wonder if this is something that Sun is looking for on purpose, or if it's just a nifty side bonus. In any event, this officially puts Sun on my list of places to avoid working.
Sooner or later, they'll patent it... (Score:5, Funny)
US 7,888,488: A system and method to allow employees to work from anywhere without having a fixed office.
Little will the USPTO know that this concept is inspired by a 20 year old concept known as a *dumb terminal*, and they'll patent it anyway.
GJC
Go ahead, mod me down! I've karma to spare!!
Go ask Chiat/Day about the reality of this... (Score:3, Funny)
Re:Go ask Chiat/Day about the reality of this... (Score:3, Funny)
We had this when I was a kid... (Score:5, Funny)
Musical Layoffs (Score:2, Funny)
Take away 50 cubicles each day, and if there's no cubicle left for you when you get to work, well, you know what that means...
Officeless offices failed at Chiat/Day (Score:3, Informative)
Re:Officeless offices failed at Chiat/Day (Score:2)
In this day of VPN and common if not ubiquitous broadband, staying home is just as effective at doing the job many times.
Chiat-Day tried this 7 years ago, and failed big (Score:2)
Not coincidentally, the company tanked soon after this started, and had to be sold in order to survive. In their new offices, traditional offices are the rule of the day.
LOL!!! Dilbert !!! (Score:5, Funny)
Scene: A staff meeting is in progress...
PHB With Diagram: We're taking away your cubicles. In the new system you'll sign up for whatever cube is open that day.
PHB: It's based on the model of public restrooms. But I call it "hotelling" because it increases my chances of getting tips.
PHB: Each cubicle will have a computer, a chair, and a roll of note paper ... take on and pass it around. [Hands out notepaper roll which looks like toilet paper roll.]
Sun Rays and remote X (Score:5, Informative)
The server rooms, conference rooms, and most offices had 24" monitors connected to Sun Ray 1 machines. My friend showed me how he could put his smart card in, and then it would ask him for his password, and he was logged into the exact same desktop that he had in his office. So whatever he was working on "followed" him around. Granted, it was just a remote X terminal, but I thought it was cool.
And I'm sure there's those of you who say, "it's been done before" or "that's old tech" but as servers get more powerful, and workstations become smaller, quieter, and dumber, it was cool to see this "old tech" being put to (damn) good use.
While my friend did have his own office, as did everyone else at that particular campus, it could be an interesting management experiment (if you want to call it that) to rotate people's desks around... maybe every month. That way, if people have a problem with coworkers, you can separate them, and that way everyone can get to know everyone else... and the new people don't feel so alienated. Of course, when you have roaming profiles, or dumb terminals, that makes things that much easier.
Re:Sun Rays and remote X (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Sun Rays and remote X (Score:2, Interesting)
I have one thing positive to say about these computers: presentations. There's something cool about making your presentation and loading it all up and pulling out your smart card and then going to where your going to give your presentation and putting in the card and there it is ready to go. No waiting. Then you go and give the presentation and it takes 10 seconds to change slides because they're so slow.
The one last thing I have to mention about these systems is that they are not worth the money. You can fill an office with PCs for LESS money and then users have a system that they know and can use. I've seen people with these systems as novices. They are completely clueless. It's much better not to expect the public to relearn an OS. Yes, I know, windows is bad, but for office use, when that's what everyone knows, you really need to go that way. My school bought 700 terminals to the tune of $600 a piece. About 70 are in use and if more that 20 people are logged into a computer it's too slow to use. Sun claimed 700 users could use ONE server and we have 2 that breakdown after 40.
Wow. (Score:3, Interesting)
- You don't have adequate resources to handle what you are doing
- Your administrators have no idea how to maintain large sun servers. You should NOT have reboots that frequently. Once or twice a year, if that is adequate.
You can't measure a system based on the cost per workstation alone.
What about software? Maintenance? Etcetera?
Maintaing a network of PCs is HUGELY expensive compared to a network of sunray machines.
Six hundred bucks per workstation? I've seen sunrays for a fraction of that. Those must be the ones with built in displays.
If you say sun claimed one e4500 (or whatever oyu have with 16 processors) could handle 700 desktops, I'd say you, or whoever told you that, is lying, or didn't understand what they said. THat is such outrageous bullshit I can't believe even sun would say that. You'd need an E10k loaded out to the nuts to even *maybe* do that.
Also, did you have sun factor in the applications you would be running? You see...
