re: dirty little secrets
There is a bit of truth in these articles, I guess. I find it a bit of a stretch to say it's a "dirty little secret". To understand all of this you have to understand the history of the network terminal, (or X terminal, if you wish), business.
To save the costs and the inherent difficulty in maintaining local storage, we always built devices that assumed certain network services from a server. Considering the fact that our products don't do anything interesting by themselves, this was not an unreasonable assumption. The services we require are about the most brain-dead simple network services ever defined in the TCP/IP world. We use much more sophisticated services if someone wants to set them up, but we don't require them. One of the great problems we've faced over the years, however, is that it is not all that common for the people installing our systems to actually have any expertise in the networking side of the business. Usually it is someone elses job to 'do the network stuff', which leads to a certain set of issues in installation.
This can be solved, however, by intelligent installation utilities for the server side software. Indeed, on certain servers where there are well documented, dependable installation procedures, this 'dirty little secret' is a complete non-issue. Good examples include VMS systems, and NT systems. Bad examples include just about every Un*x system ever made. The down side of Un*x's 'openness' is that just about every one is different when it comes to these subtle details. For one thing, the nature of the system lets administrators alter too many things, and for another it is the nature of Un*x people to 'modify' things ever so slightly, "because I can". (Don't get me wrong - I'm a terrible Un*x bigot. I just know that closed, proprietary systems are easier to build stuff for as a third party vendor. As an end user, the fact that I have to reboot this !&^^% PC every other time I print is more than a little annoying, though :).
All of this goes away in the WBT space, however. For one thing, you can assume an NT host. Very straightforward installation. For another, we're building ThinSTAR's with much more 'intelligence' in them to begin with so that they are truly 'plug and play'. Thank advances in technology for that. |
