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If Windows 7 Fails, Citrix (Not Linux) Wins
Julie188 writes "Microsoft blogger Mitchell Ashley, who has been using Windows 7 full-time, predicts that Windows 7 will fail to lure XP users away from their beloved, aging operating system — after all, Windows 7 is little more than what Vista should have been, when it shipped two years ago. But eventually old PCs must be replaced and then we'll see corporations, desperate to get out of the expense of managing Windows machines, get wise. Instead of buying new Windows 7 PCs, they could deliver virtualized XP desktops to a worker's own PC and/or mobile device. Ashley believes that Citrix's Project Independence has the right idea."
In my experience Citrix has some serious out-of-band issues with modifier keys on Linux and Mac OS X. Shift key events don't send correctly.
I type so fast that I mean "Citrix" and I get "cItrix"
I've tested this on Ubuntu 7.10, 8.04, and 8.10, and my friends report issues on Mac OS X.
People will leave XP for whatever the next MS milestone is.
That'd mean "Vista", which people resisted as well as they knew how.
For some people it means just not upgrading their machines, for some it means taking advantage of the Vista-to-XP downgrade licensing, for some it means just pirating XP to install on their new machines.
But no, Vista nicely demonstrated that people will not put up with whatever MS throws at them, as long as what they already have works well enough for their needs.
You're doing it wrong, we support ~30 users per server and they are mostly 4 core boxes with 4GB of ram, not exactly beefy servers by today's standards. We'd easily be doing 4x that if we could go to x64 with 16GB per box but IE has this bad habit of loading the 64bit executable even when you explicitly launch it from the x86 directory causing all 32bit plugins and ActiveX controls to not work.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
Not specifically a reply to you but..
They are not talking about Citrix servers and running remote apps in the traditional Citrix sense. They are referring to Citrix virtual desktops. They keep changing the name but I believe it is called the "Independence Project" now.
It allows you to have just about any workstation either local or remote and you will connect to your "virtual desktop" and do all of your work. An example is a thin client at your desk with a bare image of Windows. It can automatically launch your businesses virtual desktop on start up. That same virtual desktop you have can be accessed from ANY thin client, laptop, over the internet etc.. No more "desktop" management per say because the user can basically plug in a bare bones pre installed something from Dell and with a single application, can access their "normal" desktop.
On the back end, there are many advantages as well. The virtual desktops can use shared storage, they can be templates allowing you to distribute hundreds of virtual desktops with a small back end amount of disk space (changed from the template are saved in your desktop etc). These virtual desktops can be checked out and on a timed basis as well and and be configured to limit what access the local hardware has so you can limit usb sticks copying crap off etc. You can give an employee a laptop with a copy of the virtual desktop limited to 30 days use. If they take off, the virtual desktop with all of the company data can not be accessed after 30 days. Just an example.
Applications are updated and pushed to the templates as a group instead of to each physical desktop so that is easier as well.
VMWare has the same thing, it is called VDI. I've tested them both. I like the VMWare solution better myself but both companies are adding features and functionality every week.
I probably have one big run on sentence above and did a crappy job explaining it but. Read and decide for yourself, it is a decent technology that has a lot of good use.
Bad boys rape our young girls but Violet gives willingly.
We're telling our customers (large corp. with site wide XP license) to pickup new machines in the next few months, so we can image them with XP. Word's come down that come June, our license terms with MS change and we won't be able to 'downgrade' vista machines after that.
I drank what? -- Socrates
For all the way people are clinging to XP like Linus to his blanket, it really isn't a very good modern OS. It's very, very insecure.
I've been using Vista for almost two years now, and for all the hype about how bad it is, it's pretty damn solid. After getting used to the new UI, it's pretty usable (and this is without the new very nice usability enhancements in Windows 7). I have plenty of CPU and Memory so performance isn't an issue for me with Vista. And the biggest thing? I've been running it, attached to the internet, for two years without having an anti-virus program installed, and NO ISSUES. I don't think I could do that with XP for even a single day.
The fact is, Vista, and Windows 7 to come, are simply easier to use, and far FAR more secure. Hardly perfect, of course, but then neither is any other OS out there (and much of their "security" tends to be "security through obscurity", given they don't have critical mass to make writing viruses and worms "worth-while"). But XP to me now feels a lot like IE6... a flawed, insecure, somewhat crappy solution that everyone should just get over and move on from.
Having used Vista for a while, I can say I find going back to XP really annoying. Lack of the start-menu search is huge, for one thing. The "Luna" UI is ugly and distracting (just as I thought it was when trying to move to it from Windows 2000).
Basically, I think the resistence to Vista is over-hyped, and not based on any current reality (it's more based on the huge "Vista-Ready" snafu of Microsoft and Intel, where upgrading existing hardware resulted in really crappy performance, along with the GA release of Vista not having nearly the driver and application compatibility necessary... Vista SP1 pretty much resolves those issues). And since Windows 7 is receiving rave reviews, and doesn't have the major problems that affected the initial perception of Vista, I don't think there will be a serious issue of people NOT upgrading to it.... or getting it on a new PC and wanting to "down-grade" to XP.
Vista was a necessary and painful step for Microsoft to go through. The fundamental underlying changes they made were painful to users, but necessary for security. Windows 7 refines a lot of them to be less painful (UAC), while "time" has smoothed out the other pain points (updated drivers and applications).
I really don't think there will be any huge resistence to adopting Windows 7 when it's released.
- Spryguy
There are three kinds of people in this world: those that can count and those that can't
I'm living the Citrix desktop right now at a client. First there's a thin client that basicly connects you to the windows logon and internal systems. From there I can access most things, but in order to connect to the Internet it launches *drumroll* another Citrix client inside the first. It actually works quite well, but ironically to this story I'm getting a thick client on monday because there's some things I need to do that it can't. Most people use it though and with beefy enough servers I don't notice much difference, even when I was cropping some screenshots.
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
If you go to VMWare's site you can download the free VMWare player product.
Once this is installed, you can go to the VMWare market place and location Windows 7 beta 1 build 7000.
Download it. It's a large .zip file. When it's done downloading, unzip it. The VMDK is over 5GB so this will fail on a FAT32 drive.
Once you have the files extracted, launch the Windows.7.Beta.1.7000.vmx file by opening it (double click.) The password is the same as the default user account.
I have it running under Fusion on a Mac and Workstation 6.5 on XP. Like other posters state, this is what Vista should have been. I like it. For my personal use, I'm a Mac guy. But at work my impression is that I will skip Vista and go right to Windows 7 for the bulk of our many stations. I have Vista on a few PC's, but it is slow much slower than XP & has no features my business users must have. Staffware doesn't work in Vista yet, so that's another holdup.
Anyway, if you really want to know what Win 7 is like, this is the easiest way to do it.