TechAgility

So news in from Engadget regarding HP to offer Solid State Drives in their Laptops - is this a lead in to having Thin Client like Laptops? - I’m hoping to be able to post more about this shortly.

HP to add SSD options to business-minded laptops

By Joshua Topolsky on ssd

Filed under: Laptops, Storage

We know that when it comes to a company like HP, you cats hang on its every word, waiting for a juicy tidbit of information, quietly hoping to be privy to another life-altering, ingenious decision. Well listen up folks, because we’ve got news. According to a report today, HP will be begin offering solid-state drives as an option for all of its professional series laptops, including the HP Compaq 2710p, 2510p, 6910p, and 8000 lines. The company’s first NAND flash offering will be a whopping 64GB SSD, adding about $1000 in additional cost to the systems, though the company expects the prices to drop as solid-state proliferation increases. In all seriousness, HP isn’t always on the cutting edge, but this is a smart decision, which — luckily for us — seems to be cropping up all over the map.

written by dcaddick

So, don’t fancy lugging the projector with you to that next meeting with the customer? Want to do some impromtu PowerPointing for more than one person while having an informal meeting at Starbucks?

No problem, just use your mobile SmartPhone as your projector!

Hands-on with Texas Instruments’ cellphone projector

Now that we have email, internet, TV, GPS, cameras, and satellite radio on our cellphones, our next wish is for bigger, higher resolution screens — which seems paradoxical, because larger displays almost always mean bulkier devices. Well Texas Instruments thinks it’ll soon be able to nullify this trade-off with an in-handset projector that we’ve heard about several times before, but last night’s Pepcom event in New York was the first time we’ve been able to peep the technology up close. Not that the TI reps made it easy to do so: the prototype unit was in a locked metal case underneath the table, and we had to swear up and down that we saw Walt Mossberg getting a demo before they’d cough it up. As you can see, the reason they want to keep this under wraps for the time being is that the quality and brightness are certainly not ready for prime time yet; while the unit we saw used lasers as the light source, we’re told that an LED-based model still in the lab offers significant improvements. Keep reading for more shots of this rare prototype — along with a video courtesy of Popular Science — and give yourself a few moments to bask in the future before returning to the stark reality of your own phone and its dim little QQVGA action…

Continue reading Hands-on with Texas Instruments’ cellphone projector

written by dcaddick

Brian Madden and Gabe Knuth have been looking deep at a possible VDI Solution for a University and they have shared their experiences, I must say it’s an Excellent Post - nothing like igniting the fires just before iForum?

On Brian and Gabe’s behalf I take exception to those who have commented on this post and are giving them a hard time on their *recommendations* to the University - especially those who feel free to shoot them down without offering any other alternative AND simply hiding behind the "Guest" ID

It is great to see someone come out and be completely open about this process and bring it to the public domain where we can all have our 2cents worth - and for this they deserve and have my thanks, as we’re all trying to keep up with all the multitude of different options and potential solutions to help customers get the most out what they’ve got.

This is seriously only a small section of this, if you have any interest in VDI Solutions you should take the time to read through the full Post and all the comments

VDI for hundreds of apps and thousands of users? A case study where we recommended this instead of a Terminal Server-based solution

Posted by Brian Madden on September 26, 2007.

A very strange thing happened yesterday. Gabe and I were working with a customer—a university—and we ended up recommending a VDI solution instead of a Terminal Server-based solution. Afterwards I was feeling, “Wow! I can’t believe I just did that!” But I really feel it makes sense. And in fact I think it might continue to make sense more and more, and now I’m wondering if VDI can start to come out of the niche and into the mainstream?

Let’s start at the very beginning. Gabe and I worked with this university six months ago. They were not using any server-based computing or streaming or anything like that. It was a brand new environment. They had four scenarios (or “use cases”) they wanted to enable:

1. There are 1200 lab workstations throughout campus. Users need to be able to walk up to any one of them and access any of 200 applications. The users also need access to their own data and profiles.
2. They want to publish a remote desktop via server-based computing to people so that they can access the “lab workstation” from their dorm rooms or off campus.
3. They want to publish individual applications (as opposed to a full desktop like in Scenario 2) to users on their own computers.
4. Longer term, they want people to be able to run these applications locally on non-university-controlled workstations (i.e. student laptops), and they want this to work offline.

