Virtualization for VARs

You would think something that the major vendors are now giving away for free isn’t the best place for a VAR to be, but you would be wrong. Welcome to the world of server virtualization, the next hot set of services for VARs to sell.

What makes it a hot area is that while VMs are simple concepts, the actual implementation is much more subtle and the devil is in the details. Does this sound like opportunity for the channel? Yes.

You can read more of my column in eWeek’s Strategic Partner magazine here.

Get Me Graphics for Vista

The latest news about de-planetizing Pluto has got me bummed. In my misspent youth, the story about how Clyde Tombaugh discovered a planet was one of those moments that steered me towards science and technology, along with watching Mr. Spock fight Tribbles, decoding Clarke’s 2001, and trying out the experiments from Mr. Wizard. While I can understand the decision, it is a lot like telling Columbus that he landed on some Caribbean island instead of the U.S. of A.

Well, let’s not dwell on Pluto but move on to something else to get really depressed about. If you are considering getting more experience with the latest beta of Windows Vista, you will find that your graphics horsepower is woefully inadequate for running this operating system.

I have found from my tests that you will need a discrete graphics processor if you are going to have any kind of productivity with Vista at all. This is probably going to be most noticeable with your laptop, which traditionally has lagged behind desktops in terms of graphics firepower. Why is this important? Vista treats itself like one big video game, with pixel shaders, anti-aliasing, and the like. Everything on the screen is now considered a 3D polygon that can be manipulated by the OS.

While there are some obvious reasons for Microsoft to offer these enhancements as part of its OS, particularly for the gaming generation, there are some non-obvious ones as well. Aero — what the new Windows interface design is called — makes Vista more reliable by separating the screen drawing commands more completely from the applications control. Many of the crashes of XP were caused by this lack of separation, and one application stepping on another one’s screen real estate. The testing that I have done indicates that Vista will help fix these problems. But the fix comes at a high premium.

The wisest course of action is to wait and postpone buying any new graphics card until Vista ships next year. If you can’t wait, then make sure your card has at least 256 MB of on-board video memory, and see what your vendor says about supporting Direct X v10. This is what will guarantee Vista functionality. And if you are making a major PC buy, consider how you will deal with your video subsystem, and think about getting even more video RAM.

Yes, 256 MB of video RAM is going to be the starting place. That is a heck of a lot of RAM for a general business computer, and chances are most of your corporation’s PCs have far less installed.

I tested the hypothesis that having an add-in graphics processor is a necessary condition for running the latest beta 2 of Windows Vista, by testing two identically configured PCs, but one with a plug-in Nvidia GPU and the other using the Intel integrated graphics on the motherboard. I found that without the extra GPU, you are wasting your time and your own productivity. While the experience with an integrated graphics card is acceptable, it is borderline acceptable and most users will become easily frustrated over the limitations imposed by Vista on graphics-poor PCs when trying to run multiple applications. By multiple, I mean more than one: Vista runs a lot of stuff under the covers, much more than XP.

What this means is that users running the on-board Intel graphics will not get the performance and productivity gains that they would have with a discreet graphics card. Intel will try to obfuscate this message in the coming months, and the major PC vendors have already begun plastering “Vista-ready” logos all over their Web sites, but ignore these messages, and find out how much video RAM you can really afford and make sure you get a plug-in card and not anything onboard too.

On a new Dell that I bought about a month ago that was “Vista-ready” it came with a big 8 MB of shared video-RAM. Going into the BIOS, I could see that my choices were keeping this setting, or dropping the video RAM down to 1 MB. Some choice. You might have similar circumstances, if you even know how to fiddle with your BIOS, or download a new one that might help make further adjustments. As a result, Vista runs slowly on this PC, and I don’t see any of the 3D treats that I could have gotten had I installed a better video card.

Microsoft has this mickey-mouse assessment tool that will grade your system and tell you how it is expected to perform with Vista: don’t even bother with the download, because it is easy to game this tool and have it report just about anything.

I’ll have more to say about Vista in the coming months, but you might as well know the bad news now about the add-in graphics scene as you try to console yourselves about the whole Pluto thing.

An unusual recruitement video

Not worksafe, but hilarious just the same. I think they *are* kidding here. But it is a great way to recruit people for their firm.

