Date: Tue, 20 Nov 2001 21:28:37 -0800 From: "Ted Mittelstaedt" <tedm@toybox.placo.com> To: "Mike Meyer" <mwm@mired.org>, "Anthony Atkielski" <anthony@atkielski.com> Cc: <questions@FreeBSD.ORG> Subject: RE: home pc use Message-ID: <000701c1724d$5f4525e0$1401a8c0@tedm.placo.com> In-Reply-To: <15355.2770.644343.846234@guru.mired.org>
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>-----Original Message----- >From: owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG >[mailto:owner-freebsd-questions@FreeBSD.ORG]On Behalf Of Mike Meyer >Sent: Tuesday, November 20, 2001 6:01 PM >To: Anthony Atkielski >Cc: questions@FreeBSD.ORG >Subject: Re: home pc use > >> So are X Terminals still in common use? If not, why not? They >sound like an >> excellent solution to a recurring problem with Windows (namely, >the fact that >> users tend to screw up machines that they can fiddle with themselves). > >No, they've died. [Begin rant] They died because users want to "own" >their things. They don't want to have to trust their data to some >central server controlled by the IT staff, though they expect the IT >staff to back up their machines. [end rant] > Mike, that's a gross simplification if I ever heard of one. :-) X terminals died for the following reasons: 1) Their manufacturers figured they could get a ton of money for them because of the old "If it's UNIX then slap 200% ontop the cost" attitude of commercial software vendors. A top of the line X terminal was loads more expensive than a PC running a decent X server. 2) At one time X terminals had 1280x1024 resolution with millions of colors and PC's had CGA adapters that played through a TV set. Well, perhaps not that bad, but modern graphics cards in a PC surpass anything that any commercial terminal vendors could produce. 3) The X protocol only works decently over an Ethernet LAN it sucks horribly over slow links. Think large corporations with many far-flung WAN links that might be 56k links because they are cheap. 4) Most of the mundane X clients were rewritten to be HTML-spewing applications. For example, compare the Solaris "admintool" with the perl-built "webmin" administration tool. Why the hell would anyone want to go through all the rackafratz of setting up X and X terminals to run a tool that is not extendible (admintool) when you can run webmin with a webbrowser on a $200 PC remotely, a program that only takes a day or so to extend with a new module (if you know Perl that is)? 5) Ever seen a X Terminal laptop? As far as mobile users go, an X terminal is useless because it can't be used offline. I've worked at enough corporations and I've seen some of them with laptop penetration into the 30-40 percentile range. These aren't salesguys that are supposed to be travelling all the time, they are managers and such that need to take work home and find it easier to have the entire desktop carried with them. Consider from an IT departments point of view if they have to setup and staff up to support 20-30 laptops, then they have to put an entire infrastructure in place that is identical to that needed to support a bunch of desktops. Worse is that so many managers view a laptop that costs 3 times more than a desktop and half as powerful as a kind of status symbol and a lot of them will construct elaborate justifications to have them, even though they never travel and never take work home. > >> > Telling managers "I'm waiting for an answer >> > from vendor tech support" is a *very* common >> > occurence with them. >> Yes, and it works well. But it only works if there _is_ a vendor >tech support. > Pull crap like that a few too many times and your going to end up with no job. Yes, you can stave off the immediate demands with excuses. Another common excuse that works with FreeBSD is "I left voicemail with the consultant and he hasn't gotten back yet" But the problem with making excuse after excuse is that the upshot is that your simply not doing anything to solve the problem. After a while people get tired of listening to that and they sense that your not going to be a resource to them anymore. A few short months later and there's managers mettings where department heads are saying totally seriously "Why don't we just outsource the entire IT department, they never do anything anyway" Next thing you find is that your fired and given the option to re-apply for your job with someone like EDS. That is what General Motors did, by the way. GM had a huge IT department that had perfected the art of passing the buck like your advocating here and finally got so sick of it they sliced the entire IT department off into it's own company. Lots of techs suddennly found that they couldn't pass the buck anymore. It never pays to look for ways to NOT do your job. If that's someone's motivation for using Windows then my advice is for them to rapidly seek employment in government because that's about the only place their gonna last. Ted Mittelstaedt tedm@toybox.placo.com Author of: The FreeBSD Corporate Networker's Guide Book website: http://www.freebsd-corp-net-guide.com To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-questions" in the body of the message
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