Gimme my fucking terminal back! (geeky)

The BBQ Pit
1

Gawd, to think of all the money we’ve wasted.

About a year ago, my employer “upgraded” from being a 100% AS/400 mainframe + dumb terminals shop to a W2K-AS/Citrix Metaframe/Mocha W32 mixed setup.

All the office and email shit is on Windows, and we run the Mocha AS/400 terminal emulator for our catalog and circulation system. Some people have real PCs with real memory, but about 90% of us are stuck on Wyse Winterm thinclients with gigabit NICs.

In the time they’ve made everything “easier to use”, my productivity has dropped maybe 50%, specifically because of input lag. That’s right: I can type numbers in twice as fast as fucking Mocha or Windows can understand them. It takes mroe than a minute to fucking launch Word.

For fucks sake, when will people get it through their heads that Windows isn’t the solution for everything??? I can understand the need for using application servers and thinclients rather than having a couple thousand PCs to upgrade manually, but goddamit, when you’re doing repetitive, fast data entry, you don’t need a fucking GUI. Not to mention the daily crashes, reboots, and hangs of our “simplified” Windows farm. Or the fact that our website now gets hacked at least once a month. Or that administration has seem fit to start emailing memos as PDFs that are nothing more than 12 point Times New Roman text.

What’s worse, they’re eventually gonna migrate all the databases to Ms-SQL. Thankfully, I’ll be outta here by then…

A couple of Sunfires and some Rays could have handled this whole thing nicely. Then, I could log in to a real terminal, get some real work done, and all the idiots could be safe in their nice little warm WIMPy world.

I’m even starting to pine for OfficeVision. Ugh.

2

Oh, and for the pedants: I know AS/400s aren’t really mainframes. But next to the crummy-ass Wintels in the basement, they’re close enough.

3

Sounds like half the problem is network infrastructure.
Buggers running off hubs rather than switches or what? I’m not saying I approve of the sodding Citrix box, but I’ve tuned one at work and we’re getting nigh-realtime responses off a 384k frame relay connection. Was a bit of a lag nightmare there because of the off-site box looking for computers… and then one of the switches quietly died… are there any times it’s better than others?

4

Dunno. I vaguely recall a router shitting the bed a couple of months ago, and them replacing it, but I’m just a clerical peon, not IT.

The delay is shitty at the best of times on the Wyses, and totally worthless at worst. It’s slightly better on the PCs, but I still get a painful lag on the emulator.

Don’t get me started on what cheap pieces of crap the Wyses are… for the $400 a pop we paid for them, we could have gotten a pile of leetle tiny Celeron office desktops. We’ve actually run out of replacements, because the power buttons keep failing. Hell, the handful of ancient Compaq P1s we keep around still work better.

5

Oooh, that pisses me off. If your e-mail is just a couple of paragraphs of text, send it as text, not as a Word or PDF attachment!

(Says Orbifold, who’s received one too many e-mails of the form “Three important paragraphs about the construction workers tearing up your front lawn today included in the attached 400MB Word document”, when he’s reading his mail via Pine on a Linux box or via a cheap web-mail service…)