Opera: we will reinvent the Web

Wowbagger said:
Isn't reinventing the web a little like reinventing the wheel? Wouldn't some new and original invention be more worthy of hype?
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I am, I suspect, equally cynical... up until maybe three years ago, I was an Opera zealot...

But now I have a hunch they've missed the bus...

Doesn't stop me being curious and even moderately optimistic, though
 
Let's see: the first time they sprung diskless workstations on us, we referred to them as dickless workstations.

At my previous job, they took away our somewhat ancient Windows computers and replaced them with thin clients. Stuff that took instants on the old machine slowed to a crawl. Going from displaying one screen to another took 45 seconds. The fact that the screens were graphics-intensive (not the data, just the award-winning background graphics) made sucking the new page off the server a major pain. We sorta adapted by eventually finding the correct settings to shut off graphics mode, which REALLY upset the programmers and graphics designers when they came to visit from Europe. Side note: gawd it was FUN showing them how crappy the software ran when it was on a real-world system.

From a systems admin point, thin clients are wonderful, because you can control everything. Unfortunately for the end user, unless the software was written to run well on such a minimal set of hardware, the end user suffers a MAJOR hit to productivity.

You need programmers who understand how to write within the limitations of such a system. Unfortunately, most programs I've seen these days are bloatware. You need somebody who is familiar with the original slogan for the original Dr. Dobb's Journal of Computer Calesthenics and Orthodontia: Running light without overbyte.

Beanbag
 
Beanbag said:
The fact that the screens were graphics-intensive (not the data, just the award-winning background graphics) made sucking the new page off the server a major pain.
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:confused:

A thin client in such an environment ought to be lightning fast... with the relevant file (complete with 'award-winning background graphics') staying put on the server and the only client/server traffic being keystrokes, screen-updates and mouse-gestures

Or am I missing something here, too?

Maybe I need more coffee...
 
I think it had something to do with sucking down full-page 1280x1024 bitmapped graphics through a grossly overloaded LAN. The software ran just fine when run from a CD on a "real" machine, not one of the castrated clients they gave us.

Beanbag
 
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Beanbag said:
I agree that the details of the implementation are significant. I'm sure one of the LAST things on the vendor's and client's mind was the possibility that the actual shared hardware would be seized.

The general pitch has been that all a person needs is a machine with just enough hardware and horsepower to log onto the internet, while the "real" storage and processing would be on the web.

Your company obviously has the resources to set up a secure, in-house, well-controlled distributed data center. That gives you a degree of control a small business or individual doesn't have.

Beanbag
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But this is true for a whole range of things and why a major factor in ITIL is the underpinning contracts etc.
 
Beanbag said:
From a systems admin point, thin clients are wonderful, because you can control everything. Unfortunately for the end user, unless the software was written to run well on such a minimal set of hardware, the end user suffers a MAJOR hit to productivity.

You need programmers who understand how to write within the limitations of such a system. Unfortunately, most programs I've seen these days are bloatware.
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In the Unix/Linux world, the classic example of a thin client is the X-terminal. The X-protocol is exactly made for that kind of stuff (and AFAIK, the Citrix protocol is even better from a bandwidth point of view).

In my last job, as a trainer, we used one PC as server for a classroom with a dozen X-terminals. Worked as a charm, and wonderful from administration point of view.

As to bloatware: we gave the students a simple window manager, such as IceWM, as desktop. With the 10Mb network we initially had, Gnome was a nuisance; it was OK with a 100Mb network, but it was obvious it wasn't really designed with such an environment in mind.
 
Beanbag said:
From a systems admin point, thin clients are wonderful, because you can control everything.
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Yeah, but controlling everything shouldn't be the purpose of a thin client. You can control pretty much everything on thick clients as well, so there should be a better reason than that.

Now, I've seen instances where thin client setups would work better than thick clients, and vice-versa. It really depends on the needs and the expectations.
 
Six and a bit hours to go... and the source code comment (behind www.opera.com/freedom/) is a little bit longer...

<!--
We start our little story with the invention of the modern day computer.
Over the years, the computers grew in numbers, and the next natural step in the evolution was to connect them together. To share things.
But as these little networks grew, some computers gained more power than the rest and called themselves servers.
Today, millions of people are connected together in a great web ...
-->

Tick

Tock
 
It took more than 5 minutes for the page http://unite.opera.com/ to load. They're doing it wrong. When it finally loaded and I couldn't find anything about better pr0n I lost interest and left.
 
tuc0 said:
It took more than 5 minutes for the page http://unite.opera.com/ to load. They're doing it wrong. When it finally loaded and I couldn't find anything about better pr0n I lost interest and left.
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I think that Unite is merely the hype surrounding the latest desktop version: Opera 10

youTube blurb said:
With Opera 10, we are introducing a new technology called Opera Unite, radically extending what you are able to do online. Control your content today.
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Hmmm... the opening sounds uncannily familiar...

:confused:
 
They want to enable ordinary people to run services in a browser on their desktop machine? On Windows?

Oh dear...
 
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