06 March 2007
Thin Client
I’m doing an information technology symposium intended for people old enough to know better at a plush campus on the Hudson above New York.
It is frigid cold, and I was not ready for it. In the back of my mind I must have thought that the back of the winter had been broken, and perhaps it has been on the banks of the placid Potomac. But not here. The ducks walk on the ice on the corporate pond and the wind rips across vast lawns.
The buildings are just high enough here to pose the same threat as they do elsewhere, so naturally I am on the lookout for falling Colonels. Word from Moscow is that another epidemic of spontaneous defenestration has been spreading, and even apparently healthy retired military officers have taken to hurling themselves from fifth-story stairwells.
The latest in this public health crisis is a journalist who covered military affairs and who was on tenuous grounds with state security officials.
He apparently threw himself to his death from a fifth-floor window of the apartment building where he lived last Friday. Officials commented that he might have been disconsolate at the quality of the oranges he had just purchased. His name was Ivan Safronov, and they say that he committed suicide by falling headfirst from the window with his mandarins.
My thoughts are with the Colonel’s family, and of course, President Putin, who must be awfully embarrassed that some are connecting this unfortunate private incident with a possible global assault on the free press.
I look up a little more frequently, walking around the campus, and have ceased the purchase of fresh oranges to avoid life-threatening disappointment.
There was plenty learn in the information technology course, but I can distill one of the epiphanies.
Most of the kids out there cannot remember the days of the old main-frame computers, and punch-cards to run program language. I remember college buddies having to get up at two in the morning to get time to fun their cards through the Engineering School’s mighty machine- the only precious time available, valuable as minutes on the hockey rink at Yost Arena.
That translated into the might corporate bastions of information, the big tape drives and banks of humming slab-like processors. The machines forced the culture. Remote terminals were able to read from the central processing unit, in a strict hierarchical manner, like the old Soviet Empire.
The arrival of the personal computer was dismissed by the major data-processors in one of the most astonishingly poor predictive business decisions in history.
The main frames died, and we all became our own systems managers. I myself have three computers on my desk, with three different operating systems and files scattered between them. I have created my own little dispersed kingdom of anarchy, all three machines requiring individual protection from virus and attack, each one separately vulnerable to compromise.
We accept this today as the way of things, just as the acolytes of the main frames accepted the power of the Center as the natural way of being.
Some smart guy explained that it has all changed. “Thin client” is the way to go. I asked him what that was, and he said that with the expansion of mass storage, there was a way to have everything you have on my home computer on-line in the data storage center. Everything. All the programs, documents, pictures, and stupid downloads, you could ever want. Experts will take care of the virus protection and the firewall, do the patches, ensure that programs are up to date.
They call it the patches, and all you would need is a relatively dumb communications device with no need to store anything on it. No danger of theft; nothing to steal on the hard drive, since there wouldn’t be one. It is the end of the PC!
I slumped in my chair, mystified at the workings of the universe. The great circle of life is manifested once more; from large and central, to widely dispersed, now pulling back once more to the center. A vortex of technology carrying all we have with it. Total access to everything, wirelessly, everywhere on demand
I emerged from the session very excited to go with the thin client concept, and looking up to see if anything was falling from he roof, decided to Google up thin client machines.
They say that Google will take care of everything for you for a small annual fee. All you have to do is sign up and send them all your stuff and they will store it in their data center and they will take care of everything else.
I blinked and exhaled. I bet they will. I have been meaning to lose some weight, though certainly not the way Colonel Safronov did. I think the Thin Client is just the way to start.
Copyright 2007 Vic Socotra
www.VicSocotra.com