5 ms·

IBM calls it hotelling. You can book a desk and check in at any office.

by ViViDboarder 6y ago

texasbigdata 6y ago
Sounds good. Who plugs in your monitors and other tools? :)
- infogulch 6y ago
  How about a standard 2-monitor+HID setup at each station, that you connect to with your company issued laptop via a single usb-c cable?
  - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
    I’d like to see a solution like the Smart Card-based Sun Ray become standard in offices. Pull up to any client terminal, swipe a card and get access to your desktop as you left it. Get a cheap laptop for remote access.
    - ghaff 6y ago
      I'm not sure you really need that anymore. I can do 95% of my work from a Chromebook. Even if you need to do more locally a laptop works for most people without a Sun Ray type system (which can also be done through some cloud offerings).
      - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        The advantage of working primarily on a thin client is that turning off the client doesn’t stop the computation. Also, the worst part of modern IT tech is messing with projectors/keyboards/etc. for presentations and meetings. I’d much rather swipe my card at the projector and have my current desktop automagically broadcast to the projector. (AirPlay is pretty close to this, I guess). Anyways, the killer feature is a remote-first workflow that treats your client device as ephemeral: you can cobble something like this together, but I’d think that the integration of an end-to-end solution built and maintained by one company
        easton 6y ago
        You can buy this precise thing from Citrix/VMware (I used it with a password, other people used it with smart cards). It’s extremely common in healthcare.
        derefr 6y ago
        Or from Amazon — their offering is called Amazon WorkSpaces. (I say this to point out that “cloud workstations” aren’t just a legacy offering for legacy companies; the vertical is healthy and growing.)
        fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        The issue is, these solutions are frequently retrofits of a local-first graphical environment: whatever you think about the actual X protocol, I think a display-server model that can be distributed across a corporate network in arbitary ways would make an amazing difference: You want to show something to a coworker? Send them a "window invitation" and, when they accept, an arbitrary window is mirrored to their display. Pairing? Everyone has a common "virtual desktop", and you just have two people's desktops temporarily merge. Instead we have nonsense like Wayland that is retreating from the mantra that "the network is the computer" (Amazon WorkSpaces is particularly disappointing here: there is no way, afaict, to have two screens logged into the same desktop: something that's trivial with tmux+ssh. My ideal is "tmux, but for GUIs")
    - andylynch 6y ago
      We have something like that. It works pretty well, and when COVID hit it became a game changer. I liked deploying Sun Rays back in the day too.
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  The monitor stays on your desk. Who plugs it in? How hard is it to plug in a USB cable to your laptop that you need to ask who’s doing it?
- derefr 6y ago
  To actually answer your question — these coworking spaces do have IT staff. They’re mostly responsible for maintaining the shared infrastructure, but they’ll help you out with your needs as well, if you ask. If you reserve a cube for months at a time, you can certainly bring in a full workstation setup, and they’ll help you to wire it up. (Not that you’d need much help; both power and Ethernet drops are right there for the taking.) It’s really the socialism to WeWork’s capitalism: because everyone there is, in the end, working for the same employer, enabling the people who come to work there to succeed at their jobs is part of the job-description of the stationed office staff. They aren’t just exchanging money for doing the letter-of-the-law of your SLA contract with them, with your job as an opaque thing that takes up a room. Office staff are more like a college librarian is to a college student: a resource paid to help however they can.

IBM calls it hotelling. You can book a desk and check in at any office.

texasbigdata 6y ago

Sounds good. Who plugs in your monitors and other tools? :)

infogulch 6y ago
How about a standard 2-monitor+HID setup at each station, that you connect to with your company issued laptop via a single usb-c cable?
- fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
  I’d like to see a solution like the Smart Card-based Sun Ray become standard in offices. Pull up to any client terminal, swipe a card and get access to your desktop as you left it. Get a cheap laptop for remote access.
  - ghaff 6y ago
    I'm not sure you really need that anymore. I can do 95% of my work from a Chromebook. Even if you need to do more locally a laptop works for most people without a Sun Ray type system (which can also be done through some cloud offerings).
    - fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
      The advantage of working primarily on a thin client is that turning off the client doesn’t stop the computation. Also, the worst part of modern IT tech is messing with projectors/keyboards/etc. for presentations and meetings. I’d much rather swipe my card at the projector and have my current desktop automagically broadcast to the projector. (AirPlay is pretty close to this, I guess). Anyways, the killer feature is a remote-first workflow that treats your client device as ephemeral: you can cobble something like this together, but I’d think that the integration of an end-to-end solution built and maintained by one company
      - easton 6y ago
        You can buy this precise thing from Citrix/VMware (I used it with a password, other people used it with smart cards). It’s extremely common in healthcare.
        derefr 6y ago
        Or from Amazon — their offering is called Amazon WorkSpaces. (I say this to point out that “cloud workstations” aren’t just a legacy offering for legacy companies; the vertical is healthy and growing.)
        fiddlerwoaroof 6y ago
        The issue is, these solutions are frequently retrofits of a local-first graphical environment: whatever you think about the actual X protocol, I think a display-server model that can be distributed across a corporate network in arbitary ways would make an amazing difference: You want to show something to a coworker? Send them a "window invitation" and, when they accept, an arbitrary window is mirrored to their display. Pairing? Everyone has a common "virtual desktop", and you just have two people's desktops temporarily merge. Instead we have nonsense like Wayland that is retreating from the mantra that "the network is the computer" (Amazon WorkSpaces is particularly disappointing here: there is no way, afaict, to have two screens logged into the same desktop: something that's trivial with tmux+ssh. My ideal is "tmux, but for GUIs")
  - andylynch 6y ago
    We have something like that. It works pretty well, and when COVID hit it became a game changer. I liked deploying Sun Rays back in the day too.
chrisseaton 6y ago
The monitor stays on your desk. Who plugs it in? How hard is it to plug in a USB cable to your laptop that you need to ask who’s doing it?
derefr 6y ago
To actually answer your question — these coworking spaces do have IT staff. They’re mostly responsible for maintaining the shared infrastructure, but they’ll help you out with your needs as well, if you ask. If you reserve a cube for months at a time, you can certainly bring in a full workstation setup, and they’ll help you to wire it up. (Not that you’d need much help; both power and Ethernet drops are right there for the taking.) It’s really the socialism to WeWork’s capitalism: because everyone there is, in the end, working for the same employer, enabling the people who come to work there to succeed at their jobs is part of the job-description of the stationed office staff. They aren’t just exchanging money for doing the letter-of-the-law of your SLA contract with them, with your job as an opaque thing that takes up a room. Office staff are more like a college librarian is to a college student: a resource paid to help however they can.