> Sun even tried to steal a page out of Apple's 1980 playbook by seeding > schools with Sun Rays. A 1980's kid had most likely never seen a > computer. Pac-Man wasn't even out until 1980. The Apple could have been > complete crap and it still would have succeeded. A 1999 kid had Windows > 95, 98, ME, and XP beta. They had Nintendo 64, Sony Playstation, Sega > Dreamcast. To think that you'd gain mind share and adoption from these > kids by sitting them down in front of Solaris 7 and CDE is as likely as > the orginial Star Trek (special effects and all) warmly received 20 > years after Star Wars was released.
Gosh...CDE.... I can see that not really working. Though I do have to say, from personal experience, Solaris 10 and JDS (after significant local customizations to the OS in general) was very successful in gaining student mind share (we had students referring to the Sun Rays as "the cool Sun computers"). One person even told me she was thinking about getting one for home before I explained a bit more about why that might not quite work. The thing with schools is that it's all about the overall user experience and not what it's running on. It has to look good, run fast, and make it easy for people to get their business done. I'd say the largest advantage the Sun Rays have had at our site is that the login times are significantly faster than on our Windows machines where a Group Policy is applied for each user that logs in. Plus Windows always waits until after a user has logged in to start a bunch of apps, further slowing down the login time. In case I haven't echoed here before, I think JDS layout of GNOME was significant in gaining Sun Ray user adoption at our site since it was close enough to Windows that any student or teacher could figure it out without much help. As far as I can tell, Solaris 11 Express no longer keeps the JDS layout, but reverts to the traditional GNOME layout, and that worries me because that's different enough from JDS that it could cause transition issues. If at all possible, we'd love to see the JDS layout kept as a system administrator settable option, otherwise we may be stuck on S10 until we figure out how to configure the default panel layout ourselves. > And there's a lot more. Told you it was interesting. It's still the > best idea Sun ever had. I want to hear more :) Quite possibly one of the most intriguing e-mails I've read in awhile. They should make at least one movie off of it ;) William Yang _______________________________________________ SunRay-Users mailing list [email protected] http://www.filibeto.org/mailman/listinfo/sunray-users
