FUTURE OF WORK: The complicated new face of personal computing

Citrix overhauls virtual desktop products for 'personal cloud'

• Improving usability of virtual desktops, Citrix will preview an upgraded version of its HDX technology. With three times faster performance, Wasson said virtual desktop technology will deliver better multi-tasking, graphics support, real-time collaboration, and delivery of rich multimedia to branch offices.

With the proliferation of smartphones and tablets, users often have several devices to connect to corporate networks. But unless you use only cloud-based services and trust your security to someone else, enterprises need robust technology in the data center to deliver applications and secure the network.

Two new Citrix technologies target these needs:

• NetScaler Cloud Gateway, to be available in physical and virtual appliances, sits at the "front door" of the data center, connecting Web applications and Windows apps to any device in a secure manner, while providing single sign-on to users, Wasson said. The Gateway will also monitor a customer's licenses and service-level agreements.

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• NetScaler Cloud Bridge, a companion piece, sits at the "back door" of the network to provide a secure connection between the data center and cloud services. WAN optimization improves data flow and reduces use of bandwidth, and lets you split up the components of an application between data center and cloud. For example, a customer could run most of an application in a cloud service but keep Active Directory and sensitive data in-house for security reasons.

A sale date for Cloud Gateway is not available yet, but the software will be available on NetScaler VPX, a software-based virtual appliance that starts at $2,000, or on NetScaler MPX, a hardware appliance that starts at $12,000. Cloud Gateway will also be available for a NetScaler services package that starts at $90,000.

Cloud Bridge will ship next month with pricing starting at $5,000 as a standalone appliance, or as part of the NetScaler Platinum edition.

Rounding out Citrix's Synergy announcements are a few pieces that bolster the company's virtual desktop software:

• An acquisition of virtual desktop vendor Kaviza, which targets small and midsized businesses with VDI that doesn't require load balancers, connection brokers or attached storage. Wasson said this will move VDI "downmarket" to the masses.

• XenDesktop 5, which was released a few months ago, is being updated with Citrix's IntelliCache to reduce the need for network-attached storage by running more processes on the server. (XenDesktop costs $95 to $350 per user or device.)

• A free online service called "Success Accelerator" will give customers guidance in deploying Citrix virtual desktop products.

Citrix's desktop products put it in a good position against rival VMware, which has lagged behind Citrix in delivering features such as profile management, virtual desktops on the iPad and a bare-metal hypervisor.

One problem for Citrix is that many potential virtual desktop customers still use VMware to virtualize the servers that are likely to host desktop images. Although Citrix points out that the Amazon and Rackspace clouds run on the Xen hypervisor, VMware boasts a customer base that includes 96% of the Fortune 1000.

Windows debugging made easy

Looking through the results, the engineer found an Exchange search function was consuming many of the cycles. The sluggishness was caused by the fact that a number of users had humongous mailboxes, which when they searched through them, would spike the server load. The admin instructed the users to reduce the size of their mailboxes, or organize them better. As a result of such tidying up on the users' part, server performance improved.

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In a third case, Russinovich's wife had complained that the Windows Photo Gallery would hang after showing a movie. The bug was particularly annoying to her, as she was showing friends some home movies. A friend of hers even quipped, "This never happens with a Mac."

Russinovich reran the Photo Gallery software while capturing all the processes in Process Monitor. "When in doubt run Process Monitor," he advised. He matched the time of the hang with all the processes running at that time. While most of the processes were routine, he found an unusual system call, ironically enough, to an Apple QuickTime object, which was the source of program hang. "Sure enough, it was from that company that doesn't know how to write Windows software," he joked.

Russinovich also showed the audience how to rid a machine of a bad case of malware. This example also came from a user submission, detailing how the infected computer had a particularly thorough piece of malware that blocked all attempts to run any sort of diagnostic, anti-virus or system administration tools.

One way around the block, Russinovich advised, consisted of running another program he had written called Desktops, which lets the user set up four virtual desktops for the computer. The user can then switch among the desktops, each of which ran independently of the others. While not a diagnostic tool per se, Desktops could be used to repair the malware-riddled computer. The malware monitored any activity on the main desktop, but it was unaware of the other desktops, one of which Russinovich used to run anti-virus tools.

