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Do you have any idea of what it costs to park in Hoboken? $14 or more for 8 hours of parking, and there are 12,000 indoor parking spots in Hoboken, I'd guess roughly half of those are in decks. Or how much the city makes off parking tickets? We're talking millions in parking revenue each year for the companies operating the decks and millions in parking-ticket revenue for the city itself (using RFID tags now) for a 1-square-mile city with a population of about 40,000.

Plus, if you want to hire a single dev, you'll be paying far more than $66,000 for a competent one in Hoboken -- especially once you consider benefits. Also, what do you do when they are on vacation? This is a clear case of when it is a good idea to outsource an ongoing, uptime-critical project. This company has a proven track record.

Finally, I think you're underestimating the requirements of the software -- oit doesn't just manage the garage, it also physically moves valuable private property. Are you willing to stake that liability on finding a developer who will not make errors? I sure as hell wouldn't be.

Here is some real info on how the hack works, thanks to google:
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1983037,00.as p
Seems to me, lots of OSes will have a problem with this until they figure it out. Could it be a hardware security hole?

Except it's already been patched.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1999241,00.as p?kc=EWRSS03119TX1K0000594

• Teleo:
  http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/aug0 5/09-30MSNTeleoPR.mspx
  

  
  "Aug. 30, 2005 -- Microsoft Corp. today announced it has acquired Teleo Inc., a provider of voice over Internet protocol (VoIP) software
  and services..."
  

  
  http://www.makingthings.com/downloads/README_Teleo AppSDK_v_1_0_1
  "README Teleo Application SDK version 1.0.1 Zaurus (Linux arm) built with arm-linux-gcc version 2.95.2 Linux x86 b uilt with gcc 3.2"
  

  
  

• FrontBridge (Jul 20 2005)
  

  
  http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/jul0 5/07-20FrontBridgePR.mspx
  "July 20, 2005 --Microsoft Corp. today announced that it will acquire FrontBridge Technologies Inc., a leading provider of managed services that address corporate e-mail security, compliance and availability requirements. ... better protect their messaging infrastructure while complying with mandatory
  regulations such as the Sarbanes-Oxley Act of 2002, Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act (HIPAA), and regulations that affect
  financial services companies such as SEC 17A and NASD 3010 and 3011."
  

  
  http://www-306.ibm.com/software/success/cssdb.nsf/ CS/BEMY-5UJNYU?OpenDocument&Site=default
  " FrontBridge counters spam attacks with IBM and Linux hosted
  solution. On the software side, FrontBridge is running a customized Linux
  distribution. "After going through the available combinations we had no
  doubt that IBM IBM eServer xSeries servers running Linux was the best
  possible solution for us," explains Jillings."
  
  

• Groove (Mar 10 2005)
  
  [I think this was more of a exec-recruiting move to
  replace Alchin]
  
  
• Sybari Software (Feb 8 2005)
  
  http://www.microsoft.com/presspass/press/2005/feb0 5/02-08SybariPR.mspx
  
  "Microsoft to Acquire Enterprise Anti-Virus Security Provider Sybari Software"
  

  
  http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1830182,00.as p
  "On the day the software giant completed its purchase of Sybari Software Inc., a deal first announced in February, Microsoft Corp. announced it
  would immediately discontinue new sales of Sybari's flagship Antigen
  suite for the Unix and Linux platforms."
  Jun 10 2003 GeCAD
  

How about link #1: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1996904,00.as p

Simon Crosby, the CTO for XenSource, said:
"The VMware team should be praised for engaging an open dialog with the Linux kernel and Xen communities, and they are actively engaging in the process," he said.

They are - FTA http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1990366,00.as p

XenSource doesn't have a business to protect?
That'll be why Frank Artale is the vice president of business development at XenSource.
That'll also be why Microsoft and XenSource have joined forces to aid server virtualization, will it?
(FTA - http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1990366,00.as p )

In fact in Win64 from Vista on up, unsigned kernel-level code cannot be installed. You need to use a not-cheap signature from a trusted authority.

