I haven't really much exposure to Linux on the desktop but as an architect responsible for delivering a Windows 7 desktop to 150,000+ desktops, training is most certainly an issue, from end users, on site support teams all the way through to the backend admins. I assume there would be a step change in support tools and processes. There certainly is a big change going from Windows XP or even Vista to Win 7.
In my opinion it would be naive to think that a more to a completely different OS doesn't mean a complete re-training exercise from top to bottom. It also doesn't mean that it isnt unachievable, especially if Linux / Unix already has some penetration, perhaps in the workstation space, and therefore desktop support and the tools required / processes are already somewhat defined etc.
Your experience of people bringing in broken PC's to fix is a world away from an enterprise environment. I suspect have no conception of the process involved in designing and executing a simple request that in practice spans several resolver groups, some of which will certainly change as a result of an OS change.
You've also completely ignored the application compatibility angle. The OS is but a window to get at your apps and therefore to that wonderful data. App compat is the most important part of any desktop refresh at the moment. Come the wonderful day when every app is HTML 9 standard or whatever the desktop may be irrelevant but right now it isn't. Please don't tell me you are going to get 15,000 apps working on WINE and maintain support agreements with the app vendors or move everything to open source and migrate the data across to the correct format at the same time.
In most enterprise cases, the vendor hardware sourcing agreement is separate from the OS refresh cycle. If you can sync or extend that refresh period (assuming Linux can run on older hardware better and hence the refresh cycles can be extended) then all is well but you probably need the support of the hardware manufacturers. I don't automatically see that becasue Linux *may* work on older h/w better than Windows you necessarily *can* make this happen but I don't necessarily discount this either.
I'd also note that in most cases, reliability is probably more important than speed within the Enterprise. Depends on the worker model. Both is of course very nice:)
A PC may cost 800 dollars since the price could includes warranty & break-fix support to a certain SLA response time over the lifetime of the device. A laptop will be much much more.
Btw, my org is on a 4 year h/w replacement cycle. Windows seems to cope fine enough.
Hope this helps
1. Convert your country to some un-American religion (try not worshipping money or something)
2. Pretend you have $hitloads of oil
3. Run around a lot in the wilderness wearing nothing but Gucci handbags so when they inevitably invade they have to chase you Benny Hill style with drones
4. Once your entire country has been upgraded to a 200 GB/second cloud to handle all the drones flying around fess up that the oil was a myth.
5. Download-pr0n heaven
The point is that how do you stop someone downloading and playing games anyway - simple answer is you can't at the moment (as the Demigod experience has proven yet again) and it ain't going to get better. I would argue you are in no worse condition if there were no technical checks (and the seller wouldn't be able to d/l fixes etc or play online so there would be an impact). So I guess the analogy is keep on thinking whilst the city burns around you?!?
Funny that the realease text below seems to indicate the installation of Windows 7 causes a home-wide search and destroy of your MP3 booty. What I want to know is what the hell happens if you happen to be connected to the internet as well, does it try to delete every bleeding MP3 it can find?!?:)
File Name: en_windows_7_beta_dvd_x64_x15-29074.iso Date Posted (UTC): 12/30/2008 4:26:48 PM
SHA1: E09FDBC1CB3A92CF6CC872040FDAF65553AB62A5 ISO/CRC: 8E2FAD39
Available to Levels: TechNet Plus SA Media; TechNet Plus (Retail); TechNet Direct (Retail); TechNet Plus (VL); TechNet Plus Direct (VL); TechNet Cert Partner; TechNet Gold Cert
Partner; T1;
Instructions and Resources
Update to Windows 7 Beta (KB961367)
To protect your MP3 files
1. Before you install this Beta release, back up all MP3 files that might be accessed by the computer, including those on removable media or network shares.
2. Install the Beta release of Windows 7; download and install the Update to Windows 7 Beta (KB961367) located on this page.
