Conventional wisdom seems to have hi-jacked the term 'thin-client.'
Today's widespread definition is that a thin client is a diskless device which runs windoz and citrix. It allows a user to execute programs which then run on the server instead of on his work-station?!! Of course to run current versions of ...doz and ...trix requires a somewhat fat piece of hardware, so why is it called thin? I guess what it really ...doz is ...trix most consumers into thinking it's more efficient and more cost-effective than it really is.
My ideal 'thin client' would be a super internet appliance; in other words an i-opener with more capability. It would be packaged like an i-opener, with nothing more than a keyb (with thumball) and an lcd screen. It would have ample ram, rom and d-o-c to retain and run locally all core applications, and must include network interface circuitry. The system boots from rom, loads from d-o-c and has a gui for executing the core applications, including a browser, wordpro, Ssheet, email, telnet, calendar, phone-directory. All long-term storage would be on a server, and additional programs could be resident on a server and linked in a way so when executed the object/binary code would tranfer to the client and be executed locally there.
Any other ideas about an 'ideal' thin client? Maybe it should be called a very-thin (a vin-) client.
