From owner-freebsd-questions Tue Apr 10 6:58:32 2001 Delivered-To: freebsd-questions@freebsd.org Received: from guru.mired.org (okc-65-26-235-186.mmcable.com [65.26.235.186]) by hub.freebsd.org (Postfix) with SMTP id 4275F37B423 for ; Tue, 10 Apr 2001 06:58:29 -0700 (PDT) (envelope-from mwm@mired.org) Received: (qmail 32227 invoked by uid 100); 10 Apr 2001 13:58:24 -0000 From: Mike Meyer MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Message-ID: <15059.4480.67277.332449@guru.mired.org> Date: Tue, 10 Apr 2001 08:58:24 -0500 To: "Ted Mittelstaedt" Cc: questions@freebsd.org Subject: RE: BSDi Acquired by Embedded Computing Firm Wind River In-Reply-To: <22683751@toto.iv> X-Mailer: VM 6.90 under 21.1 (patch 14) "Cuyahoga Valley" XEmacs Lucid X-face: "5Mnwy%?j>IIV\)A=):rjWL~NB2aH[}Yq8Z=u~vJ`"(,&SiLvbbz2W`;h9L,Yg`+vb1>RG% *h+%X^n0EZd>TM8_IB;a8F?(Fb"lw'IgCoyM.[Lg#r\ Sender: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.ORG Ted Mittelstaedt types: > When discussing desktops and servers in context together, here > is the definition: > > Server: That which is intended and generally provides services to desktops, > over the network. > > Desktop: That which is primary purpose is to serve as a user interface > between the human and the services provided by servers on the network. > > But, before we forget, there's one other type of system: > > standalone: A host that is intended and generally uses services that it > provides itself, and where network connectivity is not particularly critical > to it's operation. > > Of course, many corporate networks are somewhat fuzzy, in that often > users may spend much time running Word or Excel and just using their > own desktop's resources. It's not at all unusual for things Unix systems to be fuzzy the other way. For instance, many Unix desktops used to run smtp servers. In the early days of the web, Unix sysadmins would set up web servers on their desktop just to have one to demo internally. As long as you avoid multimedia applications, hardware configured to be a server can run interactive workstation tasks - like those mentioned by Ted - "between the cracks" of whatever server they run. A word processor or spreadsheet waiting for the user to type a character just doesn't use very much CPU. Cray saw this kind of thing when they first started putting interactive users on their supercomputers. The interactive users needed so little CPU that the difference in billable cycles available per month wasn't visible. I'll add my voice to the chorus - I'm quite happy with FreeBSD as a desktop. It would be better if there were better support for new hardware, but that's a minor matter. On the other hand, I've never used either Windows or the Mac as my day in and day out desktop. http://www.mired.org/home/mwm/ Independent WWW/Perforce/FreeBSD/Unix consultant, email for more information. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message