Maybe you could let everyone know what you develop - maybe you can send out a few keys if its protected, let the internet masses test your application, sure your employer will be very grateful:)
Stardock are not "progressive and lenient" on DRM. I cannot sell on a game I purchase from them. Likewise, I cannot download updates / fixes from Stardock for a 2nd hand game of theirs I bought from ebay. When they introduce a system such that you can pass on ownership of a game through their drm system (hell they can take a small cut if they like!) then I'll start buying their games again.
Of course, if things have changed recently pardon me and put me right.
Why is Stardock raised up as the Paragon of DRM free software? Has anyone ever tried to resell any game on ebay or trade it in? Point is that game is registered against the email address you used and essentially you can't download any patches without access to the original email. Of course, the pirates are solid in releasing the latest patches....
Maybe if everyone who buys a Stardock product uses a different email address from a free webmail account then this might work...but then who knows what billing details they hold online.
Would love to be corrected - I night start buying some of their games again...
So you don't sound somewhat bias right?! Virtual PC mirrors the workstation product - a poorer relation but the workstation products aren't targetted at HA server configurations really.
Consider this - Hyper-V just made ESX3i free, just the same as Virtual Server made VMWare Server (formerly GSX) free. I don't think Hyper-V is great (the lack of support for previous version service packs is appaling for example) but substandard - not for a second, it mirrored my quick 10 VM test for speed against ESX (apart from setting the bloody VM's up!)
I don't think home users care how long Vista takes to install "within reason" (like not 45 consecutive days and has to end on Xmas day.) I know I sure don't cos I don't install every day. The only thing I want is not to have to "personalise" a new install if I want to re-install and there is a tool in Vista to capture your settings (USMT).
From a business perspective the way to install Vista will be via imaging (Ghost, SMS OSD). This cuts the install time to tens of minutes, not hours (well, perhaps not OSD, depends on the network speed.)
As you have kind of alluded to though, the big issue has always been the apps. Whether you pre-install or send the MSI's over later, apps are getting bigger all the time and the bandwidth requirements have risen with that. Hell, there was a DVD burning package at 350GB for XP. There are ways around it (carrier send in SMS for instance) but the true size of a Vista install that is usable by a business customer is close to 2GB (Vista, Office, Acrobat and their company's LOB apps)
Of course you can toggle on and off most of the annoying features in Group Policy. But that wouldn't be a story.
I guess for me its still a question how MS are going to push Vista to businesses. As Linux has learnt, pushing the security angle (for some reason) only goes so far. Not sure businesses have much interest in Halo:)
So a better article to write would be "20 reasons why Businesses won't buy Vista" imho.
Hmmm the fact that I am use MS technologies in my workplace does not necessarily make me a fanboy?
MS didnt screw this up, they licensed the technology and Citrix made a companion product that extended the original... like seamless windows etc. So if you want to "blame" anyone, should you not be blaming Citrix for essential "selling out"?
yeash yourself:)
Good post. Remember that in Citrix v4 (or better still, Softricity) the HKCU/LM situation is not an issue anymore.
Actually, I think you can be more sloppy on a TS in some ways, especially if you are using seamless apps. Remember that in that configuration you have essentially virtualised the user experience. Your file system or desktop could be a mess but hey the users never know.:) With traditional FAT clients you have to worry so much more about look and feel.
Appsense. Or if you are cheap Software Restriction Policies in AD. Simple.
Apps not running is largely a thing of the past.
Citrix themselves have admitted that Citrix isnt the best platform for browsing. They now have a web caching appliance and push that for those people using browser enabled apps.
CSG is a damn good SSL proxy.:)
Man, whoever thought of running AutoCAD on old versions of Citrix should have been shot. 50MB files being manipulated on the server and image maps "dragged" across the network - sure fire way to get 2 people per box or destroy everyone elses user experience on that box.
The newer v4 does have some features to allow highly graphical applications to work, as it predicts the image ahead of it happpening. Still, I wouldn't trust it on my Citrix farms yet:)
Not true. MS has always charged per user device. When Windows 2003 was released, they then allowed TS to be licensed per user. It was never concurrent user based. Citrix *is* concurrent based, but then this is on top of the TS license count. Incidentally, you always had to license the server - it is MS after all!
