It does suck, that's as deep an analysis as thin client deserves.
Sure everybody wants the big documents on the file server, but as you say shadow copies are nice.
Nope it only takes two dead drives to kill a RAID array so long as one of the dead drives is the parity drive, lose the parity drive and one other at the same time and your data is toast. Chances of it happening are low, but it does happen.
The drives of the server have nothing to do with the slowness of running things over the network, the slowness is in moving data around. No network can read or save data faster than local, it's the nature of the beast, and when you add sending actual running code over the network the beast gets even slower.
Sure there's more, but they all have drawbacks (mostly in usability and speed) over client server, and client server still owns the majority of the market by a long shot.
Again, the improvements to the product has mostly been stealing features. NT4 Cytrix with TS gave you more functionality than 2K3 TS on it's own gives now, not much more but more. MS gets twitchy about people making money by adding obvious functionality to their products, it's the same reason they've been delving into anti-spyware stuff.
Because Powerbuilder is ugg. There's a lot of buzz again about web apps, but it'll fade, it always does.
I haven't seen any web app that works anywhere near as well as local, this is especially true if the app previously was local. Compare the last local version of any app that's made the mistake to their latest web version and you'll find the local version was faster, had better UI and was much more useful. It's a universal truth.
I haven't seen any centralized app save one single dollar. Sure they all say they do, but they're lying their butts off. They never take into account what happens when the network goes and suddenly nobody can do anything. 1 hour of down time for a central app can cost a mint.
But useless is a disk fails..
Nope it only takes two dead drives to kill a RAID array so long as one of the dead drives is the parity drive
So Im guessing you have never seen any of the modern raids? with multiple hot spares or raid ADG have you? Raid 10? You're not looking like you really understand raid. Heck with a raid ten you could lose half your disc and not lose information.. and thats a baisc raid 10..