Watch the video on You tube

How to set up WPA2 on your wireless network

If you are like most people, your home or small office wireless router probably is running without any encryption whatsoever, and you are a sitting duck for someone to easily view your network traffic.

Some of you have put encryption on your wireless networks but aren’t using the best wireless security methods. This means that you are running your networks with inferior protocols that offer a false sense of protection because these protocols are very easily broken into.

The best encryption method is to use WPA2. This is slowly being supported on a number of wireless devices, and the latest incarnations of both Wndows XP and Mac OS X include support too.

Read my tutorial on how to setup WPA2 in Computerworld here.

A parent’s guide to MySpace

With all the news about MySpace predators, naturally there are several books that are out that claim to help parents figure out this brave not-so-new world. In fact, by the time most of you grok MySpace, you will find that many of your kids have moved on to FaceBook or other social sites for older kids.

Nevertheless, if you want a great guide to this landscape, I highly recommend MySpace Unraveled by Larry Magid and Anne Collier . I’ve know Larry for many years and he is a straight-up guy that can explain tech terms in lay language. This book strikes a nice balance between leading you by the hand and actually giving you plenty of parental advice.

There are other MySpace books out there but I would steer clear of them until you read Magid and Collier’s book.

Real life, or something like it

I live my life online as do many of you, and lately I have been frustrated by how hard it is to leave the virtual world and find the physical items that I need to do business with someone.

I mean, who has the time anymore? What with all the hours spent creating fake MySpace celebrity pages and linking them to my real accounts, setting up new SecondLife virtual businesses, sending IMs to all my far-flung correspondents, Skyping colleagues to keep up to date on what they are doing around the world, updating my LinkedIn profile and writing endorsements for others, reading my group email postings, downloading free music to play on my iPod so I don’t have to talk to people as I am walking down the street, and checking out the latest overnight rankings on various game servers to track my progress, is there any time left to just live your life in what used to be so quaintly called meatspace anymore? Who needs meatspace when there is all this meet-space, anyway?

Remember that cell phone service that tells you when you are in the vicinity of your friends? It seems so odd now. Why bother going out, when you have all your broadband at home? And when I am out, I find myself looking around to figure out where I can get connected. This is the beginning sign of addiction.

Is it any wonder that we can’t carry on a real f2f convo anymore? (And how many of you had to stop and decode that last sentence. LOL) At least we are all becoming excellent touch typists. I guess that is one skill that has shown improvement across all demographics. That is, if you can take the time to type out the entire sentence and not abbreviate it as I just did.

And I didn’t even mention updating all of my blogs and creating podcasts, sending out these email updates to my mailing list, maintaining the mailing list and associated Web sites, and doing my usual round of online backups too. Isn’t it nice that we all these systems to make us more productive? How about spending some time creating actual content, rather than all this babysitting our data?

It is great that we can Google anything anyone anytime, and research their college indiscretions (lucky for moi Al Gore hadn’t invented the Internet yet when I was that age), but try finding a postal address, a phone number, or a contact name on the average Web site nowadays. Or how about trying to find any indication of the company you are surfing has actually been in business, or is still in business. It hasn’t gotten any easier to get these mundane pieces of information, with phishing emails and hijacked URLs. (Have you all gotten the latest batch of Paypal messages saying that money has been deposited to your account? Don’t open those.)

This just proves my point: we all live in the virtual world, and concentrate our energies on the screen instead of each other. So gather up your individual laptops, sit on the couch with the TV on and with a few IM sessions open, and don’t forget to grab your cell phones in case someone wants to call you. On the other hand, it has gotten easier to screen my phone calls — the only people that call my wired home line these days are selling me something, or wrong numbers.

Ok, I gotta go post this email and get back to doing some real work for my clients.

Online Storage Solutions

I am a big fan of backups ever since my office building had a fire one afternoon. An electrical short in the office directly below mine caused the fire, and I fortunately wasn’t there when the fire started – I had left the office to run an errand. But when I came back and saw the fire engines circled around my office building, my heart skipped a beat. Yes, I had done plenty of backups of my data, indeed just that morning I had made one. And my backup was sitting right next to the computer on my desk! A lot of good that was going to do me now, to be sure. Fortunately, nothing in my office was harmed, and I learned a valuable lesson.

