The point I was making is that road-warriors don't care to wait for data that is always remote, especially when the network connection is poor. And while using 'cloud services' isn't the same as a terminal to some people, it is giving you the same disadvantages - namely, total reliance on the network to do anything. For a lot of people, that just won't cut it. Even if the program is running locally, you're still hamstrung by the data you need being remote.
    I never said my systems go down. This is a false panacea promoted by cloud vendors anyway. What my users are interested in getting their data without having to wait an hour for a file to copy over. Time = money.

  - Eric

    I believe I have very picky users. But then again, a lot of people paid a lot of money to buy a lot of equipment so a lot of people can do sales calls and do the road-warrior thingy and work from remote offices. It's how our company makes its money. So I expect to be able to buy equipment that gets me as close to the ideal as possible. Cloud computing makes no sense in our environment, and probably wouldn't for a very, very long time. I have seen these articles a lot over the years.... and it's just same ole, same ole.
    Yes, I am an old, grumpy Unix admin. It is totally normal to keep a shotgun beyond your desk, right?

  - Eric

    Half of my users have trouble getting vpn protocols to work reliably over their isp links. ALL of my users complain loudly when things aren't fast and snappy. I would NEVER put any of these people 'on the cloud', considering one lost packet is enough to get them riled up. It's bad enough that they will complain about new emails not coming in....it would be worse if they can't get to ANY of them when their connection is down.

    You can get a lot of power into very small notebooks now.....why go backwards back to a dumb terminal that is dependent upon overloaded Starbucks wifi in order to get ANY program to work?

    Desktops may be dying out....but we're not switching the entire world to the cloud anytime soon.

  - Eric

    I wonder, if net neutrality falls apart, and we end up with people charging more for high-speed pipes to certain places, will that generate a big boom in building VPN/GRE/IP tunnels to attempt to work around it? If so, that could become a very lucrative business for Cisco or any other tunnel-equipment maker/provider. Hmmm..makes me wonder if there is a new conspiracy about to brew....
    - E