If you tell sun precisely what you want, they will give you a price *and deliver*
Re:Sun Rays and remote X (Score:3, Interesting)
Most likely, if it's too slow to use after 20 users on a 16-processor box, the box is not the bottleneck (unless every one of those users is re-encoding multiple mpeg files to Divx or similar). A much more likely bottleneck is a piss-poor network design. These things need some serious everfucking bandwidth (my only complaint about it -- I mean, it's a remote framebuffer -- give it simple acceleration functions, even on the level of a ET4000 or a Mach 8!)
Re:Sun Rays and remote X (Score:2)
We did this in high school!
Wow, the corporate world becomes ever more domineering. Whatever happened to leaving people alone to do their jobs... Sun doesn't hire just anyone
Re:Sun Rays and remote X (Score:3, Interesting)
Uh, or you could just issue everyone laptops, and have them pick up and move.
Forrester Research has (had?) an interesting way of doing things. They didn't have private offices. They have "pods" which are a rooms which has 3 to 6 desks, and are organized by division. Some divisions, of course, had more than one pod; the one I was in had three pods, next to one another, with internal doorways. Seeting was very egalitarian and random -- as a new temp, I wound up a koosh-ball throw away from the CTO. From time to time, someone would decide they needed a change of view, or to be closer to someone they were working with, and would pick up and move to another (open) desk in the pod (or another pod of the same division). Since their philosophy was to issue laptops by default, moving was a matter of a hour or two, if you had a lot of plants or papers or something.
So it was for IT, Web Development, HR, Marketing, and, of course, all the Research divisions (the people who make the product :). I get the impression Sales may have been organized differently (cubes).
I found it really great. The low population of a pod (and I was in one of the crowded pods) meant everyone was quiet enough I could think. People I was working with were right there, and I could see if they were busy/on the phone/etc. before I interrupted them with a question, and without my having to leave my desk. It was pleasantly convival without being distracting. It was nicely flexible and the egalitarianism was very nice.
And they did it without thin clients. A lot of the putative benefits of thin clients can be gleened from investing in laptops as the default machines for everyone (regardless of platform).
They did a bunch of unusual business practices which worked really well.
Re:Sun Rays and remote X (Score:2)
In our company, we tend to stake out a corner and sit near each other. I've sat at the same desk for a month or two.
It's better than before, when one co-worker was on the other side of the floor and another was three floors up.
Re:Sun Rays and remote X (Score:3, Insightful)
This technology has been around for a while though... I sure digged it. It's really easy when you need help from a collegue: You just rip his card out of the sunray and pop yours in. There, now he's sitting behind your desktop, looking at your problem. Very handy.
Re:Is this possible w/ linux/XFree? (Score:2, Informative)
We already do this at my job... (Score:4, Funny)
Is this computer yours? (Score:2)
Re:Is this computer yours? (Score:2)
On the other hand, since all the equipment is sun's, they can probably get it replaced on the cheap.
Chiat/Day Experiment Link (Score:5, Informative)
Wacky Stuff
Chiat/Day Experiment [ciadvertising.org]
Working Better Link (Score:3, Interesting)
Working Link [wired.com]
Good idea, bad implementation (Score:2)
Re:Good idea, bad implementation (Score:2)
Try 'Dehumanising'.
I know. Brit spelling.
So shoot me.
I just hate when an otherwise intelligent post loses 'it'.
I kind of like this idea! (Score:2)
Imagine! No office cliques, since there'd be no fixed offices!
Good thing, IMHO.
Cliques are for idiots.
You 'rub elbows' with many folk that you don't know! [duffman!] Ohyeah! [/duffman!]
Excellent foundry for mating opportunities!
You don't have to deal *every fscking day* with that drooling moron in the next cube that thinks large eyed velvet painting child images of the early 70's constitute 'high art'.
I'm liking this more and more.
Yahoo Discovers Dumb Reporters (Score:3, Insightful)
"An office costs about $15,000 per year to maintain, Agnello says, and Sun plans about one desk per employee, including the remote locations, once the system is running, with 18,000 employees, roughly half the company, floating. "
comma hell!