This is one of the holes in the Agnitum Whine Paper - they ignore the fact that the code they say could easily hack past the patching would have to be signed, which presents serious problems for a hacker.

It turns out that Forbes.com was wrong...
In an article written by Daniel Lyons?

This is just the latest climb down in the SCO peanut gallery as their media allies find other things to write about. Before this article Rob Enderle already moved from his SCO Should Win article to predicting that SCO's litigation, against IBM or anyone else, is all but done.

The story here isn't that SCO has come up with another lame excuse in another vain attempt to flog the dead horse of their court case back to life, but that even their most ardent supporters are starting to see what's going on.

PS - The one-page version of the article can be found at http://www.eweek.com/print_article2/0,1217,a=18381 8,00.asp

According to eweek http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1991064,00.as p
the install time was around 50 minutes. That is a lot longer than what it takes
to install equvalent functionality on e.g. Linux, it is far more than
what it takes to install MacOS-X.

In 50 minutes you can install Linux, including office suites, database software
e-mail software, windows file servers, image editors, software development tools,...
With Vista you just get a plain OS.

Microsoft is lucky that they most of their software preinstalled on hardware.

However, the competion is shaping up even in this area. HP is to be planning to
ship some systems with Novell/Suse preinstalled, and that is a desktop that rivals
MacOS-X in usability.

The OS market development of the beginning of next year will be interesting to watch.

Microsoft has some plans for WinFS technologies they aren't talking about yet. See http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1982419,00.as p. An 'integrated storage vision' for leveraging structured and unstructured data? Sounds like Enterprise search to me. If Turner made his statements at that company conference post-WinFS announcement, maybe he had this in mind.

This is a big reason why nobody takes open source seriously

What a bunch of crock. MS bought a company that was selling a product and making money on it. Xen directly caused VMware to start giving away one of the products which in turn made it impossible for Ms to recover it's investment in the company they bought.

Xen did not directly cause VMware to give away any of its products. Right now VMware's main threat is Microsoft, since Microsoft is in the position of being able to incorporate virtualization directly into Windows.

Xen's offerings are nowhere as mature as either VMware or Microsoft. Seriously, if you were VMware, whom would you be more afraid of? The small open-source startup that hasn't proven itself, is years behind you, has little market presence and name recognition, or the OS monopolist who's prepared to force its own brand of virtualization down everyone's throats?

Yes it does. Some people even claim it's better then Vmware workstation and ESX.

Claims don't make it true. References, please. Last I heard, Xen still doesn't provide most of the features that VMware does (e.g. snapshots, removable devices). Their enterprise offerings aren't even out yet, are they?

Answering myself:

Some tables and figures are here.
Plus JBoss has answered the "study" with a nice blog entry:

I've played with Plone a little bit, and it is resource intensive, to say the least. However, when you look at their graphs, eweek ran plone under both Windows Server 2003 and Suse Enterprise Linux. Given that they used the built-in Zope application server as the web server for Plone under both Windows and Linux, I would expect the performance to be equivalent.

When you look at the graphs, Plone on Windows appeared to outperform Plone on Linux by an order of magnitude. Something smelled funny. Like debugging.

While I'm not sure how Suse configures their Plone packages, by default, the Zope packages come with debugging turned on, which cripples performance. If you look at Chapter 2 of the Plone Book by Andy McKay, it states:

By default in Zope 2.7 debug mode is enabled. Note that Plone runs significantly slower in debug mode, approximately 10-20 times slower. To turn this off, add the following line to the configuration file:

debug-mode off

To make the out-of-the-box experience more impressive for Windows users (debug mode slows Plone down on Windows even more than on Linux), it ships with debug mode off already. If you have a Plone site running and want to know if debug mode is running, go to *portal_migration* in the ZMI and look at the variables listed there; this will tell you if debug mode is enabled.

