Category: Technology

What a letdown. I ran it during beta testing and found nothing special about it. I though Microsoft would certainly add something to it that would entice me to have it on a system once the retail release came around. We got a few copies of Vista Business at work this week. Here are the differences I found between XP and Vista with an explanation as to why none of these features are new, exciting, or even worth a d@#!.

• Windows Defender = Yet more annoying Windows security prompts. Thanks.
• Instant Search = Google Desktop Search
• Windows Aero Desktop = Yippee. Now I can flip through 3-D windows on my desktop. How this makes me more productive, I don’t know.
• Meeting Space = Little, tiny Netmeeting. A subscription is required for full functionality of Livemeeting. Citrix Gotomeeting is cheaper, easier, and established.
• New backup features = Very slightly enhanced MS Backup. It’s not anywhere near as innovative as System Restore Points were in XP.
• New Interface = The primary reason PC users tired of XP quickly declare “ooh, I like it”. Just what Microsoft was counting on. It’s finally a different desktop environment for them but hardly new to anyone who’s used alternative NFS operating systems all along.

Once again Microsoft has proven they are not innovative. Just like when the announced Active Directory with a thousand trumpets and anyone who ever used Novell NDS, or directory services on NFS said “oh look, it’s LDAP 10 years late”.

Needless to say I haven’t found one technical reason to go out and put Vista on any machine I own permanently. Now if you’re a gamer who just “must have” DirectX 10 by all means, do your worst. But for those of us who check email, write documents, script, or use remote administration utilities there is little this operating system offers past transparent task bars. Just like the ones I had when I was running the Blackbox windows manager on BSD eight years ago.

How come Microsoft didn’t sit down and try to come up with something that would actually entice a few Apple or Linux fans to give Vista a day in court? It’s almost as if they are so arrogant about their market share that they’ve decided not to try anymore. They’ll just roll with the existing user base and try not to lose anyone by throwing a bone in the form of a lousy graphical interface change every once and a while. A copied, un-innovative, bloated interface at that.

I really was hoping for more and stood ready to give Vista my endorsement in the shadow of ridicule from the Apple and Linux promoters. But I cannot. All I can think is, the hype lasted 5 years for what?

There are two updates that must be completed to update Exchange 2003.  Three if you haven’t already upgraded to Service Pack 2.

The first is the cumulative time zone update for Windows 2003 Server which can be found at http://support.microsoft.com/kb/931836/.

The second is the Update for daylight saving time changes in 2007 for Exchange 2003 Service Pack 2 which is at http://support.microsoft.com/?kbid=926666.

If you have a Blackberry Server there are no specific patches that are required by RIM on the server itself.  There is a patch that needs to be run on the handhelds which can be pushed to the devices from the server.  More information is available directly from Blackberry at:

 http://www.blackberry.com/select/dst2007/resolutions/enterpriseserver/exchange.

Here’s the PDF that explains how to cofigure the software push to the BlackBerry handhelds from the BlackBerry Server:

http://www.blackberry.com/select/dst2007/Deploying_DST_2007_Update.pdf

It works.  I just pushed to my unit as a test.

I’ve started using IE7 instead of Firefox. Why commit such blasphemy? Because the tabbed browsing is functionally better. For a long time I’ve been setting multiple tabs as my “home” page. Long before IE7 I disliked the way Firefox opened all of the tabs set as the home pages as duplicates (except for the currently selected tab) when the “home” button is pressed.

IE7 did away with this nonsense while I can’t find much reference of it as an acknowledged problem or future enhancement by Mozilla. Now when you press the home button in IE, while the first tab to the left is selected, it will only refresh, not re-open, all of the pages you have set as the home page tabs. To me this is a critical function that I think has been long overlooked by Mozilla. Strange that I can find no reference to it bothering anyone else.  I don’t think I’m being too picky.  It bothered someone at Microsoft.

Register.com requires $35.00 for me to renew toddsingleton.net with them for one year. For those of you not familiar with domain registration, that’s a ransom right now. For example GoDaddy.com charges $6.99 for a new registration and usually less for a renewal. So tonight I went to transfer my domain to GoDaddy. Part of the transfer process requires providing GoDaddy with a domain “Authorization Code”. I went to Register.com to get this as required. I was told I would have to “speak to a special customer service representative to handle that request” who is only available from 8am to 6pm EST. Funny, every other registrar I know of will send the authorization code to the administrative email on record for the domain (mine).

