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I worked on a Sun Ray. I and many colleagues absolutely hated it. These tiny machines were just way too slow to handle even the tiny amount of work they had to
by deng 4y ago
I worked on a Sun Ray. I and many colleagues absolutely hated it.
These tiny machines were just way too slow to handle even the tiny amount of work they had to do. Also, everyone knows that X over network is just not made for modern applications ("modern" in the year 2000!). I worked with Matlab, and had a lot of fun trying to rotate 3D plots with a few thousand points. It was just unbearable.
Then of course the "single point of failure" thing. Network problems? No one can work. Main server has a drive failure? No one can work. Main server needs an upgrade? No one can work.
The Sun Rays had super-poor USB support. My ergonomic keyboard had no auto-repeat when connected to these things, absolutely impossible to fix or even debug. Then of course there was Sun software: although they invented Java, their JVM was leaking like a sieve and everything Java had to be restarted regularly. The Sun coreutils were just very limited compared to the GNU counterparts. We complained endlessly, and in the end, IT budged and we all got our dedicated Linux machines.
- dmix 4y agoHow long did the networked machines experiment last at Sun before you switched to Linux PCs? I remember that famous Larry Ellison speech in the mid 90s about how thin client/networked applications will be the future. It’s apparently what helped make him famous because no one cared about enterprise DBs in the tech media: https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-history/ https://tedium.co/2018/04/12/larry-ellison-network-computer-...
- deng 4y agoNo, I did not work at Sun, I did my work on a Sun Ray computer at university. Sorry if that wasn't clear.
- jeffbee 4y ago> everyone knows that X over network is just not made for modern applications ("modern" in the year 2000!). I worked with Matlab No. I don't think everyone knows that at all. At my university we used X terminals connected to a central Sun SPARCcenter 2000 over ethernet and it was fine. We used MATLAB, Maple V, SAS, etc etc.