Horrible Idea! (Score:4, Interesting)
most people take care of a nice apartment (there are exceptions) but low income housing is almost always in shambles.
if you have your own workstation & cubicle/office you will have a sense of pride, like you would if you rented a nice apartment. you take care of it and it takes care of you. the people that had it before you more than likely took care of it and the management knew what was wrong with each unit and who the trouble makers were.
the first come first serve grab a PC would be like low income housing, you would have very little chance of knowing what kind of person was there before, much less the time before that, the management doesnt really care, or is off site and there is very little pride in where you live.
flex time? (Score:3, Interesting)
it promotes flex time, which means that parents can go to soccer games and workers can go to the office nearest them when there is a problem with trying to commute.
Why can't people with dedicated offices work flex time? Or is the idea that Sun now has fewer terminals than employees (to save money), thus forcing people to work staggered shifts?
SunRay (Score:4, Informative)
First they are not dumb ternimals, far from it. It is called a SunRay. If you want to know more about them, try http://www.sun.com/products/sunray/ [sun.com]. Amongst other things you can take your SunRay card, pull it from your terminal and go put it in another. As long as the SunRay is on the same system you get your exact desktop back. With SunRay you also dont waste the vast amount of computing resources in your workplace. Don't take my word for it, go ask distribted.net. And that is just for wasted CPU cycles.
Second it is called Flexable Field Office. This means that you do NOT have to go into to the office to work. It is BECAUSE of this meany of the Sun workers were NOT in the World Trade Center Last September 11. You also do not have to be in your home town to go to an office to do work. Where it made sense, some employes kept their offices.
Ever wish you could telecommute?Yes Sun even pays for its workers home office equipment and Internet access so they can work.
And Sun saved money doing it.
Sanitation ? (Score:5, Interesting)
Doesnt anyone remember the recent story about microbe levels on keyboards and mice? This will be a great victory for the common cold.
Personnally I cant stand it when other people use my terminal (I learned dvorak, and popped out all the keys on my keyboard primarily to prevent people from using my terminal)
Somehow, this idea seems stupid, especially wrt their programmers. I certainly wouldnt put up with that environment.
The last thing I need to see on a monday morning is a moniter covered in fingerprints in front of a coke-sticky keyboard next to the mouse with the retarded ball.
Re:Sanitation ? (Score:2)
Cleanliness (Score:2, Insightful)
What happens to me if the guy who used the terminal the day before had a really flu, or if he didn't wash his hands after using the bathroom.
Pretty disgusting eh?
Imagine finding someone else's coffee stains or bagel seeds on or inside your keyboard?
You'd be finding something new and disgusting every day!!!
Re:Cleanliness (Score:3, Interesting)
Hide And Seek (Score:2)
Cross Sun off the list (Score:2)
Who does that leave?
Re:Cross Sun off the list (Score:2)
Dumb Terminals nothing new. (Score:2)
The SunRay, though, is different from your standard X-terminal.
It's not an X-terminal.
It's a remote framebuffer, smartcard reader, keyboard, mouse, and audio device.
When you see an X screen on a sunray terminal, the X server is actually running on a Sun server somewhere, not on the workstation. You are only getting the display; hence there is 0 processing on the terminal, hence it can crash and you can just go to another and re-attach.
This is nothing new, the SunRay has been out for years.
TWEEEEEEEET (Score:4, Interesting)
I interviewed at Sun in '98 these where everywhere
This is neither new nor interesting from a UNIX user's perspective. Only in the Windows world do you really really need a workstation of your own. The model they where using then was the JavaStaion these have been around since 1996 http://www.sun.com/smi/Press/sunflash/9611/sunflas h.961114.html [sun.com]
A thin client (Oracle/Larry Ellison propaganda aside) is a jumped up X-Term with a disk drive and maybe a local hard drive or large removable media. If you have a really skilled SysAdmin staff (I imagine Sun does) you can run all your regular UNIX customization & Window Makers on this, Gnome, Enlightenment, and even play Quake where ever your at in the whole world. Your not tied to hardware with can be stolen or virus'd
So the workstation is $500 a pop, the CPU isn't just a local P-4 or something it's the front end for some big set of Mid-range or higher box like a Sunfire or SunCat or some other UNIX or even Microsoftie server.
when somebody tells me about how cool their new Dell is and how well it can crunch that Excel, I just smile, I can have screensavers that are actual Fractals in real time. Wine sessions that out run the latest P4
Ok, so the one you saw has got a little Grey Flannel Suit look to it, but you have to remember it's a company system. Sorry to be L33tist but if the bulk of your contact with a computer is 9-5 your going to have fish as your screensaver and a picture of your kids as your background.