If I were running an enterprise which needed to use something with the features and robustness of Plone, and was about to devote the hundreds (or thousands) of hours required to fill it with content, and tweak it to my heart's content, I'd read the [expletive deleted] documentation, and notice that I might need to turn off debug mode. Sure, eweek said that they wanted to keep everything untuned:

But the point was to test the stacks, not their ideal performance points, which is also why we didn't tune or optimize any of the systems but ran them as close to default as possible.

Too bad that they didn't turn Zope debugging on in Windows, just to be consistent.

This is not a complex tuning or advanced configuration issue. You don't need to use eye of newt, or sacrifice small animals on the night of a full moon to make this simple change. If debug was left on in Linux, it not only invalidates their results, it also shows their conclusions to be utter garbage. A big part of their conclusion that open source software worked better on Windows was based on the Plone example (the best "apples to apples" comparison in their entire test). Eweek said:

Probably most surprising was the solid performance that came from the stacks that contained a mix of a Windows server and open-source components.

Replying to myself.

The do provide the other numbers that show the numbers in pretty graphs.

I've read the article before it hit /. and their conclusion is that there is no clear winner. .Net outperforms OSS solutions on some tests and vice-versa. The surprising(*) results are how good WAMP performed in some of the tests (if you really want specifics RTFA). Here is a direct link to the tests.

* - I've seen similar results in benchmarks of Mono & .Net, i.e. Mono apps with .Net framework vs pure .Net and pure Mono, so although there is no connection between JIT compilers and web servers performance, the trend is there.
Too bad the article haven't touched Mono.

ODF is XML. ODF is XML.

There, say it with me now...

ODF is XML. ODF is XML.

And when I want to use Open Source Software that reads Office files and saves them as ODF, well, I already do sue that.

In my blog, I've been ranting about Apple's false sense of security and its advertising misrepresentations for a while now. Some of my recent posts which are very much on-topic here include these:

• Why Apple Should Rejoice In Its Low Market Share:
  http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/385/
• 2006 Could Be a Bad Year for OS X Security:
  http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/401/
• Apple Advertising Misrepresentation #2 - Security
  http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/494/
• Mac Hacking on the Rise
  http://mikesalsbury.com/mambo/content/view/13/

I think it's just a matter of time until the big bright bullseye Apple is painting on itself and its users becomes some malware coder's primary target. Hopefully they'll be ready when that day comes, but I have a feeling it's going to come as a very rude surprise.

As David Coursey said last year in his article "When Will Apple Grow Up?":
"...because of its small market share and low enterprise presence, Apple can release software that really needed better, and more public, testing almost with impunity. This is further proof that Apple isn't willing to do what's necessary to become an enterprise player--and customers reward that behavior by staying away, in droves." http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1813718,00.as p?kc=EWRSS03129TX1K0000611

Yes, exactly.

Open Source is totally unprofitable

A little later after posting parent I came across this: about RedHat

which is very unlike news about Sun Microsystems

But no surprise there, it's been happening for a while

now who's capitalistic ?

"MySQL has become the most popular open-source database in the world by offering users a good combination of choice, performance and ease of use," said Marten Mickos, MySQL's CEO. ...

"We will now be providing developers with the additional option of leveraging SCO's popular platforms. We look forward to working with SCO and their large reseller network to support our mutual customers with their enterprise database applications," Mickos said. ...

The certified version of MySQL 5.0 for SCO OpenServer 6 will be available later this year under the name MySQL Network for SCO OpenServer 6. It will be available directly from SCO and from SCO's resellers. Its pricing has not yet been set.

Taken from http://www.eweek.com/article2/0%2C1895%2C1855483%2 C00.asp

******************

Mysql AB actively sought a relationship with SCO, and is now assisting SCO by joint certifications.

You can be sure every dollar they make will be used to fund their legal warchest for the attack on GNU/Linux

We should boycott Mysql, and Mysql AB.

