ITworld: Thin Client Economics

Back in the 1980s when PCs were first entering corporations, IT workers had to fight off the mainframers who wanted to keep their 3270 IBM terminals on their desktops. A similar battle is being waged these days with so-called thin clients, which lie at the heart of a virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) rollout.

You can read more about the economics of using thin clients for your main desktops in a story that ran today in ITworld here.

Tune Up Utilities 2010 to tweak your PC’s performance

Make your Windows PC run faster and more reliably with this updated utility program. It can do many common tasks quickly and automatically, and clean up your hard drive and registry settings too.

www.tune-up.com
Price: $49.95, for up to three PCs
Supports Windows 7, Vista and XP with SP2, in both the 32- and 64-bit OSs

ITworld: VDI Strategies for Success

VDI (Virtual Desktop Infrastructure) is a growing trend. The idea is to stream a standard boot image from a central storage repository so you can save on desktop support and maintenance costs. You avoid having to run endpoint protection products, or patching individual desktops, and you can distribute your desktops around the world as long as you have a reasonably fast Internet connection and a Web browser to kick things off.

But VDI is fraught with complexities. You can read why in my post in ITWorld today here.

Datamation: Virtual Servers update

A lot has happened in the last nine months of 2009 since we wrote our update on virtual servers. Citrix has made Xen Server free and released a new version 5.5 in mid 2009. Microsoft has released R2 of Windows Server 2008 that extends Hyper V in new and useful ways, and adds support for Red Hat Linux guest OSs finally. And VMware has come out with about 57 new products mostly labeled version 4 to manage and integrate their line, and handle greater densities of VMs per server.

You can read my full report here on Datamation’s Web site.

ITExpertVoice screencast: Using Laplink’s PC Mover to Migrate XP to Windows 7

If you are running Windows XP and want to upgrade to Windows 7 without having to reformat your machine’s hard drive, you currently have one choice: a utility called PC Mover from Laplink software. This video shows you the steps involved in the migration, along with things to look out for in using PC Mover.

http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-laplinks-pc-mover-to-migrate-a-windows-xp-desktop-to-windows-7/

A mixed experience getting free TV online

Since most of the TV shows are on what appears to be a three-month vacation, now might be a good time to seek Internet alternatives. I got the idea from a story last week in the New York Times about how one of its reporters has gone completely cold-turkey on their cable TV consumption.

It got me thinking about two guys that I know in their 20s that have taken completely different approaches to their digital entertainment consumption. Their approaches illustrate what we have to do to get our TV these days.

J. is single and a DirecTV subscriber, at $95 a month. C. is engaged but doesn’t pay for his TV programming. Like the NYT reporter, he uses his computer to send video to his TV from various Internet sources, using a HDMI to DVI cable. Both are relatively computer savvy guys. Both bought their TVs earlier this spring – this is C.’s first TV since his college days, and did so because he wanted to make it easier for him and his girl friend to watch shows both separately and together. J. has a second TV in his bedroom, and a bigger plasma display in his living room. Both guys have 10 MB cable connections for their Internet service.

C. watches a combination of shows from various Web video sites, such as Hulu and Boxee and some on air TV too. He works in the financial industry, where he has Bloomberg TV streaming to his desktop PC as part of his job. J. works in sales and has some downtime during the work day, where he also watches TV on his PC, but only those Web stations that aren’t blocked by his employer. SpikeTV is his favorite. C. likes the Netflix streaming option, J. hates it – “if I wanted to watch ten-year old movies, I would just find them for free online.”

J. is a big computer gamer and has an Xbox and connects other gaming consoles when his friends bring them by. “The Xbox was difficult to setup to find my digital media,” he told me, much worse the Playstation 3, which easily found and played the majority of his video files that he has downloaded to his PC. It is ironic that a Microsoft gaming console connecting to a Microsoft Windows PC is more difficult to configure than a Sony console connecting to a Windows PC. C. runs on a Mac.

Curiously, the two guys also differ on how they watch movies. J. hasn’t been in a movie theater since 1996, and is proud about that record. Instead, he has downloaded hundreds of movies illegally from a file sharing service, and makes copies of the videos for all of his friends. C. goes to the theaters once every two months but says that it can get expensive, especially at big-city ticket prices.

