Citrix, why?


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    Were you drunk when you mapped the drives like that?

    Bonus WTF: opened a folder with a stupid amount of subfolders (enough to cause the scrollbar thumb to hit minimum size). Wound up at the bottom of the list, tried to scroll down to one of the later drives. Each scroll op paused briefly to re-render the next drive.



  • Some of the mappings make sense. 😆


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @HardwareGeek said:

    Some of the mappings make sense.

    But in aggregate, they don't. I thought maybe the network drives were maybe in the order they were originally mapped on my pc, but it's not that, because the ones that don't have $ in the name are mapped by the Citrix session and don't exist on my PC.

    Worse than that, the D drive comes first, and then the DVD burner, and then the C drive?!

    They must have used @blakeyrat's "mix up the order every once in a while" idea.

    (btw, b-man, I hope @-mentioning you like this isn't bothering you.)



  • ORDER BY NEWID()

    Body is very descriptive, it's SQL!



  • Is it weird I was disappointed the "physical" drives didn't spell Discourse and I couldn't yell bingo?



  • I found TRWTF.

    It's the year 2014!



  • @mott555 said:

    I found TRWTF.

    <img src="/uploads/default/8651/de2b85bce2b9fcfd.png" width="292" height="500">

    It's the year 2014!

    My stepdad would be mortified if his computer didn't have a floppy drive.

    This is so because my stepdad is weird and is currently using a first-generation Pentium laptop, booting off floppy disk because the BIOS on it shits itself if you run DOS 6.22 on the hard drive but is fine if you boot it from floppy.

    So he can write timing-accurate QBASIC games because DOSBox isn't accurate enough.

    I swear I am not making this up.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @mott555 said:

    It's the year 2014!

    Yes but the server's probably...aw, hell, it's probably not old enough that it SHOULD have one, but it does.

    We have multiple servers that are old enough they still came with 'em, because like most places they're too cheap to replace them before they die.



  • VMware still hooks up an emulated 3.5" floppy by default, but I usually remove them.

    I finally removed the floppy drive from my desktop 3 - 4 years ago. It wasn't even hooked up, my motherboard didn't have the proper headers, just left over from a previous build and I reused the case.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @mott555 said:

    I finally removed the floppy drive from my desktop 3 - 4 years ago

    3-4 years?! Presumably you weren't actually still using a floppy disk shortly before 2010?



  • I've never understood Citrix. I know it's something big around Windows, but in my career I've never seen it or had someone tell me "we need Citrix for this"



  • @Eldelshell said:

    I've never understood Citrix. I know it's something big around Windows, but in my career I've never seen it or had someone tell me "we need Citrix for this"

    I saw this happen. It was as WTFy as you might expect.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Eldelshell said:

    I've never understood Citrix.

    Install an application on one server. Everyone remotes in and runs it there (or "locally" as a published app, meaning the window appears on your own desktop) instead of installing it on their own PC.

    Yes, you could use Remote Desktop. Why people don't is beyond me.



  • It's like the cloud but inside your own walls!
    And enterprisey, so it's gotta be good!


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place



  • It's older than the buzzword "cloud".

    It's basically for network admins who have a huge hard-on for the days when you had one server, dagnabit!, and everybody used a terminal to the one server, dagnabit! Why in my day you could buy a hamburger for a nickel, then buy a Model-T with the change! You young whippersnappers, what with your Skip-It toys, your new-fangled Sriracha sauce, your googie architecture...



  • OK, so we can basically say that Citrix is a hack to make single site Windows software work as client-server and that web applications killed (is killing?) Citrix.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @Eldelshell said:

    OK, so we can basically say that Citrix is a hack to make single site Windows software work as client-server and that web applications killed (is killing?) Citrix.

    I would say it's more used to avoid having to maintain software on a pile of desktops. Also, I dunno about "is killing". Lots of people still use desktop-based software on Citrix. Maybe someday, but not yet.