Better to trial and fail then not try at all, I'd say. At least if you actively work to avoid them, eventually you will at least hurt them financially - which can eventually (hopefully?) lead to someone else with bigger pockets that we can trust finally buying out the backbone.

It's not so easy in more rural areas, but I suspect this will give Vonage a hefty boost if enough people get disenfranchised by AT&T over this to make the switch. That's assuming that Vonage can avoid more lawsuits.

With IBM CEO announcing $6 Billion for expansion in India, which also included setting up worldclass IBM Research centers, I think it was a bad move by Apple. IBM CEO & executives are much more experienced and powerful in the corporate world than Apple executives are. When Bach's player hits the road, Jobs will be forced to move Cupertino to Bangalore or he will move to Benaras ;-)

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1978009,00.as p

Microsoft executives have recently said they are committed to a greater outreach to the open source community and to make Windows software interoperable with that licensed under the GNU General Public License (GPL). Is that a priority of yours and something you plan to move further forward?

I have been one of the principle people architecting the way we are going to step up to this bigger question around interoperability, and that will certainly be a focus of mine going forward, along with Bob Muglia.

You can download a copy of "Free as in Freedom" from here. I believe it's published under the FDLicense
http://www.grimstveit.no/jakob/files/text/freeasin freedom.pdf

Download that PDF and search the term "Mundie"
You'll quickly find this on page 6

The subject of Stallman's speech is the history and future of the free software movement. The location is significant. Less than a month before, Microsoft senior vice president

--
Craig Mundie appeared at the nearby NYU Stern School of Business, delivering a speech blasting the General Public License, or GPL,
--

a legal device originally conceived by Stallman 16 years before. Built to counteract the growing wave of software secrecy overtaking the computer industry-a wave first noticed by Stallman during his 1980 troubles with the Xerox laser printer-the GPL has evolved into a central tool of the free software community. In simplest terms, the GPL locks software programs into a form of communal ownership-what today's legal scholars now call the "digital commons"-through the legal weight of copyright. Once locked, programs remain unremovable. Derivative versions must carry the same copyright protection-even derivative versions that bear only a small snippet of the original source code.
--
For this reason, some within the software industry have taken to calling the GPL a "viral" license, because it spreads itself to every software program it touches.1
--

Slashdot says
Microsoft's Mundie to Continue OSS Outreach

When you read about what he said in his speeches, do you really think this guy is going to carry on much of anything for FOSS or OSS integration?

It's all about talk, and show, and complacency for them. There is no substance to it.

A change hasn't been implemented in Firefox, and indications were that there wouldn't need to be one.

The founder of Eolas said in eweek (in September 2003):
"We have from the beginning had a general policy of providing non-commercial users royalty-free licenses. We expect to be paid for the commercial use of our technologies....We released our browser back in 1995 to the world free for non-commercial use, so that should be an indicator to people that the open-source community shouldn't have anything to fear from us. The extent that those products are used commercially by others or resold commercially, sure we expect to be talking to people who are making money through the use of that technology."

I don't recall seeing anything about Mozilla obtaining a license. I don't know if they have, but maybe if Eolas hasn't pursued them about the patent, they haven't seen a need to do so.

The original model let the keyboard fold into the back of the screen, turning it into a tablet computer. That was as perfect a ebook as you could want. Now the thing works like a normal laptop. Oh well.

One they were demoing definetely has a screen you can rotate around and fold. http://www.eweek.com/slideshow_viewer/0,1205,l=&s= 700&a=180353&po=4,00.asp

No. Google does not have a legal obligation to make money for it's shareholders.

Google has a legal obligation to behave in a manner dictated to it by the voting shareholders. While this is usually a directive to make money, it could be other things. It just so happens that Page and Brin have 66.2 percent of the voting power. So they can actually do whatever they want to do. THEY are the final word on China or not, so you can point the finger directly at them.

