Posted by todsacerdoti 7 hours ago
[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...
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
Also enjoyed the keyboards (with control where caps lock "normally" is)...
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".
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