Finally, no debugging session would be complete without diagnosing the infamous Windows Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) error. Despite the severity of the problem, "It is incredibly easy to do crash analysis" on a BSOD, he said. Russinovich explained that such a crash happens when something goes wrong within the operating system's kernel memory space, such as a device driver that tries to access memory allotted to another program. Because Windows' first priority is "to protect data," it will shut down as soon as a program acts outside allotted memory space, he said.

After a system crash, Microsoft will offer an analysis upon reboot of the machine, which can point to drivers that need to be updated or other fixes. Even if this help message proves unhelpful, the administrator can check for the crash dump file that Windows produces when it crashes, Russinovich said. This is either found in the Windows directory, or in a subdirectory called Minidump. A program called Windows Debugger can examine the file and provide more information about what possibly caused the crash.

Report: Steve Wozniak Would Return to Apple, If Asked

In an interview with Reuters, Apple co-founder Steve Wozniak said he'd consider returning to Apple if asked. But if it were up to the engineering brain behind the first two Apple computers, he'd make iOS more open.

"My thinking is that Apple could be more open and not lose sales," the Verizon iPhone fan said in an interview on Friday. "I'm sure they're making the right decisions for the right reasons for Apple."

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When the reporter asked if he'd consider returning to an active role at Apple, Wozniak replied, "I'd consider it, yeah."

Wozniak is often credited for programming and building the first Apple computer, which he and buddy Steve Jobs famously sold out of Jobs' family garage in 1976. After suffering memory loss from a serious plane crash in 1981, Wozniak took a less active role at Apple. In 1987 he officially quit full-time employment at Apple and engaged in a series of start-ups. However he still sits on Apple's board of directors and remains on its payroll.

Currently Wozniak is the chief scientist at storage start-up Fusion-io. In 2009 he showed off a hidden talent on Dancing With the Stars.

He's not shy about his admiration of Android, either. Last fall a Dutch newspaper quoted Wozniak saying Android would eventually dominate iOS because it had "more features." Wozniak later told Engadget that while he did think Android would dominate iOS in the future, he didn't necessarily think it was the superior platform.

"I'm not trying to put Android down," he said. "But I'm not suggesting it's better than iOS... it can get greater market share and still be crappy."

Shocker from Redmond: Microsoft turns to Linux

Microsoft has ceased development of the Windows operating system and will be releasing its own Linux distribution, the company revealed in an SEC filing yesterday.

The annual 10-K report disclosed plans for the development of the "Winux" operating system and detailed special costs related to terminating the Windows business -- including costs associated with supporting current versions of Windows through 2020.

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The move signals that Windows -- once the world's most popular operating systems -- is no longer strategically important to Microsoft. Company officials acknowledged that switching to Linux will result in significant cost savings without compromising performance, scalability, reliability, or security. Further, compatibility with most Windows applications will be maintained, the officials said.

In a call with reporters, Steven Sinofsky, president of the Windows and Windows Live division at Microsoft, downplayed the significance to customers.

"It's not a big deal," Sinofsky said. "Most Windows users won't even know the difference."

Sinofsky explained that, although Winux is based on Linux, it would run native Windows applications using an emulation layer that Microsoft is developing. Although emulation introduces additional software overhead, Sinofsky said any performance differences would be "imperceptible" on today's hardware.

"The user experience will be nearly identical [to running Windows] today," Sinofsky emphasized. "The GUI will be the same. Performance will be the same. Security will be better."

Sinofsky declined to provide a timeframe for the Winux release or indicate what the licensing terms would be. He confirmed that Microsoft would continue to maintain Windows at least through 2020.

Departing Microsoft CEO Steve Ballmer [link to Ted's Ballmer bumped story ] said in an interview with CNBC earlier today that the switch to Linux would deliver huge cost savings and put Microsoft in a better position to compete against Apple and Google in consumer and mobile technologies, as well as Oracle and IBM in business computing.

"The operating system is no longer the key to winning in the technology business," Ballmer said. At the same time, Ballmer noted that the demise of Windows saddened him personally. Ballmer said he planned to devote much of his time during retirement to helping Windows users. He had created a weblog of Windows tips and technical advice, called My Windows Pony, that will soon be re-introduced as My Winux Pony.