Well, here’s the problem: this domain expires at exactly midnight tonight. See the situation that’s forming? I called GoDaddy for help since I already paid them $7.99 for the transfer (which coincidentally includes a FREE one year domain registration extension). The rep laughed at the notion that I had to speak to a “special customer service rep” for an authorization number from Register.com. He then offered to refund the transfer fee if I ‘d like. I said no. I’ll have to pay the freakin’ ransom to Register.com and then I’ll move this domain straight to GoDaddy to get my free one year extension giving me the domain for 2 years. Register.com offered two years for $49.95. Wow, do their prices suck or what?

In the meantime I have another domain currently registered through Register.com, southeasternrea.com. I will begin the process of transferring that domain to GoDaddy immediately for $7.99 so I won’t have to pay over FOUR TIMES as much to renew it for one year. And what does this accelerated pricing buy you? Limited domain management tools in the web interface requiring you to have to call a “special customer service rep” to manage your own domain. That’s about as weak as it gets.

If you have a domain about to expire with Register.com here’s my advice: Transfer it to GoDaddy for $7.99 at least 10 days before the expiration date and get yourself a free one year renewal. This is the best way to let Register.com know their prices bite ass. And for those of you who are wondering why I don’t just let the domain expire and then renew it with GoDaddy for $6.99 I will detail the lifecycle of an expired domain.

• Once a domain expires the previous registrant has 12 days to renew the domain at the regular price (DNS is disabled).
• After 12 days the registrant can renew the domain for the regular price plus a surcharge of $80 for up to 30 days.
• After 30 days the domain is put up for auction for 30 days.
• After 60 days the domain is returned to the previous registrar (Register.com in this case) who can put it back into the public registry as available. I don’t know if there’s a time frame in which they’re required to do this.

I was surprised by IE 7.  I did not expect anything great because I’ve always found IE behind Firefox in security and features.  And I’ve always hated developing sites for IE in Dreamweaver because of the way it treats development standards and CSS tags.  But working in a MS environment with Exchange 2003 and Outlook Web Access the use of IE has clear advantages in the functionality of OWA.

I also tried out Google Office this week.  All I can say is now I officially have little reason to close my browser with the exception of Trillian.  I firmly believe that by 2015 the icon driven OS desktop as we know it will be a thing of the past.  It may still be there in looks but it’s all going to be on a TCP/UDP port highway with modifications for legacy app support.  So to will your entertainment stream to you this way. 

This week I saw an article on Slashdot where some who’s-who know it all CFO was predicting the coming demise of data centers as ASICs and memory grow smaller.  BS I say.  We’re going to have higher demand for warehouses of digital data than ever before in the near future.  Even if the storage devices shrink we’re not going to put every episode of Gilligan’s Island at 1280×1024 or higher resolution on a memory stick.  It’s going to take redunant storage arrays of some kind even if it’s on battery backed flash drives.  It will only take one rack of storage instead of ten to house all the bad 80’s movies I want to watch on my fiber from the curb.  The CEO of Pack-Rat, Bob Poirier, already has fiber to his house from Verizon.  Then again he also lives right down the street from Steve Case.  Mabey that’s why he has all that AOL BS on his laptop?

For over ten years there has been on-going internal discussion in corporate IT departments surrounding the cost benefit to organizations of deploying a centrally managed thin-client hardware topology verses “fat client” or locally installed applications on PC’s. There was a time, about seven or eight years ago, when the argument against thin clients from a cost perspective was a futile endeavor. During this era of the late 90’s the cost of a PC was decreasing but a quality business class system ran $900 or more without a monitor.

Now with a solid, business class workstation priced at $700 or less, with a flat panel LCD display and Windows XP Pro, the cost benefit of a thin client environment must be weighed by factors that were considered unbeatable at the dawn of thin client computing. Some of these include: centralized administration, ease of deployment, license manageability and remote user access. Currently a thin client deployment using Microsoft RDP and Citrix components are far from being less expensive than the cost of a PC. I include Citrix in the equation verses standard Microsoft RDP because of the security, stability and flexibility ICA adds to the environment, such as the ability to publish individual instances of applications verses the entire desktop and the ability to overcome notorious printing issues.

