Re: Cheap hardware X-terms?

["malonowa" <malonowa@wanadoo.fr>]

----- Original Message -----
From: Evan Leibovitch <evan@starnix.com>
To: <seul-edu@seul.org>
Sent: mardi 21 septembre 1999 17:16
Subject: Re: Cheap hardware X-terms?


> On Tue, 21 Sep 1999, Doug Loss wrote:
>
> > I was talking with Roman yesterday when Sun's new Sun Ray system came
> > up.  Sun Ray is a form of network end station that doesn't run
> > applications locally but on a server.  For the life of me I can't quite
> > figure out how it's much different from an X-terminal.
>
> It's not very different, excapt that I believe it has some browser
> and Java client smarts built in.

The networking protocols have been highly optimized as well as it being a
stateless network setup. You can move from one device to the next and
everything is exactly as you left it. This is not to be confused with x
session management.

> I would personally wonder if old systems (ie, 486s that rarely come with
> more than 16MB of RAM) are up to the task of doing decent X service.
> Call up a single mainstream like Netscape or WordPerfect and you're
> swapping like crazy -- and I find the prospect of swapping over a
> network link to be downright chilling.
>
From what I can gather, the sun ray is not booting over a network at all -
it's merely an input output device. It's not loading any operating system at
the client. This is how they make their claim that it doesn't need
upgrading - since it will only ever need to transfer audio-visual data from
the server to it and send user input back to the server fast enough for
human awareness.

Roman.