It's not that ESX has issues. It's that the Guest OS is flat out not designed for "something" to change your CPU on the fly, which is the way the guest sees it... In fact we (yes, I work for VMware) used to allow that back in the ESX 2.0 days, but the guest bluescreened/panicked after a while as the microcode is loaded at boot time. The only way we can pull these tricks today is by masking some specific instructions of newer chip generations vs. the previous ones. Hard, but not rocket science. Get me a guest that adapt to those changes live and you'll have what you want...
I must respectfully disagree with my colleague (I also work for VMware). There are many reasons why a "normal", although admittedly geeky user would run ESXi at home. Today's version will run on a large variety of hardware, some of it not even listed under the HCL, and it's really easy to use and setup. Installation is next, next, next. Configuration still requires Windows but it's pretty easy. Just point a web browser to it, download the VI Client, run it against the server, configure it the way you want it, and start creating VMs. The defaults are good for most uses.
I have my Ubuntu-based virtual router/fw VM, my Asterisk VM, a good Ubuntu-based fileserver well tuned, our family web site on the virtual DMZ, VPN access, and even an XP VM running Mozy all day long so I can backup from my fileserver without having to be tethered for days. The whole thing is a rocket, runs smooth and unattended in my garage consuming 90+ Watts and I still have enough capacity for another 6-10 VMs given the amount of RAM I have in that box.
I say try it yourself. I see no reason why in the future, you may not even have offering from third parties for home servers already pre-configured for tasks like this.
Apparently, it will become a trend for the high-end tier of technology certifications. VMware will also be adding it the their VCDX certification, but not to the "more common" VCP.
I'm in line for the Aptera all-electric model. I get regular updates and they DO seem to be on target for delivery in California. I waited years for the Venture One but it's still vaporware. All seems to indicate Aptera is the real deal.
Since I installed solar panels, the cost of charging the vehicle at night will be nominal, as my day-generation will offset the charge.
Disclaimer: I work for VMware, and I just came back from VMworld in Vegas (exhausted BTW).
In all my 5 years in the company, I must say that this is the most comprehensive re-thinking of the long-term strategy for virtualization I've seen to date. It brings a new sense of direction that matches where the markets are going.
I agree with most of the comments in this thread regarding the benefits of the VDC-OC, but this is just one part of this picture. IMHO, the biggest change is the "Federation with the Cloud" strategy, where a company may choose to use, move or spawn new or existing workloads directly into a service provider on-demand, maintaining the SLAs (from security to capacity) and then bring them back to the internal cloud if needed.
I mean, go a talk to a CFO or a COO, and they'll [most of the time] politely complain about IT being expensive, and not fast enough to react to the changes the company needs. Shared services are still seen as optional and many business units still prefer to implement their own thing. With this model, IT becomes a true utility, with a pay-as-you-go menu that implements a coherent chargeback model that will bring a smile to the guys in dark suits.
Even if VMware doesn't succeed in these efforts, the genie is out of the bottle and somebody else will make it happen.
I live in a perfect are for these kind of thing (near the coast North of San Francisco), so I've been considering this for a while, but knowing my neighbors, it would be an uphill battle for the lost "view", which happens to be one of the typical complaints with wind turbines in urban environments.
That until I came across a very interesting design proposed by Blue Green Pacific in the last NextFest in LA. They are proposing a very clever design that may have a negligible impact in the look of the whole thing plus providing up to 500kWh with a single unit, at an estimated cost of 5K. If they get the funding to mass produce these units, I think they have a shot.
What I find missing in all the comments so far is the completely different approach to virtualization that VMware has when compared to MS and Xen. The in MS/Xen model, the hypervisor is flat out part of the OS, and the VMs rely on some sort of Dom0 or master partition where most of the real drivers exist.
In the VMware model (think ESX 3i), the hypervisor is a completely different layer that sits under the OS, so there is no direct OS dependency. All the drivers are specially designed and engineered to be high performance for that kind of environment, a reason why it scales so much better (at least when compared to Xen) and also a reason why they don't support all the devices out there.
I think for most of us that care about freedom of choice, the VMware model makes more sense going forward. A good, OS independent, thin hypervisor with standard open interfaces (VMI) for any guest OS kernel that wants to leverage paravirtualization, or just a full hardware abstraction via the VMM for the ones that do not, coupled with good, open source set of instrumentation tools and accelerated drivers.