The first rule of backups: make a habit of taking them to another location.

With the advances of broadband and better Web services technologies, you now have a lot of different choices when it comes to storing your data offsite. Depending on how much money you want to spend, you can accomplish this with pennies, a few or hundreds of dollars. Let’s start with the pennies first.

The simplest strategy is to burn CDs or DVDs with your data, and take them somewhere else on a regular basis. When you have accumulated a bunch of discs, though, this gets somewhat difficult to manage. One of my readers has a great take on this: ”You can use my rule of thumb: Whenever you visit your mom, take a new backup and keep it at her house. If she nags you about not seeing her often enough, it means your backup is not
up-to-date!”

Next up in the cost curve is using one of the resellers of Amazon’s S3 storage API. The two services that I tried are ElephantDrive.com and JungleDisk.com. They use small applications that communicate with Amazon’s storage repository. They both encrypt and then move your data up into cyberspace. The downside is that Jungle doesn’t currently offer synchronization with your data on your hard disk, so you have to do some work to manage the updates on your own — although they have promised to be working on a solution. They are also fairly slow at sending the files up to Amazon — 150 MB took 45 minutes for one service, and two hours for the other.

The two Amazon services are dirt cheap — you will be hard pressed to spend more than $10 a year for 2 GB of data. Amazon has published their storage API and we can expect more players to enter this space. Jungle handles both Macs and Windows, while Elephant is Windows-only. Both are small start-ups, which may be an issue because who knows how long they will be around. I want to save my data someplace and then the company disappears. On the other hand, “We have released all our source code on how we do the encryption and how we store the information on S3,” says Jungle Dave Wright, the head guy there. “Users can feel confident that there are other tools where they can get copies of their data off of S3.” And at these prices this can be just one of many places that holds your data.

A better solution on the synchronization scene is from FolderShare.com, which used to be owned by Iomega but is now part of the Redmond Borg. You install the software on two PCs, and they work on both Mac and Windows. Any files in a specific directory that you designate that gets saved on one gets copied to the other. It is presently free, too.

One company that has been around for a while in this space is MyDocsOnline.com. They offer a confusing array of pricing plans, but to use their backup service you get 5 GB for about $100/year. They are competing with Xdrive, which is owned now by AOL and will be offering 4 GB for free starting next month. Another company here in the mid-price bracket is Box.net, who offers 4 GB for about $60/year. Some other solutions offered by my readers include Datadepositbox.com, carbonite.com, and LogMeIn. These are all-Windows solutions as far as I know at present.

I have been using MyDocs for years, and like the system. Uploads are fast, and they also support WebDAV, which makes it easier to mount the server on your desktop and save files to it. Synchronization isn’t as much of an issue if you can just delete and replace the entire data store with a clean set of files, which is what I do.

At the top end of the market are companies like eVault and Iron Mountain that offer online storage for larger enterprises. These typically start around $100 a month for 5GB of storage. Apple also has its .Mac offering too. It costs $200 a year for 4 GB of storage.

No matter which service you use, start to do something today about saving offsite copies of your data. Don’t wait for a fire or other disaster to get going on this.

Five Disruptive Techs CIOs Should Watch

In an article published this month for CIO magazine, I write about my five favorite technologies that could have major changes on the way IT organizations run their shops in the coming year. Which five made my cut? Well, you’ll have to read the piece, but my criteria were:

1. Technology that changes the way IT delivers computing services to the enterprise or
uses IT services from outside suppliers, trading partners, and customers.

2. Technology that changes the inventory of desktops, servers, or existing network
infrastructure in some significant way (because of new tech or new price points).

3. New computing or networking applications that require wholesale changes to stuff.

4. Some huge trend or trendlet that has got everyone energized and developers doing stuff around it that is getting lots of funding from IT shops currently.

Locking down your endpoints

I am part of a three-city seminar series that Techtarget is putting on in September. If you live in Dallas, NY or DC, stop by and spend the day with me and the folks from Burton Group talking about authentication and security topics, here is the full agenda.

AOLfree: You’ve Got Problems!

