Network computers vs. Network PCs vs. standard PCs. As the rhetoric flies, you may be feeling disgusted enough to dump your coffee into the keyboard and go back to the days of tin cans and string. Don't get mad, get educated.
Marketers woo government buyers with promises of what products can do.
Decide first what you want to do before you ponder the hype. Sun argues that all Java applets should be written to run on any computer that supports the Java environment. That's fine as far as it goes, but the fact is that Java doesn't support all the functions of a typical operating system. As programmers develop applets for intranets, they sometimes need to squeeze in special functions such as linking to objects in a database. Or they may be tempted to speed up functions by making applets that run only on specific operating systems.