Throttle Internet Bandwidth on Windows

Very Often certain Internet applications prove out to be Bandwidth hungry and often choke the internet connection. As an aftermath, the other apps struggle to steal bandwidth.

There’s an app called NetBalancer that let’s you throttle your internet connection (and even LAN connections) by limiting per-application bandwidth. You can choose to assign priorities to each one of them (just like CPU priority) and avoid the sluggish throughput. This application Shapes your bandwidth so as to fairly divide bandwidth among applications.

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bandwidth-throttling

So next time you run BitTorrent application like uTorrent, you don’t have to worry about how much it wants to eat, you can always restrict it.

You can, for example, designate priority to your web browser instead of your BitTorrent client. You can even specify download and upload priorities separately meaning a process can have a high download priority but a low upload priority.

However, the free version of NetBalancer limits you to setting upload and/or download priorities for 5 different processes and the main features include:

* Set download and upload network priority for any process. Currently supported priorities are:
o High priority
o Normal priority
o Low priority
o Block traffic
o Ignore traffic
o Limit traffic
* Set download and upload speed limits for a process
* Show all system processes with their in and out network traffic speed
* Show current connection for any process
* Show downloaded and uploaded traffic for any process since NetBlancer’s start
* View overall system traffic as a graph
* Show last 15 seconds traffic in system tray
* Fine tune priorities (see Level Severity setting).

NetBalanceris one of it’s kind Quality of Service (QoS) on Windows, avail it for free on Windows Platform: Windows 2003 32/64-bit, XP 32/64-bit, Vista 32-bit, Windows 7 32-bit, 64bit

20 Tech Habits to Improve Your Life

11. Consolidate Multiple E-Mail Addresses With Gmail

Gmail account add; click to view full-size image.You have more e-mail addresses than you do pairs of socks--so it makes sense to keep them all in one drawer. If you have mail coming to your ISP's account, your work address, your school address, and your throwaway Yahoo account from 1998, and you're having difficulty juggling everything, it's time to consolidate all those messages into one inbox. Google's free Web-based Gmail service is both an e-mail host and an e-mail client. Use Gmail's built-in Mail Fetcher to retrieve messages from up to five external e-mail accounts using the POP3 standard. In Gmail's Settings area, visit the Accounts tab to set up your external e-mail addresses, and you'll then receive all your mail in one roomy inbox. You can even send mail from your non-Gmail addresses via Gmail's Compose screen, too.

More: Get Organized in Gmail

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12. Never Forget a Birthday, Teeth Cleaning, or Oil Change Again

E-mail reminders; click to view full-size image.When you're tired of scrambling to send Mom flowers at the last minute every year, set up a scheduled e-mail reminder for her birthday--and for any other long-term recurring tasks. Google Calendar can send upcoming-event alerts via SMS ("Pick up the dry cleaning at 3 p.m. today") or e-mail ("Schedule a hair appointment; it's been six weeks!"). Most Web-based calendars (like Google Calendar) and task managers (like Remember the Milk), as well as Web sites such as HassleMe and Sandy, support e-mail alerts.

More: 26 Tricks to Help You Tame Google Calendar
13. Never Forget a Password Again

KeePass; click to view full-size image.Your Web browser can save your user name and password for sites you log in to often, but you still have lots of other passwords to remember--Wi-Fi network names and passwords, computer log-ins, PINs and passphrases, even security questions and answers. Instead of writing everything down on a sticky note tacked onto your computer monitor, lock up your store of sensitive passwords in a secure, encrypted password database. The free KeePass works in Windows, Mac, and Linux, and assigns one master password to your database. Park your passwords, PINs, and software serial numbers in your personal secure database, and save yourself the hassle of having to call the IT department the umpteenth time to reset your password.

More: 15 Great, Free Privacy Downloads
14. Encrypt Your Private Files

TrueCrypt; click to view full-size image.Everyone has a folder or two of private files that thieves, children, competitors, coworkers, or casual passersby should never see. Whether you want to secure your stealth startup's business plan or some personal photos, the free, cross-platform TrueCrypt encryption software (review; download) is ideal for storing sensitive files in a password-protected virtual container. Only someone with the master password can open that container and read or write the files within; to everyone else, it's a nondescript single file full of jumbled-up junk. TrueCrypt can secure a single folder on your hard drive, or an entire disk--it's great for a thumb drive carrying precious data that could be exposed if the drive is lost or stolen.
15. Stream Content From Your PC to Your Tivo, PlayStation 3, Xbox 360, or Wii

You don't need yet another box under your TV in the living room to enjoy your digital music and videos. If you own a game console or TiVo box, you're ready to start streaming media from your PC today--no Apple TV or set-top media box needed. Find out how to get started.