I haven’t run AOL software since about the time in the late 1990s when Marshall Rose and I were writing our book on Internet Messaging together. We wanted to call the book “You’ve Got Mail” but that is a story for another day. So when AOL announced last week that they were migrating to a free service for those of us that didn’t need their dialup connections any more (dialup? Who uses dialup?) I had to try it out.

Boy, did I enter the wayback machine, Mr. Peabody. Before I knew what was going on, my hard disk had filled up with AOL bloatware. I count the following programs now installed care of Time Warner:

AOL Coach, AOL Connection Services, AOL Deskbar, AOL Spyware Protector, AOL IE Toolbar, AOL You’ve Got Pictures screensaver, Real’s Player, QuickTime, and AOL Computer Check Up. Not to mention the AOL Uninstaller, which only uninstalls one of the above programs. As my friend Barry Gerber would say, who designed this crap?

The AOLfree version faithfully replicates the AOL paid experience: you have AOL IM, a browser to AOL’s portal (when was the last time you needed to check that page?), and of course, AOL email (if you can find a series of characters and numbers that no one else has already grabbed). But why would anyone want to do this? The days of a “walled garden” — as AOL once called its portal — are long over, and most people use whatever email and browser they want these days.

However, there are a couple of things that it doesn’t do, things that parents should know. One of the most useful things of a real AOL account was the ability to set children’s access to content and how they would use their IM and email accounts. While most teens these days know more than parents and how to get around these blocks, the pre-teen set can benefit from these controls. The AOLfree universe is completely free of parental controls.

But if you are still using AOL and don’t have youngsters around, you want to get off the AOL bus now. This is why their phone lines are being clogged with users who want out of their monthly AOL tax on their Internet access. BTW, the number to call is 1-888-265-8008 and operators are standing by 24/7. I will save you the trouble of looking it up on AOL.com, which isn’t the easiest thing to find. And don’t get me started on how much of a maze AOLhelp online is. There are so many blind alleys on their Web site that any noob trying to figure this out isn’t going to get very far. Clearly, they are working on their site. (When I went under AOLhelp, account questions, price plans AOL offers; I got “We’re sorry, currently there are no available documents for this section.” Oops.)

Yes, there are some semi-useful tools, such as AOL Computer Check Up, which scans and attempts to fix your hard disk for things that are wrong with it, but there are better programs around for free, including PCPitStop.com from my friend Dave Methvin. And there is its Spyware blocker, but after installing all these other AOL thingies I am not sure that I can find the blocker among all my desktop clutter anymore. And why, pray tell, do I need both Real and QuickTime players on my machine? Certainly, one would be enough to play all that video content that AOL now is streaming at me, including the intro video with the cute blonde showing me what the software does, which is almost worth the entire hassle of installing and uninstalling AOLfree.

No, this is one piece of freeware that you get exactly what you pay for: a mish-mash of second-rate software, all so that you can have a “vanity” AOL email address to indicate to the rest of the world that you continue to be a clueless noob. Glenn Fleishman writes equally harsh language in this week’s Tidbits.com newsletter:

AOL’s software still stinks. AOL’s email filtering is highly erratic. Any of us who run mailing lists are familiar with suddenly having all of our double opt-in, fully approved AOL users bounce our email for some obscure reason that’s impossible to address directly with AOL.

AOLfree is just another in piece of their software that continues to annoy me. I wrote a short review of their latest AIM Pro IM client for Computerworld that you can read here.

When I wrote that piece I got a few emails from people within AOL that wanted to talk to me. They didn’t provide phone numbers, and I assumed they were product managers so I emailed them back, saying I welcome a dialog. Never heard another peep out of them. Perhaps they didn’t receive my message — but this is just another indication of how hard it is to deal with the company. I think we can say that the merger with Time Warner has been successful at reverse cherry-picking the aspects of two dysfunctional corporate cultures and creating a worst-of-breed new media company.

AOL has done a terrific job of getting noobs on the Net, and providing an IM service for teens that is now being used by many businesses. But their software efforts suffer from coming from a large corporation that has lost its will to be an innovator. There isn’t any reason to use AOLfree. If you still have AOL.com as your domain, it is time to consider other alternatives, like Google, Earthlink, and hundreds of other places that will do a better job.