h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

Trouble is, my boss is an ex-mainframe bod, so he buys into this sort of thing with an evangelical passion. About once every 6-9 months he tries to get us all enthusiastic about (currently) Citrix Winframe or some such thing that will enable all users to crash at the same time.

Current favourite sport in our office is to diss UNIX in front of him. We managed to keep him arguing for an hour when we said that we'd rather have NT on our workstations than UNIX

I spent several years working in what was essentially a mainframe driven company - PCs were regarded as toys; the essential thing for PCs was that they had to be able to link into the company mainframe!

Very occasionally, diskless workstations can be useful - I was involved in setting up a LAN using diskless workstations; the idea was to stop virus infections/illegal software etc by not allowing users to put anything on their PCs themselves. Also, there was to be no internet access (cruel!). In this environment the concept of diskless workstations was reasonably successful because application software was installed on the workstations. Generally, however, I agree that diskless workstations running apps from the internet are doomed.

I've just seen an article about holograph technolgy being used on storage media - this will give something like terabytes as opposed to gigabytes of storage. I wonder how the old mainframe dinosaurs will feel about being able to put in their pocket the same amount of data that they needed massive buildings for!

Just try running winframe in a secure envrioment. I work with firewalls all day, and every time I am faced with winframe I have to explain that the only way it is going to work is if you have one *really* good person configuring it. To get it to run securely you have to tweak it all about. If you really need security go with vpn stuff. It is the only way. Of course you will pay through the teeth to do that as well. Oh well....