On top of that, VMware has open sourced their virtual disk format (VMDK), has collaborated with Xen on a completely open VM portable packaging format (OVF), and has a number of fully open source programs. This is allowing the developing of the Virtual Appliance concept and has facilitated the penetration of Linux in places that wouldn't have otherwise.
Now, because I work for VMware (use as disclaimer also), I can tell you that the bread and butter for us is NOT the hypervisor, but all the stack we built on top of it, that includes disaster recovery, lab automation, VM lifecycle and a bunch of other very very high level stuff.
Still, competition is good for the market, open source or not, and as users, we'll all benefit.
Granted. Although I started on the Atari 800XL, not the Commodore (they were too expensive when I was growing up back in Chile), I'm sure the feeling is the same...
What I consider more relevant about those days is that as kids we had to be "creators" instead of "users" as it happens today. The most fascinating idea about the computer was that you could "tell it" what to do, and it would just do it. The potential was endless, but you HAD to learn some form of programming language. The more control you wanted to have, the lower in the stack you had to go. I can't emphasize enough how "mind shaping" was learning assembly language on the 6502 (with only 1 accumulator and 2 registers)...
It is hard to find the same in today's environment. You don't see a lot of 12-year-olds programming the computer any more. We have created a whole generation of "users" and I don't see an easy way to change that...
This is pretty real stuff and this is what the trend seems to be these days. BEA's LiquidVM is the most clear example of this. VMware calls this concept JEOS (Just-Enough OS). The idea is to leverage the hypervisor's capabilities for all the underlying operations related to access to the real hardware. That allows you to develop your OWN OS based on the needs of the application. You no longer need to support thousands of devices on the lower level or thousands of software facilities and APIs in the higher level. You can now tailor an OS for a single application, such as running a JVM as BEA did, gaining a lot of performance and reducing complexity.
I truly believe we are seeing only the beginning of what Virtual Appliances can deliver. Disclaimer: I work for VMware.
A lot of the comments focus on LCD replacement. In my experience, unless they fix the speed of rewriting the screen, it won't happen. I own an iLiad Rex ebook reader (http://www.irextechnologies.com/) which uses B&W epaper and although the visual is excellent, you can tell it is not easy to do something as simple as turning a page. The whole page needs to be re-written every time, which takes about a second. For an e-reader that is relatively acceptable, but for any kind of regular LCD-type usage, that won't fly.
That said, I agree with a previous poster. I would pay up to 1K for an A4-size ebook reader. The iLiad screen is too small for most PDFs out there.
I enjoy the jokes as everybody else, but I just want to take a moment and reflect what Slashdot has been for me in the last 9 years. It has been more than just a forum with tech news and stuff. It is truly a community of minds. A place for all of us that CARE about things, from technology to science to politics. A place where we can voice our individual and collective opinions. This is the embodiment of what I envisioned as the potential of the new "Global Network thing" back in 87 when I was playing with Bitnet at the University of Santiago in Chile, and I was amazed at what it could become.
In the late nineties I was a sales engineer for Ascend Communications and I was traveling around the world constantly, many times for 4 weeks on a row. I can still remember how Slashdot was the only piece of "stability" in my life at that time, as I was constantly stuck in hotels on the weekends, many times in places there is no much to see. The refresh button was my friend back then...
I don't know. I may be too sentimental today, as my grandma passed away yesterday 6,000 miles away, and here I am again, finding comfort in the community.
Happy birthday Slashdot. Keep up the spirit of independence, and keep caring about stuff that matters...
Although I'll reserve my judgment until more facts arise, I tend to agree with your statement. I've been in Peru dozens on times in the last 10 years and I can assure you that the general population is very easily influenced by any sort of borderline unexplained phenomena, especially if it comes from the sky. UFO cults have fertile ground in these folks minds. In fact, the story at http://oswaldolilly.blogcindario.com/2007/09/01972-el-meteorito-de-peru.html/ (in Spanish) is already being tagged under "OVNI", Spanish for UFO...
Don't get me wrong, these guys deserve everything that they get for their cheesy actions in the last several years against Linux. However, now, looking at their demise, I can't stop thinking how did they get there, when they were once "the rebels" against "the establishment" back in the day.
I started my career as a technical support engineer for SCO Xenix in the late 80s, back in the time where Larry Michaels was there. They had the vision and an excellent code base. I had customers running up to 16 Wyse terminals on a 286 system under Xenix running COBOL applications, and even more could be achieved with SCO UNIX on the 386...