As we progress with the routine technical advancement your going to see a things like SUN 450 Enterprise w/Quad 480Mhz processors [sun.com] showing up on Ebay for $500, Likely in about 18 months
Schools and small businesses are going to start wondering why they are being nibbled to death by Microsoft and Apple and the various shadowy and dodgy hardware vendors (Compaq, Dell, Packard Bell) and switch into where this setup is more common it will look more like the NAVI from Lain [anime.org.uk]
Re:TWEEEEEEEET (Score:2)
Exactly how do you figure?
The company I work for has been using Windows NT for years and we essentially have the same setup. The desktops are the same throughout the company, and I can go to any of them and get my basic work done. All of your data, email, everything is stored out on the network drives and accessible from any computer in the company quite easily.
I've been working out of two different buildings for the past 4 years with no problems and I'm certainly not using a laptop.
Re:TWEEEEEEEET (Score:3, Insightful)
You probably have to see this to realise how much better it is than Windows.
Re:TWEEEEEEEET (Score:3, Informative)
Windows has evolved to the point that it is manageable in a very similar manner. With the introduction of Windows 2000, I could distribute applications to an end user on a needed basis.
One of the fundamental problems that the Unix model you talk about has is that the files needed to run the application all reside on file servers. This results in two things. First, high network utilization, and second, decreased client performance.
You can mitigate these issues slightly, but you never really solve them until you install the application files on the local client. You mention engineers, but don't seem to understand that these are the users who would be most impacted by this as many advanced applications consume large amounts of storage for their binary files.
While at ISU our biggest issue in this regard was a GIS package from ESRI called Arc/Info. The binaries for this app consumed about 500 Megs of drive space all totaled. There was a considerable difference between loading this from local disk versus over a network drive. i.e. like 5 seconds versus 60 seconds on a DEC Alpha station. As such it made sense to install the application to local disk to maintain good performance.
I guess I should also point out that the Windows world also used this same model with all apps residing on the file server back in the era of Windows 3.1. But again the network utilization and performance impact became signifigant constraints. With harddrive prices falling over time it became economically infeasible to continue to maintain this type of environment and the world switched at around the time of Win95/NT4.
The point being it is not much better than it is in Windows, your solution happens to have some severe limitations which makes it impractical and inefficient.
The Windows 2000 model whereby the desktops get a standard set of applications to start with and additional applications are pulled down on an as needed basis is really quite better.
Re:TWEEEEEEEET (Score:2, Informative)
I work with Suns every day - 420s, 880s, 4800s, 6800s, ... They are not fast at CPU intensive tasks. We are talking desktop apps here, not web servers and so on. I understand the difference between single CPU PCs and multiple CPU, high I/O capacity servers.
UltraSPARCs are not computationally very powerful. You're correct that you can't compare the clock speeds, but they still are not that fast -overall-, which is what matters, not efficiency (Mac PPC advocates make the same mistake). An UltraSPARC II at 480 is slow! Even a copper USIII at 750-900 MHz is not that fast. Yes, I believe a 1G UIII has a higher specfp than a P4 at 2GHz (correct me if I'm wrong), but it's slower at integer ops which are the basis of most desktop apps. And you can get P4s at 2.4GHz now. (IBM's Power4 is far superior to USIII, btw) But Sun servers are for server loads, which typically have higher I/O requirements than Excel, or even my developer tools (though admittedly IDE drives suck and I wish I had SCSI at work like I do at home).
A quad setup is something you'd use for balancing server loads with lots of concurrent activity, not desktop apps which are "bursty" and benefit more from fast (dedicated) single processors. A 450 is a very small USII based system with a backplane that has less memory bandwidth than a current PC! Most of the Java server software I work on is deployed to 6800s. When you're talking about large shared Sun systems, there is a lot of scheduling overhead - something you don't want for interactive desktop apps even though the total amount of work a decent Sun system can do is much higher. The workload is just different.
-Kevin
Good idea ruined by bad hygene (Score:2)
GAH! (Score:2)
I'm gonna bet... (Score:2)
We had this in IBM (Score:2)
It worked as the PHBs expected - in the beginning. In order to fight for a terminal which had no blind spot on the green screen and keyboard with no defective keys we had come up with all the dirty tricks a human could imagine. Some people took the aggressive approach like splitting on the keyboards and claimed that they had got some incurable infectable disease, some took a rather defensive tactics like taking sleep beds to office and stayed in the room overnight just to get a working terminal until their projects done; some are very organizational who formed gangs to create their own 'district' where no others could cross the lines to approach their terminals.
