Diskless PCs Are Back
A decade ago, diskless PCs were all the rage, at least according to the vendors,
analysts and the sheepdog IT press. Even though they were cheap (not cheap enough,
though) and relatively secure from data theft (this was before every single
worker had a high-speed 'Net connection), diskless boxes never really took off.
With virtualization, Citrix and Microsoft's terminal services all surging,
maybe local drives are now a bit passé, at least for desktops. Recognizing
this possibility, Microsoft this week announced new
licensing options for Vista, including the ability to run Vista on a variety
of thin clients. One option lets the software run on "virtual machines
centralized on server hardware."
Unfortunately, only Software Assurance customers can get these licenses. Given
the cost of Software Assurance, I'll just run Vista on my hard drive, thank
you very much!
Is the Great Google Too Great?
Redmond Channel Partner magazine, written for Microsoft resellers (some
partners consider this word a slur but they do, in fact, resell software), has
a newsletter written by Lee Pender. I love Lee's stuff, except when it sinks
in how much better his is than mine!
Recently, Lee tackled
Google, asking if Google knows too much about us and is using this information
inappropriately.
In fact, forget the Patriot Act, the NSA and the CIA. If Google ran U.S. national
security, they would have found Osama bin Laden surfing for girlie pictures
in Bora Bora!
Read Pender's views and highly refined writing here.
Ask a Ferrell
This weekend, I took my son Nick to Blades of Glory, the new comedy starting
Will Ferrell and Napoleon Dynamite. It's a great film, once again proving the
fancy critics with large vocabularies wrong (for comedies, my family only goes
to movies that critics have utterly panned, like Dude, Where's My Car?).
I'm not here to tell you how to spend your $12. I'm here to tell you that the
stars of this movie included the Web as part of their press junket just as much
as "Good Morning America" and "Live With Regis and Kelly."
Besides an interview with Break.com, my son David (he gives me so much Redmond
Report content that I'm going to have to start cutting him a check) pointed
me to a great interview with the one
and only "Ask a Ninja."
By the way, my youngest son Nick is stealing a page from his dad's playbook,
launching a blog just as curmudgeonly and opinionated as his old man's. Most
of the comments he's gotten are from me using fake names and fake e-mail addresses.
This 11-year-old busted me when he saw that all the messages came from the same
IP address (damn you, static IP!).
Feel free to check
out his site and leave feedback -- just don't be creepy, rude or inappropriate
(that's reserved for messages sent directly to [email protected]).
About the Author
Doug Barney is editor in chief of Redmond magazine and the VP, editorial director of Redmond Media Group.