Dibbler's Net

It was only a matter of time but the next evolution in the desktop is here with DesktopTwo. Sponsored by Sun this new free service gives you a virtual desktop.

* Caveat. With all cloud services you need to balance the service vs the risk of having your data on someone else’s systems.

I signed up and logged in. Besides the requirement for Flash this service works really well. The display is clean and the apps are useful and full featured. I will spend some more time to see just how ready and willing I am to move to this type of thing but this would be a nice jump in technology from where remote desktop is today and remote computing for the office workforce. Once we are able to completely move back to a dumb terminal / server option we will not have completed our full circle back to mainframe based computing as things were when I started. I am very interested in how this completion of the computing technology cycle will open a new wave of client /server and client computing in the next circle of technology advancements.

I was also very pleases to see that the parent company Sapotek have not only made this open for development of new apps but they have made the whole system open which means you can run this as your internal desktop system using any assortment of web client machines. With the requirement to be on Windows, or Mac, or Linux no longer there and only a base requirement for bandwidth and a browser we will see less dependecny on the big OS makers and more control by the corporate IT departments. Most people would say that this is bad but in my mind it isn’t. Back with dumb terminals and mainframe’s security truly was easier. When you are dealing with the app security and not every desktop it does help to simplify and reduce the burden of work. The old adage used to be that any system could pass C2 requirements, all you needed to do was remove the network card, video card, keyboard, and lock it in a room. Once that was done you had one of the most secure OS’s around. It may seem like a joke but the reality is there. The less doors and windows on a house the easier it is to secure those few entry points. The less software or desktop machines the easier it will be to not have your data breach end up on the front page of the local news. Please do not take this to say that Cloud Desktops are the answer to security. I don’t mean that at all. I just see that the cycle coming back around to dumb terminal and mainframe (server) systems has some ability to simplify one aspect of a security model.

So go to their website, sign up and give it a try.

D~

For the past few months I have started running a dedicated opensolaris desktop system on my desk at home. It has two monitors, one screen displays nagios network status while the other one does generic web browsing and some twit live watching. I had run into an issue with 2008.05 that it did not want to nicely upgrade to svn_95 due to some mbr boot changes. Now granted this is a development so I don’t expect anything to be perfect, however I am finding myself surprised by more features each day. I am used to the fact that Solaris is a great Server OS first and a desktop second (for most users) but this is starting to change for me. This evening I decided to move to svn_95 as part of the pre 2008_11 version. Wanting to avoid my mbr boot issue (which is documented I just didn’t read the readme first) I went and got the ISO for 2008_11 svn_95 and downloaded it to the solaris system. Upon download I put a blank DVD+R into the drive. First Opensolaris saw the blank disk and auto launched a burning utility, this is new and I must say a nice touch. This shows Sun’s move to more of a end user friendly desktop. Next I went to the ISO file and right clicked on it. From there it gave me a burn to disk option which I used. From there a small utility popped up and with one click the dvd was being burned. This was actually an easier process than burning an ISO on windows. Congratulations to the Opensolaris team for a job well done and an OS that is quickly becoming a viable end user option.

D~

From http://www.deploylinux.net/matt/2008/08/all-your-vms-belong-to-us.html

Quoting “As of tomorrow morning, VM’s running on all hosts with ESX 3.5U2 in enterprise configurations will not power on.”

The current thought is that some beta/preview code got left into the application that basically is a nothing works past this data kind of thing. The workaround fix of setting your system clock back a few days only breaks a few Federal rules if you are in a corporate environment.

Not wanting to just repost someone elses blog entry and the fact the news is quickly jumping on this story I wanted to post my personal issues with this problem.

Way back when I was writing software widgets for Web servers licensing was a big issue. As a coder I wanted to protect my code. Make it so that anyone using it really did pay for it. We also needed a way for people to try it. This meant using a registration key with an expiration date. This was really the only choice to allow people to demo something and to help offset some of the easier widget stealing.  The problem was is that the real version also included this code so if you bought a full version we gave you a license key that was good till 2032. Now this was many many years ago and since then I have drastically changed my thoughts on this area. First I am generally opposed to any software that requires any call home function to stay alive and is any way dependent on licensing every year. I understand that there is more SAS type of licensing and certain subscription type services like Antivirus where yearly costs are part of the model, for the moment I am leaving those out of this thought.

When it comes to actual software, where I have paid full price for the software up front then that software should not have any type of date based restriction anywhere in the code. If I choose to not pay for maintenance a year from now then I should not receive product updates ( security patches yes, new functionality no) but the base product should still continue to work. There are too many documented cases where software expires and then customers are basically strongarmed into paying higher fees just to keep their doors open. Or in some cases the vendor gets sold or goes away and now you have an expensive door stop. When you are looking to buy that next big software application for your business make sure that you evaluate licensing in your product criteria and test for date based kills. Any software that requires this type of licensing should be last on your product selection list. Going back to when I wrote software we actually found this to be enough of an issue that we changed how we distributed demo software. We moved to a model where we compiled a special demo build that worked for 30 days. But this was a different set of code then what we sold which had no Date restriction code in it at all. In the end it was the only fair way to treat paying customers. Now if other vendors could start to understand that it’s wrong to extort your customers and this VMWare issue is a direct result of that attitude. The only way we can fix this is to start demanding that vendors treat us better.

D~