We could tolerate this because we didn't have the concept of 'sweatshop' and we didn't usually sue our employers here, but I'm sure those PH-cluebies finally learnt when all the good people left.
Finally Sun is catching up with this.
The network computer is dead. Just let it die (Score:2)
Just like in the Matrix (Score:2)
I bet this idea came from (Score:2)
I worked in that office... (Score:5, Insightful)
I actually worked in Sun's San Francisco flex office (the one that is mentioned in the article.) I have a lot of stories, both good and bad, about this way of working. First, let me start with a bit of an explanation.
On one of Sun's internal websites, there is a Java applet where you go to reserve workspaces. People like me who didn't have a "real" office were allowed to reserve 14 days in advance for up to 5 consecutive days. Others were allowed to reserve anything that was left. So it's not as much of a potshot as you might imagine -- I was in the office 4-5 days a week and most of the seats weren't even reserved. You could reserve at home through Sun's remote access, so it wasn't like there was a huge line building up at 7AM or something.
I can tell you the pros and cons, but I'm biased because I absolutely hated it. I hated the formulaic offices, and I hated that personal decorations were frowned upon. But the thing that really drove me crazy was that we were expected to use the UNIX terminals in lieu of any Windows or Macintosh laptop that we might have available. In fact, I was asked to give up my laptop because it looked bad for me to have a laptop on my desk and not be using my Solaris workstation (I had a real workstation because I tested websites on different browsers on Solaris.) The whole thing made me extremely bitter toward the company and was one of the main reasons for me leaving. I feel that it's hypocritical to hire a web developer who is used to using Photoshop, a nice solid text editor, and Dreamweaver, throw that developer in front of vi and the Gimp, and expect that web developer to be as productive as before.
However, if you could get all your work done on Solaris, it worked out well. Most of the non-technical people got used to CDE (!) and were fine with a Netscape window. If all you need is Netscape, Star Office, and a couple of other applications, then sure -- a flex office is beneficial. A friend of mine still works out of that office, but she's not there very often, which is the whole point. She works all over the Bay Area and doesn't seem to mind giving up the development applications of a Windows or Macintosh machine. Then again, she isn't a developer...
I think whether you like these offices or not depends on your personality. I must admit that Sun pulled it off well -- it's a solid implementation. The applet on the website shows you where person X is at any given moment, and you can forward your phone extension anywhere, even to a cell phone or to your home phone, so you're never out of touch. I had a real problem with it because I am a highly creative person who requires certain applications that simply aren't available on Solaris. This, and the lack of office decorations, really threw me out of my comfort zone, and I know I wasn't the only one. Apparently, however, I was in the minority. (I suppose the others who hated it, many of whom were my startup-personality friends, also left.)
I hesitate to just bash on Sun since I know that it was more of a personality clash than a bad implementation, but to anyone who is considering this: the creative minds in your company will hate it. I'm talking about the people with their offices/cubicles decorated with every imaginable sticker and toy -- the ones who treat their office as a second home. These are often some of your most productive and worthy employees, so be sure to listen to their needs.
This article really struck a nerve with me. It brought back all the frustration I had with working in that office. I can only hope that the others like me have had their complaints heard or, like me, have left for greener pastures. To the rest of you -- stick with the small-group (2-3 person offices). That was the environment in which most of us thrived.
-- I left Sun in May.
I think you missed my point. (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps I would have gotten people more up in arms had I mentioned that Linux (any PC-based OS that required your own computer instead of a terminal) was frowned upon as much as Windows and Macintosh were. I said several times that I would work fine if they gave me a Macintosh instead (since the Windows 2000 computer I received from another part of Sun was evidently not adequate.) But my boss pointed out that other people (who were doing email support and not development) were fine with a Solaris box. He couldn't understand why I didn't want to give up my laptop for a CDE desktop and smart card, even though (here's the kicker) he too used a laptop on a daily basis.
When you hire an employee, you are expected to give that employee a standard set of tools. In this case, Sun bought me a Windows 2000 laptop and a Solaris workstation (well, the workstation was a hand-me-down.) Then my boss tried to force me to give up the laptop in favor of being Solaris-only because of the "image" that using Windows gave Sun (trust me, they were doing this to the Mac people as well.) I said no, and I quit.