I know this is just a nostalgic thought and that the SCO I'm referring to has nothing to do with its current incarnation. I hope this can be used as a lesson for Canonical and other very successful ventures that can really become the next best thing: don't become arrogant and forget your values and where you came from. Companies change, but at the end of the day, it's all about the people and how you contribute to make your and our lives better.
I don't think the battle is only on the 45 vs. 65nm arena. There are other interesting technologies in the package that deserve some consideration. Barcelona will include Nested Page Tables (NPT) technology, which could potentially give a significant performance boost to memory intensive applications running on virtual machines once the hypervisors start supporting it.
Intel will also be coming out with a similar technology called Extended Page Tables or EPT, but AFAIK their timeframe is early 2008.
Get a low power PC and install Asterisk, OpenPBX, Yate or any other Open Source PBX. You can do *whatever* you want with the call.
I implemented a similar system for my home once. I accepted the calls, but if for some reason I didn't like them, I programmed *991 to blacklist the last number received, period. Future calls would check into a small Asterisk database and if the number is listed there, it would send it to a caller torture script that will keep the victim in endless voice prompts. Nobody says you can't have a little fun with it along the way...
I can't believe that nobody has recommended Solaris 10 x86. Check the ZFS filesystem as it includes most of the features found in RAID and LVM combined at the OS level.
If the only thing you are planning to do with that box is storage, then Solaris is a no brainer. If you also want to add most of the standard stuff you find in Linux, such as apache, Samba, NFS, etc, you can also do all that. Heck I can even run Asterisk on it now, and you gain terriffic security when you use zones/containers.
If we do run out of IPv4 addresses for real this time, I predict ISPs will switch to 100% private IP addressing space before even thinking on IPv6. Heck, it's already happening in other countries. In Chile for example (a reasonably high-tech country) VTR http://www.vtr.cl/, the only cable ISP, will give you ONLY RFC-1918 addresses, period.
The masses won't care. They only care about their basic apps, and ISPs will use that as leverage to control more services, especially all P2P and VoIP-related ones.
First with VMware virtual machines encapsulated in a single VMDK file on my mobile 8 GB microdrive. You can run them anywhere with the free VMware Player (Windows or Linux).
As of last week, with the new Pocket ACE it gets even easier and I can add encryption, expiration time, etc. Awesome technology if you haven't tried it. http://www.vmware.com/products/ace/features.html
IMHO, unless you are a gamer or you need very specific hardware, there is no reason any more to run anything outside a VM.
To a certain point, I think he is right. I've been involved in several large projects where companies are getting really tired of managing end-points (PCs/laptops) and are just moving back to a terminal-like model.
The projects I've been involved in are using VMware ESX in the back-end, and every user has their own private virtual machine hosted (and managed) in the datacenter. Updates, patch management, policy control, etc, all taken care of. In fact, the users can have any unmanaged end-point (even Linux, Macs), and the only network access they get is to the connection broker. RDP/X/NX/ICA, etc. all of those are good options to access the hosted desktop and performance is great. It is even technically possible to "check-out" the VMs out of the datacenter for off-line operations if you need to travel.
Think about this scenario: a single WiMax or similar technology deployed in every school, library, plaza or public space where the "laptops" are actually terminals in a well designed centralized server model. There is no local intelligence in the laptop, preinstalled software, or any kind of local processing at all. There is no need for it. The "terminal laptop" boots wirelessly from the network, and all sessions are server-based. No black market for the laptops and extremely low cost to build and maintain.
I must say that I find the screencasts on Ruby-on-rails (at http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts) probaby among the best presentations I've ever seen, from the perspective of communicating the idea.
Recently, I decided to start experimenting with "alternative" ways to communicate a message in my presentations. The biggest success has been using Mind Mapping software, in this case, Mindjet's MindManager 6 Pro. This is not only a tool/technique to organize your ideas better, but the product has the feature to "present" each one of the items and its branches, making it ideal for bullet-oriented presentations. It's also interesting to note that people tend to pay more attention to you when you are *not* using PowerPoint. They are so used to it than anything different will attract more attention.