According to Negroponte, the $100 laptop will initially cost around $135

Nooooooooooo

"We are also talking to Microsoft. They're going to make a Windows CE version" for the machine, Negroponte said. "We're going to help them make a Win CE version, so geez, why criticize me?"

from
http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1945984,00.as p

Now they win over a domain parking service and everyone want to say the statistics are unfairly in their favor? What about all the years those statistics worked against them, I didn't see you complaining then.

I like to work with Apache, but 2k3 server is a large improvement from MS. If MS finally getting their act together on the server front means they win back some of the "Netcraft share" than great.

After Adobe threatened MS with a lawsuit for wanting to allow PDF writing for free in Office 2007 i can see why they'd rather use their own format. Essentially, they weren't pushing their own format, they were going to provide PDF support as well as the XPS format, but Adobe it seems will be suing because they're not charging for the ability to convert to PDF format.

I have heard for a number of years about the idea that American (or other foreign, for that matter) companies will be able to open new markets and profits by selling their products (whether they be tangible goods or IP) or services in the People's Republic of China because they represent an "almost untapped market of new customers." But does this really hold true, especially for IT companies?

In the seventeen years I have worked in the IT industry (mostly at companies which sold software, but also for a hardware vendor) I have seen varying degrees of interest in selling products in China. For example, in the late 1980s through early 1990s, I worked at McAfee Associates, which even then had a fairly global presence due to marketing the product as shareware. We had never had any sales in China and, as a matter of fact, would regularly receive copies of our own anti-virus software from which our copyright and contact information had been removed and replaced with messages saying it was from the Ministry of Public Security and to contact them if a virus was found. Of course, changing the messages in the software also set off its own anti-tamper checks for signs of damage/infection by a computer virus, so we received plenty of copies of our own software where the warning message had been edited as well and were infected by computer viruses. Still, it is very hard to sell a product in a country whose government itself is hacking and pirating the same software you are trying to sell. When Bill Larson took over the company from John McAfee he expressed a strong desire to sell products in China, but when I left in the mid-1990s there was still no sales coming in from over there, other than the occasional ex-pat who registered a copy of the software.

Strangely enough, the only company I've worked for which has had some success in China is a telecommunications manufacturer, who makes equipment like VoIP PBXs, phones and so forth. They have had a few wins over there and even have a small sales office in Beijing. I was always surprised they never had problems like Cisco did with Huawei. But that's just one company and sales from other countries in the region (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) outstripped those. I haven't worked there since last year, but I doubt things have changed much.

So, where are the foreign IT companies which are making money in China? Cisco may have had some success there in the past, but Huawei and their "Cisco-like" products look like they are to overshadow them, and services like Alibaba, Baidu and QQ in China are already servicing the markets that Western ecommerce, search and community/messaging have had only limited success in reaching.

I have heard for a number of years about the idea that American (or other foreign, for that matter) companies will be able to open new markets and profits by selling their products (whether they be tangible goods or IP) or services in the People's Republic of China because they represent an "almost untapped market of new customers." But does this really hold true, especially for IT companies?

In the seventeen years I have worked in the IT industry (mostly at companies which sold software, but also for a hardware vendor) I have seen varying degrees of interest in selling products in China. For example, in the late 1980s through early 1990s, I worked at McAfee Associates, which even then had a fairly global presence due to marketing the product as shareware. We had never had any sales in China and, as a matter of fact, would regularly receive copies of our own anti-virus software from which our copyright and contact information had been removed and replaced with messages saying it was from the Ministry of Public Security and to contact them if a virus was found. Of course, changing the messages in the software also set off its own anti-tamper checks for signs of damage/infection by a computer virus, so we received plenty of copies of our own software where the warning message had been edited as well and were infected by computer viruses. Still, it is very hard to sell a product in a country whose government itself is hacking and pirating the same software you are trying to sell. When Bill Larson took over the company from John McAfee he expressed a strong desire to sell products in China, but when I left in the mid-1990s there was still no sales coming in from over there, other than the occasional ex-pat who registered a copy of the software.