If you use x64 and scale up boxes rather than scale out, you can of course reduce your server license cost considerably.
XP Embedded isnt that much different to XP.
I think your company didnt really get the idea I am afraid.
Could you please elaborate on how MS screwed this up? All of the features you mentioned were available in Citrix 1.8 (which I can unfortunately remember quite well since I had to troubleshoot an implementation the other day) and are still there in version 4.
The thing MS did screw people up with was the lack of free TS CAL with Windows 2003 in TS application mode, but that isn't going to matter to a thin client implementation.
I designed a 5,000 seat farm for a particular bank, based on the Citrix XP backend. Ignoring the usual cock-ups and mistakes that come from working in an enterprise environment, the development and implementation was pretty smooth.
From a Windows perspective, TS out of the box will give you a good experience. Whether you goto Citrix or not depends how much you wish to tweak the end user experience (you can do different configs based on different ip addresses, good for low bandwidth connections) and whether you need the "enterprise" level features "out of the box", remembering that you will be paying enterprise prices for that level of user licensing (features like resource and summary database for reporting, integrated billing, advanced load balancing, snmp integration etc etc)
Citrix also does companion features which can also provide a technical edge - for instance allowing you access to applications based on ip address, so for instance you can't access the payroll app if you are sitting at home.
On the potentially darker side, it can have great shadowing features and thus in terms of helping users its a great boon. There is also a feature coming up where you can record user interaction for later (mis)use. Better shutup about that since I'm on slashdot here:)
On the terminal side, Wyse have a great range that includes their own OS, Blazer and Linux. Blazer is more lightweight, XP is the largest. You still have to patch XP but Wyse does the legwork in indentifying the patches and getting them on their website (forget the rubbish later on in this thread, you do need to patch them and no nobody from MS claims you dont need to!) Rapport is reasonable at maintaining the image. Wyse now have an addon to stream custom OS' images to the thin client based on logon details now - Blaser is very lightweight so this is possible. We have keyboards with smart card readers integrated working, so they are pretty flexible.
Finally, have a look at x64. The comments on this page about lack of scale and stability are criminally outdated. Windows x64 doesnt have the 2GB addressable memory segment, which was the limiter to the number of users that you could get on one host using 32bit Windows (nos profiles in working memory etc.) So with x64 you can now scale up a box rather than scale out and achieve a decent user count rise as you add CPU/memory.
In my opinion Thin Client is a viable technology for the basic knowledge worker. It cant replace laptops altogether at this point but certainly it will reduce your TCO in certain areas.
I must disagree with the Windows 2003 statement. I run Meedio as a media center on 2003. All my peripherals work, including the MS Media Center only remote control and keyboard. All my software works, including fingerprint reader, winamp and nero. If I can use it as a media centre most business will have no compatibility issues (and incidentally Citrix now has specific features to deal with twain devices now.)
Citrix is based on TS. The main virtue of Citrix is that it increases manageability through the use of management consoles, it has built in resource manager features and it has a superior load balancing feature. Some of the other stuff that appears unique (seamless windows) you can get with 3rd party add-ons (Jetro etc) and save yourself a packet.
RDP doesn't suck compared to ICA, in fact v5 is so close in performance to ICA Citrix now count it as a connection in their pooled license connections. Stability didnt go down the drain either, the main stability issue of any thin client infrastructure was printing, and in particular kernel mode drivers. The use of Universal Printer Drivers (Citrix. HP, MS) and user mode drivers has resolved that particular issue.
A TSCAL is approx $10 - I think that compares quite nicely in comparison to a MS XP license, and I haven't even gone into the user vs device count comparison.
Bottom line is I'm not really sure how much you have used or even know about thin client technology for the last 10 years!
Having just designed a Server Based Computing implementation for a bank, I know a little about SBC , at least in the Windows world.