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It's not that ESX has issues. It's that the Guest OS is flat out not designed for "something" to change your CPU on the fly, which is the way the guest sees it... In fact we (yes, I work for VMware) used to allow that back in the ESX 2.0 days, but the guest bluescreened/panicked after a while as the microcode is loaded at boot time. The only way we can pull these tricks today is by masking some specific instructions of newer chip generations vs. the previous ones. Hard, but not rocket science. Get me a guest that adapt to those changes live and you'll have what you want...
I must respectfully disagree with my colleague (I also work for VMware). There are many reasons why a "normal", although admittedly geeky user would run ESXi at home. Today's version will run on a large variety of hardware, some of it not even listed under the HCL, and it's really easy to use and setup. Installation is next, next, next. Configuration still requires Windows but it's pretty easy. Just point a web browser to it, download the VI Client, run it against the server, configure it the way you want it, and start creating VMs. The defaults are good for most uses.
I have my Ubuntu-based virtual router/fw VM, my Asterisk VM, a good Ubuntu-based fileserver well tuned, our family web site on the virtual DMZ, VPN access, and even an XP VM running Mozy all day long so I can backup from my fileserver without having to be tethered for days. The whole thing is a rocket, runs smooth and unattended in my garage consuming 90+ Watts and I still have enough capacity for another 6-10 VMs given the amount of RAM I have in that box.
I say try it yourself. I see no reason why in the future, you may not even have offering from third parties for home servers already pre-configured for tasks like this.
Apparently, it will become a trend for the high-end tier of technology certifications.
VMware will also be adding it the their VCDX certification, but not to the "more common" VCP.
I'm in line for the Aptera all-electric model. I get regular updates and they DO seem to be on target for delivery in California. I waited years for the Venture One but it's still vaporware. All seems to indicate Aptera is the real deal.
Since I installed solar panels, the cost of charging the vehicle at night will be nominal, as my day-generation will offset the charge.
Disclaimer: I work for VMware, and I just came back from VMworld in Vegas (exhausted BTW).
In all my 5 years in the company, I must say that this is the most comprehensive re-thinking of the long-term strategy for virtualization I've seen to date. It brings a new sense of direction that matches where the markets are going.
I agree with most of the comments in this thread regarding the benefits of the VDC-OC, but this is just one part of this picture. IMHO, the biggest change is the "Federation with the Cloud" strategy, where a company may choose to use, move or spawn new or existing workloads directly into a service provider on-demand, maintaining the SLAs (from security to capacity) and then bring them back to the internal cloud if needed.
I mean, go a talk to a CFO or a COO, and they'll [most of the time] politely complain about IT being expensive, and not fast enough to react to the changes the company needs. Shared services are still seen as optional and many business units still prefer to implement their own thing. With this model, IT becomes a true utility, with a pay-as-you-go menu that implements a coherent chargeback model that will bring a smile to the guys in dark suits.
Even if VMware doesn't succeed in these efforts, the genie is out of the bottle and somebody else will make it happen.
Really interesting times to be in IT.
I live in a perfect are for these kind of thing (near the coast North of San Francisco), so I've been considering this for a while, but knowing my neighbors, it would be an uphill battle for the lost "view", which happens to be one of the typical complaints with wind turbines in urban environments.
That until I came across a very interesting design proposed by Blue Green Pacific in the last NextFest in LA. They are proposing a very clever design that may have a negligible impact in the look of the whole thing plus providing up to 500kWh with a single unit, at an estimated cost of 5K. If they get the funding to mass produce these units, I think they have a shot.
What I find missing in all the comments so far is the completely different approach to virtualization that VMware has when compared to MS and Xen. The in MS/Xen model, the hypervisor is flat out part of the OS, and the VMs rely on some sort of Dom0 or master partition where most of the real drivers exist.
In the VMware model (think ESX 3i), the hypervisor is a completely different layer that sits under the OS, so there is no direct OS dependency. All the drivers are specially designed and engineered to be high performance for that kind of environment, a reason why it scales so much better (at least when compared to Xen) and also a reason why they don't support all the devices out there.
I think for most of us that care about freedom of choice, the VMware model makes more sense going forward. A good, OS independent, thin hypervisor with standard open interfaces (VMI) for any guest OS kernel that wants to leverage paravirtualization, or just a full hardware abstraction via the VMM for the ones that do not, coupled with good, open source set of instrumentation tools and accelerated drivers.
