[0] https://www.usenix.org/legacy/publications/library/proceedin...
As a concrete example, the failure to add USB printing support killed SunRay at airline kiosks in the early 2000s. American Airlines was the first airline to adopt kiosk-based check-in; they were very hot on SunRay, but needed USB printing. When American found out that Sun had just gutted the team (including everyone responsible for USB support!), they (reluctantly!) used Windows-based PCs instead. Sun tried to put the group back together, but it was too late -- and every airline followed American's lead.
Could/would SunRay have been used for airline kiosks? There are reasons to believe that it would have -- and it was certainly a better technical fit than an entire Windows PC.
There were examples like this all over the place, not just with SunRay but at Sun more broadly; despite the terrific building blocks, Sun often lacked the patience and focus to add the polish needed for a real product. (Our frustration with Sun in this regard led us to start Fishworks in 2006.[0])
RIP SunRay -- and what could have been!
[0] https://bcantrill.dtrace.org/2008/11/10/fishworks-now-it-can...
Also enjoyed the keyboards (with control where caps lock "normally" is)...
It does feel like a bunch of universities in particular could have taken advantage of something like this. Something akin to the laptop "close the lid and just open it back later whenever", but on all the desktops on campus. Sounds amazing in theory!
Probably a nightmare in practice to deal with though. There's so many advantages to having people turn off their machines.
Just imagine, one ID that would work for both doors and computer access, no need for clunky username/password+2FA juggling. Just tap your card (and optionally, if a institution chooses, enter a pin for a second factor), and you're off to the races.
This could easily be implemented through mobile phones too, since most have NFC nowadays, if cost of credentials that can do asymmetric operations is a concern.
Of course, this would never happen, as both Academia and Access Control are extremely slow-moving fields stuck with decades of legacy solutions. The vast, vast majority of institutions still use what amounts to static unchanging ""passwords"" sent across the wire (usually unencrypted!) to authenticate users.
This is something I've been thinking of for a long time, and had no idea Sun had beat me to the punch long before I was even born! What a shame, they were really ahead of their time.
could do the same with Atari, Cray, even a rebrand of SGI to Silicon General Intelligence. I miss muscular tech like that.
Atari has been brought back! https://atari.com
HPE is using the Cray brand: https://www.hpe.com/us/en/compute/hpc/supercomputing/cray-ex...
Coincidentally, https://www.sgi.com/ redirects to the HPE Cray link above.
With modern network speeds it's interesting to consider how good a thin client could be these days.
I also travel a lot, and it's great to have all of my applications and data right where I left them from any desk in any office
One thing lead to another and now we're building our own server software, thin client OS (no hardware yet, we load our image on COTS x86 devices), and public VDI cloud.
p.s. what's up with the capitalization in this article? Sentences not starting with capital letters are harder to read.
It's some irritating trend with a few folks. Like an "oh im too busy to bother with that".
The main challenge has been building a modern remote desktop protocol that achieves high performance but without requiring GPUs for each user and works on Linux. VNC is really showing its age, and X forwarding isn't really usable over the Internet. We are also using Yubikeys instead of smart cards, though I'm looking forward to testing some of the FIDO2 cards that are on the market.
One of our colleagues said something that really resonated with me "When you're working using our system it should feel like you're sitting down at a personal supercomputer". There are always more features to build, but the basic vision of being able to sit down at any desk with our Warpbox and connect to your virtual desktop within a few seconds is a really nice workflow.
Is there a short trial period before I pay? I didn't see it on the website. If it really does feel like real time usage like GeForce Now with gaming, then that is seriously cool.
I'd be glad to set you up with credits to run the system through its paces. Right now our most valuable payment is feedback
protocolture•11h ago
theandrewbailey•8m ago