With Terminal Services/Citrix, you will be paying M$ big money, but then again you have said that you need to go a supported route. You need to budget in this case for M$ server costs and TS Client Access Licenses. Citrix offers more functionality but at an increased cost.
Citrix gives you published applications, more manageability, and and increased client range (amongst other things.) It also provides an easy Web portal product to present the apps (Web Interfance) However, there are plenty of third party clients available for TS if you wanted to go that route, and some ways to publish apps via TS rather than having to publish a desktop. MPS3 (newest version of Citrix) is very powerful in the way you can partion the farm and configure users's experience.
With Citrix/TS, you can connect to the same disconnected sessions thus keeping the vision of roaming users. App. compatibility issues are there but perhaps a little overstated here - new Office products for instance are built with TS in mind, and anything that is certified for XP should work without too much trouble.
For the client end, you can run a thin platform, or you could run a cut down/locked down XP or linux client. All you need for Citrix is a web browser front end to log into the Web Interface. You can do the same for TS through ActiveX components.
Lastly, you didnt mention printing as a requirement. If it is, you need to make sure you have enough bandwidth to print from a central location. Should be ok in your case but there are technologies out there to limit if you wish.
Hope that helps a little. In summary, it is a viable way forward imho:)
of the games I recommend (woo hoo!)
Civ 2 (maybe 3 is newer but AI aside is not as cool)
HOMM3 (or 2, 4 is pants)
Stars! (Supernova is cancelled btw)
Hearts of Iron
There are others I like, already mentioned in here!
Cheers
D
Yawn Yawn the same stuff is peddled out time and timr again, and yes you are right. But don't you understand that whilst it might be the good ole US of A way to allow freedom of speech and allow anybody to do anything that they own, then when it severely affects the business model of that product it might be a bad idea in the long run?
If I were selling consoles I'd say a 2 fingered f**k it and watch you all play with yourselves instead (not literally though!):)
Slashdot Mirror
I haven't really much exposure to Linux on the desktop but as an architect responsible for delivering a Windows 7 desktop to 150,000+ desktops, training is most certainly an issue, from end users, on site support teams all the way through to the backend admins. I assume there would be a step change in support tools and processes. There certainly is a big change going from Windows XP or even Vista to Win 7. In my opinion it would be naive to think that a more to a completely different OS doesn't mean a complete re-training exercise from top to bottom. It also doesn't mean that it isnt unachievable, especially if Linux / Unix already has some penetration, perhaps in the workstation space, and therefore desktop support and the tools required / processes are already somewhat defined etc. Your experience of people bringing in broken PC's to fix is a world away from an enterprise environment. I suspect have no conception of the process involved in designing and executing a simple request that in practice spans several resolver groups, some of which will certainly change as a result of an OS change. You've also completely ignored the application compatibility angle. The OS is but a window to get at your apps and therefore to that wonderful data. App compat is the most important part of any desktop refresh at the moment. Come the wonderful day when every app is HTML 9 standard or whatever the desktop may be irrelevant but right now it isn't. Please don't tell me you are going to get 15,000 apps working on WINE and maintain support agreements with the app vendors or move everything to open source and migrate the data across to the correct format at the same time. In most enterprise cases, the vendor hardware sourcing agreement is separate from the OS refresh cycle. If you can sync or extend that refresh period (assuming Linux can run on older hardware better and hence the refresh cycles can be extended) then all is well but you probably need the support of the hardware manufacturers. I don't automatically see that becasue Linux *may* work on older h/w better than Windows you necessarily *can* make this happen but I don't necessarily discount this either. I'd also note that in most cases, reliability is probably more important than speed within the Enterprise. Depends on the worker model. Both is of course very nice :)
A PC may cost 800 dollars since the price could includes warranty & break-fix support to a certain SLA response time over the lifetime of the device. A laptop will be much much more.
Btw, my org is on a 4 year h/w replacement cycle. Windows seems to cope fine enough.