C. has about 30 GB of music on his PC, most of it illegally downloaded. His last CD was purchased from a store about nine years ago. J. bought his last CD in 1996., and also has several gigabytes of stolen music on his computer. “There is no point in downloading a clip from a legal site,” he told me. “In the time it would take me to listen to the commercial and the first 15 or so seconds, I can find the entire MP3 song online and have it on my hard drive.”

So what can we learn from these two guys? First, going completely free-TV isn’t easy. Some shows aren’t readily available on the Internet. For example, HGTV has exactly 12 shows on Hulu at the moment, which is a very poor sample. Yes, you can find some old shows (C.’s current fave is the vintage Adam 12 series), but your mileage may vary. Yes, they are adding shows all the time, and in some cases you can find the shows on the networks’ own Web sites. I watched a few episodes of FlashFoward on ABC.com, but I had to watch short commercials and click on a button to continue playing the show when the commercials were done.

Second, the system isn’t spousal friendly, at least not for my generation. When I checked to see about my wife’s favorite local TV station, they didn’t have any stream that I could watch from their Web site. HGTV’s Web site is also miserable, making finding a show more of an Easter Egg hunt, and I mean that not in any good way. I know free-TV isn’t ready for my wife yet. C.’s fiancée is happy with their free-TV setup, but it has taken her a while to get used to the arrangement.

Third, while the TV producers and networks are trying mightily to avoid another Napsterization of video, they have yet to succeed. They have experimented with copy protection and that seems to be on the wane, and now concentrated on streaming. Some episodes are available for sale on iTunes.

One thing that is clear is that broadcast networks “must-see TV” is so over. Both guys don’t watch much in the way of sports or news programming. Both watch shows on their schedule, not the networks’.

Finally, the number of add-on devices and gotchas is still mind numbing if you want to deal with the Internet channel. For ABC’s shows, you need to download a player and not use Safari. Netflix has the best and widest streaming support but you’ll need a computer, a supported Blu-Ray DVD player, Xbox or PS3, or their Roku device. Some current shows don’t show up for days or weeks online. Others only have excerpted clips.

Speaking of Roku, I bought mine a month ago and unlike J., am happy with the Netflix choice of those older movies, especially the ones that have been upconverted to HD status. There is little interruption in the video streams, even with a Wifi connection to my network. And Roku continues to add other services, such as Pandora roll-your-own music channels, to make it easier to get content to my living room.

We certainly have come far with free TV — it wasn’t all that long ago that we were using videotapes and buying DVDs, both things that seem so quaint now. Streaming video gets better and better as our Internet pipes improve.

But we still have a long way to go before the Internet can replace the cable DVR. Certainly, Hulu is worth taking a look at and seeing if you can find your favorites and queue them up to watch on your computer. And as Netbooks and used Mac Minis are around $300, there isn’t much friction in having one of them connected to one of your TV outputs. The big remaining issue is having to deal with the various software pieces to try to play the videos.

Top ten IT iPhone apps

While it’s the frivolous iPhone apps that get the attention (yes, there really are more than 175 apps that can produce rude bodily noises, I checked), there are lots of apps that can also help you do your job as an IT worker. While less notorious, they are worth your time to download and check out.

Let’s look at my top ten IT business-related apps to download and try out. Most of these apps require the v3.0 firmware on either device to work properly. I have also tried to pick those apps that are free or nearly so too. You can read my article and see the screenshots over at Computerworld here.

ITExpertVoice screencast: Using Windows 7 Mobility Center

Windows Mobility Center is a new feature of Windows 7. Microsoft has collected in one place for road warriors a powerful series of controls that can help you quickly connect to wireless networks, adjust your screen for presentations, and set up other important adjustments. No more hunting around the Control Panel settings for busy people on the go. This video shows you the lay of the landscape with Mobility Center.

http://itexpertvoice.com/home/using-windows-7-mobility-center/

Baseline: Make E-mail Encryption Effortless

E-mail encryption certainly isn’t new, but as more companies come under fire for leaking customer identities or privileged information, encryption is increasingly essential for doing business—and possibly for staying in business. The business case for encryption is even more compelling because the latest products are easier to manage, implement and use in daily e-mail activities.

