Everything old is old again
...or, you can't Future Proof, no matter what marketing wants you to believe.
So my favorite Sun Ray guy, Thin Guy, is going to make a couple of videos demonstrating some of the New And Cool features that are coming in the Sun Ray Server Software release, some as soon as 4.1.
The video for 3 September 2008 is a demonstration of some cool multimedia capabilities. Specifically the ability to show movies on a Sun Ray device. Most interesting is the ability for a Windows system (reached, I presume, via the Sun Ray Connector) to display a video in a usable manner by streaming the multimedia from the Windows system directly to the Sun Ray, by-passing the Sun Ray Server.
So I asked Thin Guy if this was really going to work on my now, what, 5 year old Sun Ray 1 clients? And he said no:
The Sun Ray 1 series will do the YUV/XVideo method. Only the two will do the direct decode. Both use considerably less processor and network, but the direct decode from windows using the Sun Ray 2 series is the most efficient as it by passes the Sun Ray server completely.
I'm presuming from this that it means that a Sun Ray 1 will display the movie if run natively from Solaris; however the Windows streaming trick won't work.
While the video capabilities gets me re-thinking my home network setup again, it also makes me a bit sad as kind of gives short shrift to the idea of a future-proof client. It puts us back on the upgrade trail if we want to be on the cutting edge.