Hope this helps
1. Convert your country to some un-American religion (try not worshipping money or something) 2. Pretend you have $hitloads of oil 3. Run around a lot in the wilderness wearing nothing but Gucci handbags so when they inevitably invade they have to chase you Benny Hill style with drones 4. Once your entire country has been upgraded to a 200 GB/second cloud to handle all the drones flying around fess up that the oil was a myth. 5. Download-pr0n heaven
The point is that how do you stop someone downloading and playing games anyway - simple answer is you can't at the moment (as the Demigod experience has proven yet again) and it ain't going to get better. I would argue you are in no worse condition if there were no technical checks (and the seller wouldn't be able to d/l fixes etc or play online so there would be an impact). So I guess the analogy is keep on thinking whilst the city burns around you?!?
Funny that the realease text below seems to indicate the installation of Windows 7 causes a home-wide search and destroy of your MP3 booty. What I want to know is what the hell happens if you happen to be connected to the internet as well, does it try to delete every bleeding MP3 it can find?!? :)
File Name: en_windows_7_beta_dvd_x64_x15-29074.iso Date Posted (UTC): 12/30/2008 4:26:48 PM
SHA1: E09FDBC1CB3A92CF6CC872040FDAF65553AB62A5 ISO/CRC: 8E2FAD39
Available to Levels: TechNet Plus SA Media; TechNet Plus (Retail); TechNet Direct (Retail); TechNet Plus (VL); TechNet Plus Direct (VL); TechNet Cert Partner; TechNet Gold Cert
Partner; T1;
Instructions and Resources
Update to Windows 7 Beta (KB961367)
To protect your MP3 files
1. Before you install this Beta release, back up all MP3 files that might be accessed by the computer, including those on removable media or network shares.
2. Install the Beta release of Windows 7; download and install the Update to Windows 7 Beta (KB961367) located on this page.
Maybe you could let everyone know what you develop - maybe you can send out a few keys if its protected, let the internet masses test your application, sure your employer will be very grateful :)
Someone please mod this reply up...
Stardock are not "progressive and lenient" on DRM. I cannot sell on a game I purchase from them. Likewise, I cannot download updates / fixes from Stardock for a 2nd hand game of theirs I bought from ebay. When they introduce a system such that you can pass on ownership of a game through their drm system (hell they can take a small cut if they like!) then I'll start buying their games again. Of course, if things have changed recently pardon me and put me right.
Why is Stardock raised up as the Paragon of DRM free software? Has anyone ever tried to resell any game on ebay or trade it in? Point is that game is registered against the email address you used and essentially you can't download any patches without access to the original email. Of course, the pirates are solid in releasing the latest patches.... Maybe if everyone who buys a Stardock product uses a different email address from a free webmail account then this might work...but then who knows what billing details they hold online. Would love to be corrected - I night start buying some of their games again...
So you don't sound somewhat bias right?! Virtual PC mirrors the workstation product - a poorer relation but the workstation products aren't targetted at HA server configurations really.
Consider this - Hyper-V just made ESX3i free, just the same as Virtual Server made VMWare Server (formerly GSX) free. I don't think Hyper-V is great (the lack of support for previous version service packs is appaling for example) but substandard - not for a second, it mirrored my quick 10 VM test for speed against ESX (apart from setting the bloody VM's up!)
I don't think home users care how long Vista takes to install "within reason" (like not 45 consecutive days and has to end on Xmas day.) I know I sure don't cos I don't install every day. The only thing I want is not to have to "personalise" a new install if I want to re-install and there is a tool in Vista to capture your settings (USMT). From a business perspective the way to install Vista will be via imaging (Ghost, SMS OSD). This cuts the install time to tens of minutes, not hours (well, perhaps not OSD, depends on the network speed.) As you have kind of alluded to though, the big issue has always been the apps. Whether you pre-install or send the MSI's over later, apps are getting bigger all the time and the bandwidth requirements have risen with that. Hell, there was a DVD burning package at 350GB for XP. There are ways around it (carrier send in SMS for instance) but the true size of a Vista install that is usable by a business customer is close to 2GB (Vista, Office, Acrobat and their company's LOB apps)
Talk about a cell in the brain... :)
Of course you can toggle on and off most of the annoying features in Group Policy. But that wouldn't be a story. I guess for me its still a question how MS are going to push Vista to businesses. As Linux has learnt, pushing the security angle (for some reason) only goes so far. Not sure businesses have much interest in Halo :)
So a better article to write would be "20 reasons why Businesses won't buy Vista" imho.