Strangely enough, the only company I've worked for which has had some success in China is a telecommunications manufacturer, who makes equipment like VoIP PBXs, phones and so forth. They have had a few wins over there and even have a small sales office in Beijing. I was always surprised they never had problems like Cisco did with Huawei. But that's just one company and sales from other countries in the region (Japan, Korea, Taiwan, etc.) outstripped those. I haven't worked there since last year, but I doubt things have changed much.

So, where are the foreign IT companies which are making money in China? Cisco may have had some success there in the past, but Huawei and their "Cisco-like" products look like they are to overshadow them, and services like Alibaba, Baidu and QQ in China are already servicing the markets that Western ecommerce, search and community/messaging have had only limited success in reaching.

Did you just compare OS X to Win 98 and Win Me? If that's what you are basing your whole OS X / Windows argument on, there is your problem. No self respecting Windows user would be caught dead using an OS that old. It would be like running Mandrake 2.x or something. Why would you bother?

Exactly. That's why I'm comparing OS X to Win 98 and ME in terms of virus activity. They have similar market share (roughly 5%), and 98/ME is innundated with current day viruses. An OS X virus would have as much impact economically/socially, but vastly more impact in the media (Worlds First Automated OS X worm).

However, whether you like it or not, computers are as accessible as they are largely because of Microsoft and not because of *nix or Apple.

That's a goofy statement. There's no way to prove it true or false, but I see no reason why OS/2, Novell's GUI efforts, XFree86, or Macintosh OS could have made computing accessible.

The reason I hate Microsoft is not because they are successful. The reason I hate Microsoft is because they ruthlessly (and unethically) bash companies into the ground via illegal tactics. And this is not a disputable claim; it's been verified, repeatedly, in court. Even worse, the above merely refers to contractual fraud/deception; include monopoly tactics, and the picture is bleaker.

Even the venerable IE has its roots in a shady deal with a company (SpyGlass) who would have _never_ licensed to Microsoft had they known what Microsoft was planning.

Furthermore, Microsoft fills the airwaves with disgusting, falsehood-ridden fud. "Linux is a cancer" "Our customers aren't interested in interoperability" "Linux is 10 times as expensive to run as Windows" "Linux was stolen from Minix"

Not to mention Microsoft contribution of both FUD and $$ to the SCO case.

Yes, its safe to say I hate them. In terms of business ethics, Microsoft is pretty much as low as you can go.

On Windows it is impossible to delete or replace a file which is in use (e.g. a shared library). The same applies for directories. Thus for any meaningful upgrade you need to restart the applications and often the OS _before_ you can do anything with their files. There are complicated mechanisms for keeping track of files that need to be deleted/replaced after a reboot. It appears that recently they have added yet another even more complicated feature to avoid reboots: http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1895276,00.as p

Such complicated techniques for a basic thing like an upgrade make me very nervous. What happens if something goes wrong with the extensive bookkeeping in the middle of the upgrade ?

Did you see this LinuxLuver? http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1972180,00.as p

Does this mean companies are hoping to sell more than "You looked better on MySpace" t-shirts http://www.hottopic.com/store/product.asp?LS=0&ITE M=299338 ?

Seriously though, how is this any worse than dataminers like Axciom http://www.acxiom.com/, or Wal-Mart having the world's larget database http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1675960,00.as p of point-of-sale data? I can't imagine the trash you'd have to wade through to get some reliable marketing data. And if that happens, we'll just see bots that create fake MySpace pages to inflate the numbers-- the same way we now see blog spam and fake blogs with product information.

There are countries where (for several years already) one could not go (or take one's kids!) to the movies without being exposed to media companies' threats of detention and rape
I come from Germany and we actually have these kinds of spots right before we can watch DVDs and (as already mentioned) they aren't skippable, so whenever I want to view movie XY, they are telling me that I'm going to jail because i bought the DVD and could copy it.
Well, at least most of my DVDs won't try to root my PC.

