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Technology Stocks : All About Sun Microsystems -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: QwikSand who wrote (20360)	9/28/1999 12:10:00 PM
From: cfimx	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

>>No, the sunray can't do that and manipulation of digital content is IMHO going to be the single biggest thing that helps keep a general-purpose PC alive. Between MP3's and CD recorders and cheap 2-megapixel digital cameras and cheap DV video recorders and cheap 20-GB disks and surround-audio and quasi-free hi-res scanners and cheap photo-quality printers and desktop RAIDs and billion-triangle 3D accelerators and MPEG decoders and (soon) DVD burners plus fast processors that let software make it all easy, any random bag lady can go start a content production studio for $5000. And it's getting more like that every day. Even when there's enough bandwidth and ISP storage to support that kind of activity over a portal link, which is a long way off, you still need too many local doohickies for that kind of job. It rules out a SunRay.<<< not to mention that we like to keep porn on the LOCAL hd. <g>

To: QwikSand who wrote (20360)	9/28/1999 2:05:00 PM
From: Prognosticator	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 64865

Qwik: the SunRay may not be able to manipulate content, but the servers sure will, and as long as the pipe is thick enough to stuff compressed content down for rendering in real-time, the SunRay may have a huge advantage. For example, suppose you want to do some video editing on your PC. So, you go out and buy a 20GB disk for starters (soon be full), and MP3 compression card (plus firmware upgrades for the latest implementation), a wave-table synthesis card, a digital signal processing card, stuff them in your PC, set a few jumpers, install a bunch of incompatible software programs to drive them all, call tech support because your scanner just stopped working, oh, and there's smoke coming out.... Or use a SunRay, with an E100000 server with 10TB of disk, and some high-power DSP co-processors to do the crunching. All you have to do is expand the definition of what SunRay can render to include compressed audio-visual data, and you're there. Maybe in V2.0? Corrections to this thought train appreciated. P.