One of the key costs of a Microsoft thin client deployment is the cost of running Windows 200x Terminal Server in “Application mode”. Once a Windows server is converted from “Administrative mode” each device or user that connects to the system will require a “Device” or “User” CAL (Client Access License). There’s a big difference in the two that must be taken into consideration when making the purchase from a Microsoft license reseller and setting up the terminal server. Here’s the difference:

• A Microsoft Terminal Server “User” CAL means that each domain user account that connects to a terminal server instance will permanently use a CAL. The user account can use this CAL to access any MS Terminal Server instance. This CAL can only be released from it’s bind to the user account via a call to Microsoft Licensing Support and usually only twice per CAL according to MS policy.
• A Terminal Server “Device” CAL is one that permanently ties itself to a specific workstation or hardware device (i.e. thin-client) by binding to the MAC address of the network adapter for that device. The device can use this CAL to access any MS Terminal Server instance. This CAL can only be released from it’s bind to the device via a call to Microsoft Licensing Support and usually only twice per CAL according to MS policy.

A ideal example of when to use per Device CAL’s would be in a call center environment. Several different users will sit down to the same workstations on multiple shifts. With three shifts you would have to invest in three times as many user CAL’s as Device. Alternatively a good use of per User CAL’s is for remote users of applications who may not always use the same device to access the terminal server environment.

The cost of a User CAL and Device CAL are the same. Since they tie themselves to the user account or device accessing a terminal server they are termed “non-concurrent” licenses. Generally these run approx. $70 per user for a small to medium business depending upon your relationship with your license reseller. I will not include the cost of the server OS itself because it will be assumed that a Microsoft 200x server will be in the environment regardless or architecture. However a terminal server will be more expensive than a standard file and print server due to hardware requirements. A difference of around $2000 on average.

On top of the required Microsoft licensing there are the required Citrix Presentation server licenses. Unlike the Microsoft licenses Citrix licenses are “concurrent”, meaning they do not tie to users or devices. They are pooled on a licensing server and checked out each time a user logs in to a Citrix server or “Farm”, which is a group of MS terminal servers running Citrix in a load balanced configuration for application scalability. Each Citrix license (not termed a CAL) currently costs approx. $220 per user for the standard edition of Citrix Presentation server 4.0 and $400 per user for the advanced edition which supports the load balancing scalability feature. The standard edition only supports the connection of users to one Citrix terminal server instance. One modern server with two processors and 2Gb of memory minimum can support up to 30 concurrent users (15 per processor by Citrix long running standards).For the sake of this cost analysis I will assume 30 Citrix users. I am not going to assume corporate application licensing costs or compatibility with a thin client environment because the variables are too numerous. It would be up to experienced administrators to make this assessment on an individual basis.

Total Cost Breakdown:

$320 x 30 = $9600 – ICA compatible thin client device from Wyse or HP.

$120 x 30 = $3600 – 17″ flat panel LCD monitors

$70 x 30 = $2100 – Per User or Device Terminal Server CAL’s.

$220 x 30 = $6600 – Concurrent “standard” Citrix Presentation Server 4.0 licenses.

$2000 – Additional server hardware cost for multi-session thin client support.

Approximate total for Citrix ICA thin client deployment = $27500.00 or $916.66 per user.

Approximate total for Workstation deployment = $21000.00 or $700 per user.

Clearly the base cost of hardware and OS licensing is no longer the primary benefit in selecting a thin client environment. But when additional factors, such as less desktop hardware support, are taken into consideration there are many benefits to a thin client environment including those I mentioned earlier. By no means does the falling prices of PC’s mean the end of remote application deployment. In fact I think it just means that now we’ll be able to have the best of both worlds as the PC’s replace the thin client hardware devices and remote application technologies take hold to provide reliability and ease of administration through centralized management.

And to those who think I’m forgetting to take network connectivity into consideration as a reliability factor I will only remind you that almost all corporate applications in use today require access to network files or SQL data to function any way. So never, under any circumstances, regard network reliability as anything less than an absolute necessity.