Corporate Client Computing

I think it was inevitable that the cycle would turn away from the original off-shoring locations as their standards of living became elevated to the point that their prices were no longer competitive - meaning that they could come back to US with no cost increase. These companies are going from mainstream to niche as their competitive advantage dwindles.

Major direction for Microsoft, as they acknowledge what is currently a huge groundswell of activity within diverse enterprises dealing with th eeffects of outsourcing and contract labor. These are the people that need the alternative desktops.

Many color laser printers hide information about your printer’s serial number and the date and time of your print job in every job you print. It’s believed that this is done to get your equipment to incriminate you without your knowledge. Now EFF has decoded the information-hiding scheme on the Xerox Docucolor series, by getting EFF supporters to print out pages from their printers and mail them to our researchers, who examined them under magnification and special light and cracked the code.

Microsoft has added many components into it’s virtualization toolkit lately - this screencast does, in 5 minutes, a good job of positioning and differentiating Microsoft Virtual Server and Microsoft Server Virtualization (Hypervisor-based, runs on Server 2008 Core). It also shows an 8-core virtual machine.

Once ultra wideband docking options become prevalent for laptops, and ultra wideband itself becomes prevalent in laptops, then the only cable left is the power cable. If advances like those with WiTricity continue, these wireless charging stations - perhaps integrated with (or options for) the ultra wideband docking stations - will complete out wireles laptop experience.

Excellent ThinkPad Brand Videos. There is a whole section on Thinkpad Survival called Legends of ThinkPads. There is also a slow motion video of a ThinkPad crash test in the Best Engineered section where you can really see how much flex a Thinkpad can really take and still function. Once you get the player up, select More Topics from the bottom right corner, and then select the sections mentioned above from the left side.

I have found few podcasts to be useful for corporate client platform work - most a great for personal tech awareness. InfoWorld’s Virtualization report is short (I can’t believe I’m saying this - maybe too short) and give information relevant to managing the client infrastructure in today’s corporation.

The hardest part of building a PC is selecting the right components to complement the overall design goals of the system. ExtremeTech’s article gives you a lot of insights into the issues surrounding component selection.