On top of that, VMware has open sourced their virtual disk format (VMDK), has collaborated with Xen on a completely open VM portable packaging format (OVF), and has a number of fully open source programs. This is allowing the developing of the Virtual Appliance concept and has facilitated the penetration of Linux in places that wouldn't have otherwise.
Now, because I work for VMware (use as disclaimer also), I can tell you that the bread and butter for us is NOT the hypervisor, but all the stack we built on top of it, that includes disaster recovery, lab automation, VM lifecycle and a bunch of other very very high level stuff.
Still, competition is good for the market, open source or not, and as users, we'll all benefit.
Granted. Although I started on the Atari 800XL, not the Commodore (they were too expensive when I was growing up back in Chile), I'm sure the feeling is the same...
What I consider more relevant about those days is that as kids we had to be "creators" instead of "users" as it happens today. The most fascinating idea about the computer was that you could "tell it" what to do, and it would just do it. The potential was endless, but you HAD to learn some form of programming language. The more control you wanted to have, the lower in the stack you had to go. I can't emphasize enough how "mind shaping" was learning assembly language on the 6502 (with only 1 accumulator and 2 registers)...
It is hard to find the same in today's environment. You don't see a lot of 12-year-olds programming the computer any more. We have created a whole generation of "users" and I don't see an easy way to change that...
This is pretty real stuff and this is what the trend seems to be these days. BEA's LiquidVM is the most clear example of this. VMware calls this concept JEOS (Just-Enough OS). The idea is to leverage the hypervisor's capabilities for all the underlying operations related to access to the real hardware. That allows you to develop your OWN OS based on the needs of the application. You no longer need to support thousands of devices on the lower level or thousands of software facilities and APIs in the higher level. You can now tailor an OS for a single application, such as running a JVM as BEA did, gaining a lot of performance and reducing complexity.
I truly believe we are seeing only the beginning of what Virtual Appliances can deliver. Disclaimer: I work for VMware.
That is correct. In fact, the recently announced ESX 3i has *no* service console at all. It is a pure vmkernel in 32MB of flash.
A lot of the comments focus on LCD replacement. In my experience, unless they fix the speed of rewriting the screen, it won't happen. I own an iLiad Rex ebook reader (http://www.irextechnologies.com/) which uses B&W epaper and although the visual is excellent, you can tell it is not easy to do something as simple as turning a page. The whole page needs to be re-written every time, which takes about a second. For an e-reader that is relatively acceptable, but for any kind of regular LCD-type usage, that won't fly.
That said, I agree with a previous poster. I would pay up to 1K for an A4-size ebook reader. The iLiad screen is too small for most PDFs out there.
I enjoy the jokes as everybody else, but I just want to take a moment and reflect what Slashdot has been for me in the last 9 years. It has been more than just a forum with tech news and stuff. It is truly a community of minds. A place for all of us that CARE about things, from technology to science to politics. A place where we can voice our individual and collective opinions. This is the embodiment of what I envisioned as the potential of the new "Global Network thing" back in 87 when I was playing with Bitnet at the University of Santiago in Chile, and I was amazed at what it could become.
In the late nineties I was a sales engineer for Ascend Communications and I was traveling around the world constantly, many times for 4 weeks on a row. I can still remember how Slashdot was the only piece of "stability" in my life at that time, as I was constantly stuck in hotels on the weekends, many times in places there is no much to see. The refresh button was my friend back then...
I don't know. I may be too sentimental today, as my grandma passed away yesterday 6,000 miles away, and here I am again, finding comfort in the community.
Happy birthday Slashdot. Keep up the spirit of independence, and keep caring about stuff that matters...
Although I'll reserve my judgment until more facts arise, I tend to agree with your statement. I've been in Peru dozens on times in the last 10 years and I can assure you that the general population is very easily influenced by any sort of borderline unexplained phenomena, especially if it comes from the sky. UFO cults have fertile ground in these folks minds. In fact, the story at http://oswaldolilly.blogcindario.com/2007/09/01972-el-meteorito-de-peru.html/ (in Spanish) is already being tagged under "OVNI", Spanish for UFO...
Well, at least this is our opportunity to find out what's Victoria's Secret... ;-)
Don't get me wrong, these guys deserve everything that they get for their cheesy actions in the last several years against Linux. However, now, looking at their demise, I can't stop thinking how did they get there, when they were once "the rebels" against "the establishment" back in the day.