In my article in Baseline magazine this month, I talk about four issues involved in getting encryption deployed across the enterprise.

Developing the next gen of iPhone apps programmers

I had an opportunity to audit a computer science class this week at Washington University, a class that was teaching students how to write iPhone apps. It was their final presentation, and I got to see a dozen apps that were very impressive. As I was watching the kids present, I was thinking back to my college days and the similarities and differences about my education.

Of course, back in my day real programmers wrote in Assembler, and maybe Fortran. None of this object-oriented stuff had even been invented. We also had punched cards, which is probably why I never became a programmer. In grad school, we had video terminals because PCs were still being tinkered around inside Silicon Valley garages.

In the Wash U class, most of the students had their own Macbooks, some better than my own. Each was given an iPod touch to use during the semester and this session was the moment of truth, where they had to demo their apps in front of the class. Most of the programming projects were functional, although there were a few students that had obviously been putting some long hours trying to get the bugs out of their apps. One of the kids was working on his presentation and actually debugged his app during class. Some things never change.

I was impressed first of all with the apps, which ranged from tracking what is in your fridge to being used by a personal trainer to track their clients’ workouts to locating friends on a campus map during free times. There was an app that taught people how to count cards at Blackjack –this could have helped one of my dorm-mates who would periodically make a run to Tahoe where they still used single decks and come home with enough money to pay for his living expenses. Another was used to collate and tag photos from Flickr. Each team had to research and find an app to build that wasn’t yet sold on the App Store, too.

I hope the kids take the time to finish them and post them to the App Store. Some of the apps were very polished and could probably be used as is with almost no additional effort, while a few just crashed with the slightest tap on the screen. I was also impressed with the quality of the presentations and how polished the kids were in front of the class. This isn’t what I remember of my nerdy classmates back in the day, where we seldom even spoke to each other, let alone spoke Powerpoint. Most of the kids put together a few slides that showed their decision-making and progress during the class. Some of the apps were built in teams, some solo. There were about 25 kids in the class, with two women. (This is about the same sad gender ratio in my day, too.)

These were not beginning computer science students by any means. Each of them had to have an understanding of a lot of different pieces, including the graphics interface of the iPhone itself, database calls, Web services, and the Apple development environment that is used to build the app itself. That is a lot for any programmer to handle, but the kids took it in stride. You could tell that they learned a lot during the semester, and were proud of it too. Heck, I was proud of them and I didn’t even know them.

One of the things that I was struck with during the class was how collaborative the kids were. This wasn’t the introverted nerds of my misspent youth — these kids were calling out suggestions to help each other and try to remove the remaining roadblocks in each other’s apps. Some of them had tried to go down a particular path with one tool, only to change horses and use something else. It was fun to watch them get all excited about some arcane code fragment. Part of this I think was because the iPhone environment is so new and so contained that it makes it easier to collaborate, because there are so many things to learn that are outside the normal coding process.

They also learned first-hand about feature creep and trying to hit their requirements on time and how to balance making things work with making things look pretty.

Speaking of which, most of the students had high standards for the look and feel of their apps. There isn’t much screen real estate on the iPhone to fool around with, and you have to make every pixel count. Some of the kids took the time to find the right icons to display on screen, and they all took pains to make use of the various menus and screen controls that make the iPhone apps easy to use with one or two fingers. That was impressive, and showed me that the iPhone really has a future and why 100,000 plus apps have been already created.

You could also see the beginnings of professional computer scientists here too. A few of them mentioned how they coded in pairs, using extreme programming techniques. I think that meant that the pair stayed up all night to meet a particular deadline, but still, that is how it happens in the real world too. And learning object-oriented languages is part and parcel to today’s programming world, unlike the world that I entered after college.

One kid had the funniest line, talking about his mother, who is a project manager and a programmer. “My mom is very old school and knew all these Unix shell script commands that she never told me about when I was growing up.” Oh, youth is so wasted on the young!

If your local university offers a class on iPhone apps, you might want to stop by and be inspired. I know I was. Thanks to the teacher Todd Sproull for letting me sit in.