  • I was using desktop-based software on Citrix because the corporate desktop mandated 'everyone should be able to have any application deployed to their desktop'. This wouldn't be a problem if we didn't, at the time, have two applications that ran with different versions of Oracle that wouldn't co-exist nicely, to the point where it was cheaper to buy a fleet of servers and run one of the apps for all the users, than it was to get the application upgraded and re-certified with the newer version of the Oracle client libraries.



  • @loopback0 said:

    3-4 years?! Presumably you weren't actually still using a floppy disk shortly before 2010?

    No. It was installed in my case which has been recycled several times, but not actually plugged into anything. Just taking up a 3.5" external bay.


  • Garbage Person

    Feh. I still have one. It's even still connected. My case, however, doesn't have any external 3.5" bays.

    It's mounted backwards in a 3.5/5.25" adapter. Why?

    Because the floppy seek noise on boot amuses me (yes, I keep it in the boot order. The extra two seconds to do the floppy seek is worth the amusement).

    Going to build a new PC in the next few months. Will be buying a new floppy drive to do this same task.

    (This idiosyncrasy actually goes back to the XP installer, when you needed a floppy drive to do your SATA drivers)



  • The WTF company I worked for briefly ran a web application through Citrix, because the web app required IE8 (seriously) and even they weren't dumb enough to run an IE version that old on the normal desktops. (Then again, the desktops only had IE9 on them so it wasn't like a huge improvement.)

    Of course a better and probably cheaper-in-the-long-run solution would have been to buy software that wasn't shit in the first place.



  • I haven't seen a motherboard with a floppy header since like 2007 - 2008.


  • Garbage Person

    ... good point. My 2009 ep45 board has one explicitly because of the XP luddites who were still around, but I think those are extinct.

    It also had a single IDE header.


  • Fake News

    My Asus motherboard which I bought in 2009 still had one… Might have been to load overclocking data into the BIOS or something.


  • Discourse touched me in a no-no place

    @blakeyrat said:

    because the web app required IE8

    Hm. I wonder if the compatibility mode would have worked. It does an adequate job of, for example, preserving some stupid IE5 and 7 quirks.



  • Citrix, why?

    This should basically just be the thread.

    My company is in the process of trying to run all our scanner software through Citrix. So we'll have the user on a computer with a local scanner, scanning thousands of pages per day, through Citrix'd scanning software that I just know is going to break as soon as it even looks at the prod network.


  • Grade A Premium Asshole

    @blakeyrat said:

    It's basically for network admins who have a huge hard-on for the days when you had one server, dagnabit!, and everybody used a terminal to the one server, dagnabit! Why in my day you could buy a hamburger for a nickel, then buy a Model-T with the change! You young whippersnappers, what with your Skip-It toys, your new-fangled Sriracha sauce, your googie architecture...

    We have primarily used Citrix stuff for our clients to save on licensing costs for certain softwares that are exorbitantly priced. One machine or VM will run "Mega Expensive WTFy Software" and they will all connect to it through either XenDesktop or XenApp and use it that way. It doesn't need a license for every person who needs to use it so that it can be installed on their machine and they do not have to go to a specific machine to use "Mega Expensive WTFy Software".

    Then there are the clients who work all over the USA and need access to large files at the office. They connect to a XenDesktop session to do their work and it is a hell of a lot more efficient than trying to work with large files over a VPN connection. VDI sessions are great for use cases like these.

    Then there are the clients that are a hybrid of the two use cases. They already have a significant investment in XenDesktop, may as well install X software on a VM for those times when they need to use it and make the most of the money they have spent.



  • @Intercourse said:

    They already have a significant investment in XenDesktop, may as well install X software on a VM for those times when they need to use it and make the most of the money they have spent.

    So Citrix's business model is Stockholm Syndrome?



  • Works for IBM.


  • BINNED

    And Oracle.
    And a lot of other IT firms for that matter.



  • That'll be my business model for my own startup



  • @thegoryone said:

    ```
    like this one

    
    You didn't seriously think it was going to work, did you?

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