To: Stormweaver who wrote (16967 ) 6/8/1999 10:06:00 PM From: QwikSand Read Replies (3) | Respond to of 64865
Are we all so brainwashed on this thread that we think it's a good idea to hook up dumb terminals to a centralized failure point --- dejavu. James, your posts indicate that you're not a dumb guy. You don't get this because you definitely, obviously, don't want to get it. Nobody here is brainwashed. It's not a matter of attaching dumb terminals to a failure point. It's a matter of attaching "smartish" terminals (whose degree of intelligence will depend on their primary function) to a highly reliable distributed fabric of compute power that is local when you want it to be and global when you don't. It has been stated a million times by Sun and everybody else who understands the future of computing. It can't be stated any clearer. Local compute power will continue to be used to do an ever-decreasing number of things that require more cycles than the fabric, or the network, can deliver at a given point on the rising bandwidth curve. It will still be a while, for one example, before you can use the network to edit digital video. But the point is, eventually you will be able to do just that, reliably, with much less risk of failure than you run today when you edit video on a desktop machine with one power supply and one SCSI controller. And in the near term more and more of the compute-inexpensive things we do, including word processing and spreadsheets, will just turn into minor variations of web browsing. Are you going to reply to this post calling me a brainwashed zombie? Fine...but where does Microsoft Word figure into that process? What are you doing right now? The world today is still mostly running excel and word on a local processor with a local disk. The world tomorrow won't be. I mean, look at Office 2000! Even the Evil Empire knows what's going on and is trying to co-opt it as best they can by acknowledging that what was a local productivity app in the past is a web app in the future. It doesn't matter how many times you repeat your iron mantras. The status quo ain't gonna quo much longer, and neither is Microsoft's monopoly. Regards, --QwikSand