The initial plan

For Gabe and me, these four scenarios were perfect for a combination of traditional Terminal Server-based application delivery and application streaming.

We were thinking they could use something like SoftGrid to isolate and stream all (or most) of their applications. Then they could add some Terminal Server and a third-party application publishing tool to deliver individual applications. Our initial suggestions for each scenario above were:

1. Use SoftGrid to stream the applications so they run locally on each lab workstation. Install the few non-SoftGrid-compatible applications natively on the workstations.
2. Use Terminal Server, along with Citrix Presentation Server or one of the cheaper alternatives, to publish server-based computing desktops. A combination of SoftGrid and local installs would be used to get the applications onto these Terminal Servers, much like the lab workstations.
3. The same Terminal Servers, running Citrix or whatever, can be used to deliver seamlessly published server-based applications to desktops and laptops.
4. For the applications that can be sequenced with SoftGrid, they could also be streamed to Windows clients for local offline execution.

That was our recommendation and plan six months ago. Let’s look at how that worked out.

more at source…

written by dcaddick

I have long been a fan of Stephen Fry’s work even before our stint living in London and his ability to set forth on a diatribe on any number of topics is almost unsurpassed. Here in what I gather is only his second blog post he describes what he considers the faults of all manner of SmartPhones, and I do mean ALL as he is a self-confessed addict for PDA’s and SmartPhones 

Stephen Fry

Blessays, blogs and blisquisitions

Let Fame »

Device and Desires

All the big guns want an iPhone killer. Even I, mad for all things Apple as I am, want an iPhone killer. I want smart digital devices to be as good as mankind’s ingenuity can make them. I want us eternally to strive to improve and surprise. Bring on the iPhone killers. Bring them on.

YOU might, somewhere along the way, have picked up the impression that I am a passionate Mac advocate: I bought my first 128K machine in 1984, the second Macintosh to be sold in the UK - at least so I’ve always maintained and believed (the first went to the still desperately missed Douglas Adams) and I have never had fewer than ten working Macs on the go since the late 80s. It is true that I value both the platform and the hardware, that I admire the imagination, flair, elegance, quality and pioneering spirit of the Apple corporation. All quite true.

HOWEVER……..

I have, over the past twenty years been passionately addicted to all manner of digital devices, Mac-friendly or not; I have gorged myself on electronic gismos, computer accessories, toys, gadgets and what-have-you’s of all descriptions, but most especially what are now known as SmartPhones. PDAs, Wireless PIM’s, call them what you will. My motto is:

I have never seen a SmartPhone I haven’t bought

After all, the Mac itself was founded on a notional smart device, the Dynabook, fruit of the many brains of the legendary Xerox Palo Alto Research Centre (PARC). The Dynabook concept gave us the WIMP user interface, (Windows, Icons, Mice, Pull down menus) and thence the Apple Lisa and its successor, the Macintosh. The Dynabook was a posited form, a notional device that would deliver information to its user with the greatest ease and intuitive functionality. As a result of this mission statement, the command code line found in all standard computing of the time was made to yield to a Graphical User Interface (GUI). Apple took up the call (poached some PARC staff) and produced the Mac OS; IBM and latterly MS took years and years to get the message. But that is how the GUI was born, out of a quest for a better relationship between man and machine, individual and digital device.

much, much more at source…. 

written by dcaddick

So according to theinquirer.net Citrix has only just started shipping the WANscaler to the UK? Is this a reflection on the UK’s plentiful bandwidth, such that it doesn’t really need the WANscaler? or is it a reflection of how long it takes Citrix UK to develop a go-to-market strategy? Mmmm….? 

Citrix wants WAN stake

WANscaler: awful name, useful product

By Martin Veitch: Friday, 28 September 2007, 5:20 PM

CITRIX SYSTEMS has started shipping its WANscaler Client appliance in the UK for the first time.

Acquired when Citrix bought Orbital Data last year, WANscaler is aimed at optimising performance for branch offices through compression and accelerating protocol performance.

Despite the unfortunate name, it should sell like hot cakes to firms that already run Presentation Server or Terminal Services, as a way serve applications across wide area networks.

Security is also built in “at both ends of the wire”, said Citrix’s Dave Austin.

written by dcaddick