I really hate that these types of articles always bust out this weird dichotomy of "centralized" vs "decentralized" arguing. I don't know why this is, perhaps t

I really hate that these types of articles always bust out this weird dichotomy of "centralized" vs "decentralized" arguing. I don't know why this is, perhaps there are historical reasons for doing this, since at one point it was a big divide -- really defining the types of available arguments. Now however, it is 2011, and the world is a bit different. Mostly, the centralized/decentralized divide is now a big mushy space called "networking". Those of us who have grown up with the idea of both PCs and Servers and Mainframes, don't look upon them as religions so much anymore. There are very good reasons for each of these architectures, and they map to different problems. Further there are many times solutions from centralized or decentralized space work equally well in terms of technology, but not so well in terms budget. For example, where I work we all carry around MacBooks as our primary working computers. We recently have needed to do a bunch of development using .Net on windows. We decided to buy a very powerful server box, (24 cores, 140GB Ram etc) to be the main computer for windows dev. This allows several developers to remote in, and run VS2010, is pretty fast, and cost about 1/3 of the equivalent in new resources for each dev. It works for this case. Conversely we decided to buy lots of cheap little machines for our test lab, and cluster them as needed, rather than a single big iron machine using VMS, because the flexibility was more important than cost. These decisions never involved a tech flamewar, just a "what things will actually solve the problem, what tradeoffs exist, and how does the budget work best with them". tl;dr -- sometimes terminals are a great solution for the cost, don't exclude them based on an old, mostly irrelevant anymore, religion.