On 6/20/06, Blaster <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
This is really false advertising when Sun and others claim this. Remember,
Considering you'll need many different models of Wyse thin clients at the same time, you'll have to purchase their management server software, and you'll have to coordinate the patching of the thin clients. With the Sun Ray model, if they didn't tell you the firmware was being upgraded, you'd never even know. It is that automatic and seamless. It also happens in about a second. I've tried to demonstate it to people, and found it's nearly impossible, as they always blink or look away to ask a question when it happens. Then they want me to do it again. I have to explain that it won't happen again until Sun finds a reason to release another upgrade (which is pretty rare). Of course I could have forced a downgrade and allowed it to re-upgrade, but that is completely counter to the point I was/am trying to make.
Bill Gates said no one will ever need more than 640K of memory either.
The first-generation Sun Ray 1 DTUs I have at home do everything the newest Sun Ray models do, except the old units don't have a serial port or DVI (don't need either). Now the Wyse systems have more than a dozen models for a reason. How many Wyse thin clients from more than 3 years ago can run the newest release of EmbeddedXP (or whatever it's called this week) which is required to run some software? How many from the '90s can?
Sun Rays do have firmware that must be upgraded every time you patch the SRSS software. The fact that this happens mostly seamlessly sort of hides this, but it is there.
True, but the oldest Sun Ray models can still run the newest Sun Ray firmware. As noted above, this is most definitely *not* true of the Wyse thin clients. They have an obsolescence plan just like PCs do. "Oh, you wanna run this new app? You gotta replace your thin clients!"
At some point, the first generation of Sun Rays will become obsolete as technology advances and pushes them past their design limits. At that point, Sun will stop supporting them and they will become doorstops like everything else technology eventually becomes.
I highly doubt that, as that would be disproving their own marketing push for these devices. The fact that they can (truthfully) claim that the oldest Sun Ray models run everything the newest ones can is quite a statement and the entire reason for making everything server-side. If they suddenly said they would no longer support the EOLed models, they would no longer be able to make that claim and the competition would jump all over it. The one point where this could sort-of be true is with new devices the new models have that the old ones don't. Some newer models have serial ports. That did not make Sun drop support for models that didn't have 'em.
The biggest draw back I see to the Sun Rays is their apparent inability to do full screen full motion video. That alone puts a pretty big limit on their capabilities and will forever keep them in the "dull office machine" market.
True, but they aren't marketed for use in arcades, they're marketed for use in businesses. The majority of employees of most businesses don't watch video for a living. Have you seen a Wyse do full-screen/full-motion video?
I would also like to know why these things still sell for $249 list. When you can open up the Sunday paper and get a Dell PC with a 2.5Ghz processor, 256MB RAM, DVD drive and a monitor for $229. The Dell has about 10 times the amount of physical materials and complexity as the Sun Ray. These things should be selling for no more than your average cable modem.
A better comparison would be the price of a Wyse. Otherwise, you're completely missing the entire point of a thin-client deployment. If I remember correctly, the bottom-end price of a Wyse is around the same (or slightly higher), but you won't be able to use the bottom-end model unless you're running some very basic stuff. The company I work for looked into them and compared the prices of the bottom end Wyse with a Sun Ray deployment (that included the server) before the SR2 was announced. With the T2000 servers, the price/desk wasn't that much different and the increased security and ease of maintenance were the selling points for the Sun Ray model. Then the SR2 and T1000 servers were announced... dropping the price/desktop considerably. None of this takes into account the fact that we would have had to go with higher-than-bottom-end Wyse models, making the Sun Ray configuration even more attractive. Also, keep in mind that these are stateless, unlike Wyse. If someone spills their cup of coffee into the thin client, it gets hit by a stray bullet, or otherwise meets its demise, all you do is plug in another one and your software is *still running*, because it runs on the server, not on the thin client. In the Wyse model, every $300+ thin client needs a $100 UPS (or whatever they go for now). -Kevin _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
