It was a cool idea. It will keep coming back again and again. But at Sun's price points around the early 2000s, it was a loser, and I actually agree with the market in this instance. Sun Ray was a flop.
It lived on in the world of Windows Terminal Services and things like Citrix - maybe still does in some places.
Citrix was bought out by PE for $16.5B a few years ago, under the (sadly correct) assumption they hadn’t been charging their customers enough money for this essential tech.
If you're not cheaper than buying a PC or console you can't win. No one wants to pay more for the privilege of input lag and compressed video, or getting in trouble with their ISP if they have a strict data cap.
On the other hand I have heard of some success stories about using SunRays as RDP clients, which is actually supported configuration (you still need a Solaris box that manages the sunrays and translates RDP to ALP).
And yes of course, a rack of commodity servers should how powered the server side, as this was a task that could be scaled vertically quite well.
The also didn't use the cheapest possible Sun Ray terminals, they used their internal developed embedded Sparc chip, not mass produced ARM chips.
Nobody knows how the future will be. There are lots of options. There are self hostable open models today - they are not as good, but some report they are good enough. Right now I don't have the hardware to try them (I could - if I'm willing to accept a small number of tokens per minute - useful means more tokens per second as I can get in an hour). However I expect in a few years I'll be able buy consumer hardware with good enough GPUs (or perhaps an AI chip???). Will anyone other than a few hobbyists buy them? time will tell.
The moat is Being Able To Do Things No One Else Can and as both hardware and software commoditise that moat disappears.
Open LLMs are already only a few months behind the frontier models and as soon as someone works out that accessible and cheap domain-specific custom training has the potential to be a gamechanger the Big Names will die.
Math puzzles only get you so far.
LLMs are in their Big Compute phase, and it's only a matter of time before that ends - because the intelligence of the frontier models isn't increasing fast enough and providing big enough benefits to make the models more valuable than cheaper, smaller competition.
i think llms will be the same.
n=1 but at $work they are forcing us off enterprise and on to personal claude max that caps at $200 and people are like “you don’t need the top end models anyways just use the cheaper one for coding”, which begs the question how long till those “good enough” models run locally (with relative ease) and our company can cut that huge monthly cost with just the macbook pro they are gonna buy anyways.
I have a bunch of Aruba switches and this is what we do, because it's a lot cheaper.
For Aruba I think it was 1:1; a support contract was the same price as the device itself over 2 years or something.
Support contracts never cover a "site" they always cover individual devices, so your cost scales with the amount you have... so I'm not sure I follow what you're saying..
Unless you mean to imply that you're replacing units more than once every 2 years, in which case of course you're right... but then I might consider going with another vendor entirely because that is a pretty terrible reliability record.
Wrong. I've signed many support contracts that were negotiated basically to "one flat fee for everything we sell that you use, including future purchases[1]" for some period of time. Some people think that they 'optimize' contracts by pushing for "I just want a service contract only on the SKUs I have". That's not always a real optimization.
[1] Often, this includes a tacit "including things you are using that you didn't tell us about".
I'm wondering if this is something uniquely american, because we don't seem to have much negotiating power in the UK/SE.
the best was having everyone with a disk cross-mount each other. any failure snowballed into a global failure.
Which is why it is kind of ironic having folks discussing microservices as something groundbreaking.