I started my career as a technical support engineer for SCO Xenix in the late 80s, back in the time where Larry Michaels was there. They had the vision and an excellent code base. I had customers running up to 16 Wyse terminals on a 286 system under Xenix running COBOL applications, and even more could be achieved with SCO UNIX on the 386...
I know this is just a nostalgic thought and that the SCO I'm referring to has nothing to do with its current incarnation. I hope this can be used as a lesson for Canonical and other very successful ventures that can really become the next best thing: don't become arrogant and forget your values and where you came from. Companies change, but at the end of the day, it's all about the people and how you contribute to make your and our lives better.
My friends are all scientists, you insensitive clod!
I don't think the battle is only on the 45 vs. 65nm arena. There are other interesting technologies in the package that deserve some consideration. Barcelona will include Nested Page Tables (NPT) technology, which could potentially give a significant performance boost to memory intensive applications running on virtual machines once the hypervisors start supporting it.
Intel will also be coming out with a similar technology called Extended Page Tables or EPT, but AFAIK their timeframe is early 2008.
Get a low power PC and install Asterisk, OpenPBX, Yate or any other Open Source PBX. You can do *whatever* you want with the call.
I implemented a similar system for my home once. I accepted the calls, but if for some reason I didn't like them, I programmed *991 to blacklist the last number received, period. Future calls would check into a small Asterisk database and if the number is listed there, it would send it to a caller torture script that will keep the victim in endless voice prompts. Nobody says you can't have a little fun with it along the way...
I can't believe that nobody has recommended Solaris 10 x86. Check the ZFS filesystem as it includes most of the features found in RAID and LVM combined at the OS level.
If the only thing you are planning to do with that box is storage, then Solaris is a no brainer. If you also want to add most of the standard stuff you find in Linux, such as apache, Samba, NFS, etc, you can also do all that. Heck I can even run Asterisk on it now, and you gain terriffic security when you use zones/containers.
If we do run out of IPv4 addresses for real this time, I predict ISPs will switch to 100% private IP addressing space before even thinking on IPv6.
Heck, it's already happening in other countries. In Chile for example (a reasonably high-tech country) VTR http://www.vtr.cl/, the only cable ISP, will give you ONLY RFC-1918 addresses, period.
The masses won't care. They only care about their basic apps, and ISPs will use that as leverage to control more services, especially all P2P and VoIP-related ones.
First with VMware virtual machines encapsulated in a single VMDK file on my mobile 8 GB microdrive. You can run them anywhere with the free VMware Player (Windows or Linux).
As of last week, with the new Pocket ACE it gets even easier and I can add encryption, expiration time, etc. Awesome technology if you haven't tried it. http://www.vmware.com/products/ace/features.html
IMHO, unless you are a gamer or you need very specific hardware, there is no reason any more to run anything outside a VM.
To a certain point, I think he is right. I've been involved in several large projects where companies are getting really tired of managing end-points (PCs/laptops) and are just moving back to a terminal-like model.
The projects I've been involved in are using VMware ESX in the back-end, and every user has their own private virtual machine hosted (and managed) in the datacenter. Updates, patch management, policy control, etc, all taken care of. In fact, the users can have any unmanaged end-point (even Linux, Macs), and the only network access they get is to the connection broker. RDP/X/NX/ICA, etc. all of those are good options to access the hosted desktop and performance is great. It is even technically possible to "check-out" the VMs out of the datacenter for off-line operations if you need to travel.
Think about this scenario: a single WiMax or similar technology deployed in every school, library, plaza or public space where the "laptops" are actually terminals in a well designed centralized server model. There is no local intelligence in the laptop, preinstalled software, or any kind of local processing at all. There is no need for it. The "terminal laptop" boots wirelessly from the network, and all sessions are server-based. No black market for the laptops and extremely low cost to build and maintain.
I must say that I find the screencasts on Ruby-on-rails (at http://www.rubyonrails.org/screencasts) probaby among the best presentations I've ever seen, from the perspective of communicating the idea.
Recently, I decided to start experimenting with "alternative" ways to communicate a message in my presentations. The biggest success has been using Mind Mapping software, in this case, Mindjet's MindManager 6 Pro. This is not only a tool/technique to organize your ideas better, but the product has the feature to "present" each one of the items and its branches, making it ideal for bullet-oriented presentations. It's also interesting to note that people tend to pay more attention to you when you are *not* using PowerPoint. They are so used to it than anything different will attract more attention.