Hmmm the fact that I am use MS technologies in my workplace does not necessarily make me a fanboy? MS didnt screw this up, they licensed the technology and Citrix made a companion product that extended the original... like seamless windows etc. So if you want to "blame" anyone, should you not be blaming Citrix for essential "selling out"? yeash yourself :)
sorry should have citrix isolation mode (or Softricity) :) One day I will use preview, honest!
Good post. Remember that in Citrix v4 (or better still, Softricity) the HKCU/LM situation is not an issue anymore. Actually, I think you can be more sloppy on a TS in some ways, especially if you are using seamless apps. Remember that in that configuration you have essentially virtualised the user experience. Your file system or desktop could be a mess but hey the users never know. :) With traditional FAT clients you have to worry so much more about look and feel.
Appsense. Or if you are cheap Software Restriction Policies in AD. Simple. Apps not running is largely a thing of the past. Citrix themselves have admitted that Citrix isnt the best platform for browsing. They now have a web caching appliance and push that for those people using browser enabled apps. CSG is a damn good SSL proxy. :)
Man, whoever thought of running AutoCAD on old versions of Citrix should have been shot. 50MB files being manipulated on the server and image maps "dragged" across the network - sure fire way to get 2 people per box or destroy everyone elses user experience on that box. The newer v4 does have some features to allow highly graphical applications to work, as it predicts the image ahead of it happpening. Still, I wouldn't trust it on my Citrix farms yet :)
Not true. MS has always charged per user device. When Windows 2003 was released, they then allowed TS to be licensed per user. It was never concurrent user based. Citrix *is* concurrent based, but then this is on top of the TS license count. Incidentally, you always had to license the server - it is MS after all! If you use x64 and scale up boxes rather than scale out, you can of course reduce your server license cost considerably. XP Embedded isnt that much different to XP. I think your company didnt really get the idea I am afraid.
Could you please elaborate on how MS screwed this up? All of the features you mentioned were available in Citrix 1.8 (which I can unfortunately remember quite well since I had to troubleshoot an implementation the other day) and are still there in version 4. The thing MS did screw people up with was the lack of free TS CAL with Windows 2003 in TS application mode, but that isn't going to matter to a thin client implementation.
I designed a 5,000 seat farm for a particular bank, based on the Citrix XP backend. Ignoring the usual cock-ups and mistakes that come from working in an enterprise environment, the development and implementation was pretty smooth. From a Windows perspective, TS out of the box will give you a good experience. Whether you goto Citrix or not depends how much you wish to tweak the end user experience (you can do different configs based on different ip addresses, good for low bandwidth connections) and whether you need the "enterprise" level features "out of the box", remembering that you will be paying enterprise prices for that level of user licensing (features like resource and summary database for reporting, integrated billing, advanced load balancing, snmp integration etc etc) Citrix also does companion features which can also provide a technical edge - for instance allowing you access to applications based on ip address, so for instance you can't access the payroll app if you are sitting at home. On the potentially darker side, it can have great shadowing features and thus in terms of helping users its a great boon. There is also a feature coming up where you can record user interaction for later (mis)use. Better shutup about that since I'm on slashdot here :)
On the terminal side, Wyse have a great range that includes their own OS, Blazer and Linux. Blazer is more lightweight, XP is the largest. You still have to patch XP but Wyse does the legwork in indentifying the patches and getting them on their website (forget the rubbish later on in this thread, you do need to patch them and no nobody from MS claims you dont need to!) Rapport is reasonable at maintaining the image. Wyse now have an addon to stream custom OS' images to the thin client based on logon details now - Blaser is very lightweight so this is possible. We have keyboards with smart card readers integrated working, so they are pretty flexible.