When you don't give your employee the tools that that employee needs, and try to force their hand in using other tools that aren't designed for the job, then you have a bad match as the employer/employee relationship goes. What bothered me most was that they weren't trying to proclaim that Solaris was more productive or had better tools than Windows or a Mac, but that Sun's "image" would look bad if Sun's web developers used anything but SunRays. I can understand this attitude from a high corporate level, but can anyone seriously (with a straight face) tell me that you have the same applications available to you on Solaris as on Windows? (I'm not even sure if the GIMP was available on their servers.) It's a terrible mentality to push the "eat your own dogfood" attitude so far that your employees quit. I know I wasn't the only employee to leave over something like this, either.
I think Sun needs to rethink its position regarding the tools that its employees use. Sure, give everyone a SunRay. But don't shove Solaris down people's throats as the One True Way. Understand that there are a lot of things that simply don't run on it, and understand that your (Sun's) customers aren't going to want to run a 100% Solaris shop, either. Sun will fail in the marketplace if they believe that Solaris will fill every business niche that Windows fills now, and that is exactly the attitude I see from inside Sun.
Been there, Done that (10 years ago) (Score:3, Interesting)
Portable offices have been a reality in the Unix world for more than a decade.
When I worked at the University of British Columbia in 1991, we had it down pretty pat -- and this was in a hetrogenous (but almost entirely Unix) environment. We had Suns, SGIs, IBM RS/6000s, NeXts and a good smattering of other random UNIX varients. Everybody was served by a network of NFS and NIS servers, and you could log in anywhere you want to do your work..
Not all of this was dumb terminals, though. People with light CPU loads would have X terminals and people with heavy CPU (or better funding!) would use a real workstation. Because home directories (and most binaries) were NFS mounted, I could log into any machine in our department (split over 2 buildings and 1/2 a mile) and do my work.
For part of my time, my desktop terminal was a 5-year old Sun-3 set to boot dataless, later on I was assigned a low-end SGI. Now, granted, the SGI did a far better job as a flight simulator, but for most of my work, the Sun-3 was quite satisfactory. For any of my heavy work I could log into one of the heavy-duty compute monsters (Either physically or remotely depending on the type of work needed) and work there.
word to the wise: in any remote-computing environment, always double check which machine your terminal is connected to before you do things like rebooting the system or formatting a filesystem.
primarily phone vs. primarily keyboard people (Score:4, Insightful)
I'd bet heavily that productivity (i.e. ability to find bugs, model a market, write a well crafted paragraph) goes down. Not hideously down, just enough to make great programmers merely good, and good programmers seek other employment.
Mixing phone people with keyboard people isn't nice. It makes the phone people feel guilty and rude, if they know the programmers, etc. are trying to meet deadlines. (And people who listen to their 19 voicemail messages by speakerphone: Dante has a 6th circle reservation just for you. It involves Muzak and a pair of 20 billion watt speakers, so Don't Do It. Thanks.) It makes the programmers jumpy- you never know when a beautiful train of thought and logic gets derailed on the "RING, RING...Hi! Glad you got Back to me on those trade show booth color quotes! Teal? Lets talk Blue!Blue Blue Blah Blah..." the next cubicle over. I've been in this situation, and it hurts.
And it ignores that paper is still a useful office object- crisp clear text that can be stared at for more than 1/2 hour without your eyes going numb, easy to spread out and cover with sticky notes...but no, you'll have to clean it up and put it away each night, regardless of sudden deadlines.
I'll bet even more heavily that they did only a Benefit estimate, not a Cost-Benefit estimate, when they came up with that $150 million figure. I doubt they'll study it at all.
Well, as Neal so aptly wrote (but darnitall he was making fun of them at the time, it wasn't supposed to be emulated):
Mostly used for consultants.... (Score:3, Insightful)
Ignore human factors at your peril (Score:3, Insightful)
To create shareholder value, you have to make the workforce productive, and nothing - and I mean nothing - makes a workforce more loyal, productive and ready to jump through hoops for you than happiness and belief in their own greatness. This office deliberately sets out to destroy human qualities by dehumanizing the workplace (ie, photos being frowned upon, etc).
Offices such as this have no human response, and in fact, it's like a disgruntled or evil bean counter (ie a human Catbert) wanted to make the most offensive office they could.
I'll tell you a story about why Sun will go broke in the next 10-20 years, and irrelevant in 2-5 years (just as SGI are irrelevant now*). About six years ago, Sun (and several other high end Unix vendors) responded to a multi-milion dollar tender. All the other vendors concentrated on unique features of their hardware (Digital on clustering and massive scalability, etc), software and service offerings. Sun concentrated on bashing Microsoft for 90% of their face time with us. Microsoft wasn't even in the potential set of competitors! And to top it off, Sun was the least competitive of all the bids - slowest hardware, and most expensive.