Btw, I suspect that the main reason why Microsoft was going to support PDF was to ease the transition from XPS.

I thought MS announced PDF support to comply with Massachusetts' open formats policy.

Here's the debian.org listserv postmortum. They subsequently discovered an error in do_brk(), which is described in eweek and has the CVE of CVE-2003-0961. Slashdot discussion here.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1759,1859740,00.as p

This reliable? "MS Word Zero-Day Exploit Found"http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1965042 ,00.asp

For example, even though the plot was foiled, I haven't seen any published identification of the crooks behind the nine figure bank heist

Oracle have already announced that Solaris is their primary platform for both Sparc & x86 64 bit platforms.

In light of Oracle's recent flirt with Linux as their primary platform, it must be relatively obvious that Linux couldn't deliver the scalability Oracle needs.

If Sun goes down the path of open-source licensing Java, it would use an OSI (Open Source Initiative)-approved license, he added.

I wonder if they are doing this to any of the poor saps who were hoodwinked into the Software Assurance Subscription program 5 years ago.

http://www.eweek.com/article2/0,1895,1681636,00.as p

Let's see -how many OS upgrades would I have gotten in the 5 years since? 2 -if you count XP SP1 and SP2.

Homer: an extended service warranty? how can I go wrong!

but beware of thin clients based on Windows XP Embedded. This is basically a "dumbed down" version of XP, meant to run a few local applications (browsers, media players, etc.). However, being XP, they are susceptible to many of the same vulnerabilities that "fat" XP is. Vendors will tell you that they're immune because they use "nonwritable storage." The problem is, that's not really true. They use a "RAM disk" scheme that is basically a reboot-to-discard-changes operation. While the system is powered and on the network, it's a target, and seeing how many zero-day XP vulnerabilities there are, you're forced to keep chasing this security target for eternity. There goes your supposed lowered TCO...

We have tried Wyse and Neoware clients based on XP Embedded. They both functioned OK. RAM limitations for the RAM disk were the achilles heel - lots of apps (IE, QuickTime, Real & WMP) expect a disk to use as cache. It will work, but you have to pay attention to application-level caches. As I mentioned, the REAL problem with these systems is that you have to manage them just like fat clients - patch, patch, patch, reboot, patch, etc. We absolutely hated the Wyse Rapport software. Neoware's was easier, but the delays in getting XP Embedded specific patches from either vendor was unacceptable, despite the fact that these systems were vulnerable to the same errata as "fat" XP.

The next style is the Linux-based thin client. These are far slimmer (less built-in code) than their XP Embedded cousins, often running on much lower powered platforms (PPC is quite common), making them much less susceptible to common Linux-on-X86 vulnerabilities. I haven't tried them yet, so I can't speak to the management scheme. But, I figure it's somewhere near the XP Embedded space - you still have multiple boxes sitting on desktops that need to get upgraded from time to time. I just think the fact that Linux thin clients are so much slimmer makes them far less likely to be exposed to the same risk as XP Embedded.

My favorite thin client architecture thus far is the Sun Ray platform. This is a TRUE thin client, in that the clients don't really run any software. For the most part, they behave as an Ethernet-based remote KVM. Add smart card-based "hot desking" and you have a truly usable "network computer" environment. They even run RDP for running Windows apps now. The best thing about Sun Ray is that software upgrades are done on ONE BOX (the Sun Ray Server System server, which can be Solaris or Linux). At most, you have to manage a handful of servers, if you run a cluster. But these are all in the same room, right next to your professional sysadmin, who keeps on top of patches and locks it down right. Very much a different beast than a box on every desk.

eWeek has a special report on thin clients; http://www.eweek.com/category2/0,1874,1725167,00.a sp

Good luck!
Charles

I believe you're referring to the Microsoft/Claria Tryst.

(Related Slashdot article here.)