Finally, have a look at x64. The comments on this page about lack of scale and stability are criminally outdated. Windows x64 doesnt have the 2GB addressable memory segment, which was the limiter to the number of users that you could get on one host using 32bit Windows (nos profiles in working memory etc.) So with x64 you can now scale up a box rather than scale out and achieve a decent user count rise as you add CPU/memory.
In my opinion Thin Client is a viable technology for the basic knowledge worker. It cant replace laptops altogether at this point but certainly it will reduce your TCO in certain areas.
I must disagree with the Windows 2003 statement. I run Meedio as a media center on 2003. All my peripherals work, including the MS Media Center only remote control and keyboard. All my software works, including fingerprint reader, winamp and nero. If I can use it as a media centre most business will have no compatibility issues (and incidentally Citrix now has specific features to deal with twain devices now.)
Citrix is based on TS. The main virtue of Citrix is that it increases manageability through the use of management consoles, it has built in resource manager features and it has a superior load balancing feature. Some of the other stuff that appears unique (seamless windows) you can get with 3rd party add-ons (Jetro etc) and save yourself a packet. RDP doesn't suck compared to ICA, in fact v5 is so close in performance to ICA Citrix now count it as a connection in their pooled license connections. Stability didnt go down the drain either, the main stability issue of any thin client infrastructure was printing, and in particular kernel mode drivers. The use of Universal Printer Drivers (Citrix. HP, MS) and user mode drivers has resolved that particular issue. A TSCAL is approx $10 - I think that compares quite nicely in comparison to a MS XP license, and I haven't even gone into the user vs device count comparison. Bottom line is I'm not really sure how much you have used or even know about thin client technology for the last 10 years!
Having just designed a Server Based Computing implementation for a bank, I know a little about SBC , at least in the Windows world. With Terminal Services/Citrix, you will be paying M$ big money, but then again you have said that you need to go a supported route. You need to budget in this case for M$ server costs and TS Client Access Licenses. Citrix offers more functionality but at an increased cost. Citrix gives you published applications, more manageability, and and increased client range (amongst other things.) It also provides an easy Web portal product to present the apps (Web Interfance) However, there are plenty of third party clients available for TS if you wanted to go that route, and some ways to publish apps via TS rather than having to publish a desktop. MPS3 (newest version of Citrix) is very powerful in the way you can partion the farm and configure users's experience. With Citrix/TS, you can connect to the same disconnected sessions thus keeping the vision of roaming users. App. compatibility issues are there but perhaps a little overstated here - new Office products for instance are built with TS in mind, and anything that is certified for XP should work without too much trouble. For the client end, you can run a thin platform, or you could run a cut down/locked down XP or linux client. All you need for Citrix is a web browser front end to log into the Web Interface. You can do the same for TS through ActiveX components. Lastly, you didnt mention printing as a requirement. If it is, you need to make sure you have enough bandwidth to print from a central location. Should be ok in your case but there are technologies out there to limit if you wish. Hope that helps a little. In summary, it is a viable way forward imho :)
of the games I recommend (woo hoo!) Civ 2 (maybe 3 is newer but AI aside is not as cool) HOMM3 (or 2, 4 is pants) Stars! (Supernova is cancelled btw) Hearts of Iron There are others I like, already mentioned in here! Cheers D
Yawn Yawn the same stuff is peddled out time and timr again, and yes you are right. But don't you understand that whilst it might be the good ole US of A way to allow freedom of speech and allow anybody to do anything that they own, then when it severely affects the business model of that product it might be a bad idea in the long run? If I were selling consoles I'd say a 2 fingered f**k it and watch you all play with yourselves instead (not literally though!) :)