Sun - you have to focus on making the humans happy. Whether they be your users, your customers, or your employees.
--
* I work in the security industry, and it's been three years since I've seen an SGI in production, and I've been to hundreds of clients all over Australia. I've seen an Aviion and a DG/UX box since the last time I saw an SGI, for example!
You work for Sun don't you? (Score:2)
The system only works at Sun. Here at slashdot getting in early doesn't get you a better spot.
Re:Maturity? (Score:2)
But maybe "management by remotely spying on your computer screen" is a possibility.
Re:Maturity? (Score:2)
1) there's a system to view who is sitting where (at least what they've reserved, they may not actually be in the seat at any given moment). Very handy when you want to find Joe SE to talk to him about the account, not just when you're Joe's manager.
2) while there are no assigned cubes, it's common to have "neighborhoods" where a given group tends to congregate. So if I want to talk to one of the SE's on a particular account, I know where they usually hang out; if that doesn't work, see 1).
Re:Why dont all companies do this? (Score:2, Informative)
Re:Why dont all companies do this? (Score:2, Informative)
1. No place to store files, spec documents, etc. when you leave for the night. I sure as hell don't want to have to lug 100+ lbs. of documentation home with me every single night (and yes, dead-tree format is much easier for me to look at when I'm coding).
2. You effectively punish people who don't show up for work at the butt-crack of dawn. I like to get to work early most days, but there's some days when it's just impossible. Luckily for me, my boss is generally understanding of this, as long as I put in my hours and get my work done.
3. If you need to have a short face-to-face meeting with someone, how do you know where they are? Yes, their phone number remains constant, but often I can communicate much more effectively when I can point to something on a piece of paper and say "this is what I'm talking about." With assigned cubicles, you can at least know that they are either at their assigned desk or at a meeting.
I'm sure others can come up with more/better reasons.
Re:Why dont all companies do this? (Score:2, Interesting)
I have seen the poor users who used to have a terminal data entry system transfer to a PC based gui front end. What with having to use the mouse and having to double click everywhere, their productivity dropped incredibly and, along with their morale and job satisfaction.
Re:Why dont all companies do this? (Score:2, Insightful)
In a word, "Windows" (both MS and X). People became enamored with being able to push windows around on their screen and, although X allowed a client-server model, the networks weren't quite there to handle the load well.
Re:500$ terminal? (Score:2)
In short, they ONLY have to actually worry about maintaining the back-end, not the front-end.
Well. (Score:2)
You could buy shit workstations for $500. Then you have to load them out with the software you want. Then you have maintenance.
I *guarantee* that doing this with normal pc's will cost you more than double this.
we have these at my school (Score:2)
It would be even cooler if it worked reliably though. The server that ran the lab full of SunRays had to be rebooted every night because of memory leaks. Apparently the login screen was the culprit. As far as I know they are still rebooting it.
But basically, if they got the reliability problems fixed (and I assume they did), then this box is probably worth the money. The terminal, monitor, keyboard and mouse will essentially last forever. All the code runs on a server, so you don't need to worry about upgrading it. Yet at the same time, they are basically expendable: if one breaks, plug another one in and you're back to work in 1 minute. Plus you have the extreme mobility I mentioned above. Plus you have centralized data storage and easy backups....
In contrast, PCs need to be upgraded every 2-3 years. They are tied to a particular user. They need to be supported and maintained. If there is a virus/HD breaks/fire/whatever you lose all the data stored on the PC. The cost of maintenance is very very high.
Re:The way some companies do it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:The way some companies do it (Score:3, Insightful)
Given that it's Sun we're talking about, I hardly think these are Ye Olde Green Screen Terminals. We're talking X Terminals here.
And since the X Window System is quite able to serve different displays simultaneously, I would think that different workers needing different graphics capabilities is no problem whatsoever.
At least at home my desktop system has no problems serving a 1280x1024x32 display to my monitor and a 1024x768x16 to my laptop simultaneously. I expect Sun to have a little more powerful hardware, but the basic concept is the same.
MartShow up early, get McNealy's office! (Score:5, Funny)
How early do I have to come in to get Scott's office?
