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James Fidell wrote: > > The last twenty years (since I've worked in IT) are littered with failed > attempts to centralise management of office-type applications and data > and whilst in some circumstances it makes a great deal of sense and > though a very small number of people have taken the idea on board, it > just doesn't seem to be what lots of people want. Funny all my most successful IT projects did exactly this sort of thing in various guises. They were all about pulling the data to controlled locations, and standardising, and automating the updating of, the tools to access such data. I agree it can be done with fat clients (been there...), although it has always been easier to do that with Unix like systems, because they've always had simple tools for managing configuration. Most of the Windows tools always required you to be huge before they would cost justify deploying them (although ADS helps, ADS itself is pretty heavy weight). Although in many cases the compelling advantage of thin clients hasn't been hardware cost. These were always clients who had more data than average. In that sense it is possible something is changing (the rest of us are acquiring more data to manage). But then I always marvelled that so many PCs are sold, but so few decent backup devices, so my perception of how the world ought to be is best summed up by Bill Hassell. "There are two types of computer users in the world...those that have lost data, and those that are going to." (blh, circa 1972) -- The Mailing List for the Devon & Cornwall LUG http://mailman.dclug.org.uk/listinfo/list FAQ: http://www.dcglug.org.uk/linux_adm/list-faq.html