Re:Show up early, get McNealy's office! (Score:2)
Belive it or not, McNealy has a supervisor-sized cube (albeit in a corner with some nice windows). If you want to see some nice executive offices, forget the tech industry, the oil folks are where its at. Even a "lowly" VP at ExxonMobil in Houston has over 3,000 square feet of private office/meeting/washroom space... almost as much space as an average size house!
Re:This sucks. (Score:2)
Re:This sucks. (Score:2)
As for being able to talk to people you work with in person, this system will enable personal teleconferencing with an optional camera. And if you still want to be face to face how about browsing to a webpage on your intranet that displays a floorplan highlighting everyone in your department? You could also search by name. You would be registered automatically when you swipe your card in the reader.
Besides people will automatically congregate together based on physical location and habit. For example, Marketing people might head for the open cubes near the color copier while Engineers would look first for an open cube near the R)
Preview was OK but /. cut off after my ampersand.. (Score:2)
As for being able to talk to people you work with in person, this system will enable personal teleconferencing with an optional camera. And if you still want to be face to face how about browsing to a webpage on your intranet that displays a floorplan highlighting everyone in your department? You could also search by name. You would be registered automatically when you swipe your card in the reader.
Besides people will automatically congregate together based on physical location and habit. For example, Marketing people might head for the open cubes near the color copier while Engineers would look first for an open cube near the R+D lab. And everyone is going to want to be near people they hang around with so they can take breaks or go to lunch with friends.
Also inter-personal conflicts will work themselves out since workers can relocate easily. So the hot girl in Accounting can avoid that creepy MSCE guy and move closer to her hunky Unix god.
Re:We do this where I work. (Score:2)
Re:We do this where I work. (Score:2)
Any slack-jawed mouth-breather can give software away. In fact, if you look at Freshmeat, it appears that most of them do.
But if you expect somebody to give you money for software, it implies that you've spent some time polishing and perfecting that software. It implies that you've got some pride in that software, and that that software is worth something. In sort, it's a sign of maturity, just like the article said.
That's why commercial software will always be perceived to be of higher quality than free software.
Of course, there's also the fact that, with remarkably few exceptions, commercial software is of higher quality than free software.
Re:We do this where I work. (Score:2)
Re:We do this where I work. (Score:2)
Sun also has its own word processing and office suite, called Star Office, which it has begun selling, instead of it giving away, in a sign of maturity for the Microsoft Office rival.
Explain to me how selling a piece of software is "maturity". Idiots
It is maturity because Sun is realizing to make a buck they actually have to start making and selling software, as opposed to suing Microsoft.
Re:they didn't invent a thing (Score:2)
Life imitates Neal Stephenson's "Snow Crash". [barnesandnoble.com]
In that book, the employees of the US Federal government had exactly the same sort of situation. Employees were judged by how close they were to the entry door, which they could only get by showing up insanely early.
Apparently, some pointy-hair at Sun read that book and forgot the notice that it was a distopia.
Re:Dumb, dumb, dumb. (Score:2)
i believe many of the people had an assigned office in one building, but they could use a desk in another some days to avoid some commuting or something, so maybe you wouldn't be able to use that feature of employment.
Re:Sun Ray 1; 100; 150 - Thin Clients (Score:3, Insightful)
Also, the RCA port on those is *input*, not output. It's designed to hook in a SunCamera or somesuch composit source. The caveat is that the current version of the server software doesn't support that yet (Real Soon Now!).
The motherboard is actually running a 110-MHz sun4m chip, the same that was in the JavaStations. 8MB of RAM onboard, only uses 2MB, but 8MB was the most cost-effective chip size they could get. For what this machine does, it's still overkill.
As for never upgrading, the first-generation SunRay 1 units would smoke the power supply like clockwork after 9 months of usage, due to overheating problems. Sun has apparently resolved this.
I recently pitched my boss on these, since the vast majority of our users have no need for a full-blown PC, and I spend 75% of my time dealing with desktop issues. That means a lot more expansion before having to hire another IT guy. Initially, we'll be using Citrix on the Sun machine, going back to Windows, but we have the option of kicking Microsoft to the curb, should we want to. The *capital* cost of these over the next several years is less than half that of continuing with a 3-year upgrade cycle on PCs, even after factoring in servers. They really liked the idea of being able to keep their work if the building lost power (sessions live on the server, which should have backup power)
Another poster mentioned the SPOF issue, but SunRay server software works well in a clustered environment, as well as a multi-server environment.