Microsoft also recently announced that, by this holiday season, Xbox 360 owners who are also Netflix subscribers will be able to stream "thousands of movies" using just their game console. In the meantime, you can stream Netflix movies from your PC to your Xbox 360 with the vmcNetFlix plug-in.

20 Tech Habits to Improve Your Life

6. Get Your Cables Under Control

Pilot ID labels; click to view full-size image.When you have a tangled mess of dust-coated cords knotted into a bundle under your desk, disconnecting a laptop or setting up a new printer can be impossible. The cords for power, USB, speakers, and FireWire all look the same. Simple labels can help you avoid accidentally killing your entire rig by pulling one wrong plug. Print out your own with a label maker, or buy a prefab pack of Pilot ID labels to stick on your home-office or living-room plugs. When the cat knocks one out or it's time to rearrange, you'll be glad you did. Then, get cords up off the dusty floor with an under-the-desk cable tray such as this $10 Ikea model. To keep gadget and laptop cords from falling off the back of your desk when they're not plugged in, affix a simple cable catcher (or a binder clip) to the edge of your desk to hold them. Finally, plug your workstation and your collection of peripherals into a single power strip or UPS to shut down the energy hogs with a single switch when you're not using them.

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7. Stay on Task With the Right To-Do List

Remember the Milk; click to view full-size image.The key to staying on track with the stuff you need to get done is writing it down and checking it off--whether you do so online, on your desktop, on your smart phone, or in a plain text file. PC World has tried a number of online task manager sites, and our pick is Remember the Milk. It provides all the bells and whistles you'll ever need in a to-do list online, on your desktop, and on your phone. RTM offers task categories (such as Work and Home), file attachments, notes, priorities, tags, due dates, and even "honey do" items (you can send tasks to other RTM users, such as your spouse or assistant). RTM also offers a Firefox extension that integrates the service with your Gmail inbox, so you can turn e-mail into tasks. Of course, no matter how good your software is, nothing can replace the visceral satisfaction of crossing off a line on your paper to-do list with the stroke of a regular old ballpoint pen.
8. Replace Your Laptop With a Thumb Drive or iPod

MojoPac; click to view full-size image.Instead of lugging a laptop on your next trip, save your aching back by taking your computer's desktop with you on a thumb drive or iPod. Portable Windows software offerings such as MojoPac and U3 put a full desktop on your USB thumb drive (or disk-use-enabled iPod), letting you run applications like Microsoft Outlook and save documents all on that drive. All you need is a host computer: You can plug the MojoPac drive into your in-laws' PC or a coffee-shop workstation, for instance, to access your documents and applications without leaving a trace behind. Alternatively, you can save and run free portable applications--like the Firefox browser, Pidgin IM client, and Sumatra PDF reader--from your thumb drive. Download those and other programs for free at PortableApps.com.

More: 23 Things to Do With a Thumb Drive
9. Use Your Camera Phone as Your Digital Photographic Memory

Qipit; click to view full-size image.Almost every cell phone model now includes a built-in camera, and they're good for more than just snapping pics of your buddies' bar shenanigans to blackmail them with later. Use your phone's camera and memory card to capture the spot where you parked, the label on a bottle of wine your spouse loved, the price on a new gadget to look up online, or an amazing meal you'd like to try to cook at home. A new crop of Web services can turn digital photos of whiteboards and documents into searchable PDF documents, too. E-mail your camera-phone shot of a whiteboard or document to Qipit, and the service will recognize the text and e-mail you the resulting searchable PDF.

More: Six Things You Never Knew Your Cell Phone Could Do
10. Create Your Own Price-Protection System

Amazon Price Watch; click to view full-size image.Deal search engines such as RetailMeNot.com or SearchAllDeals.com and social sites like BeatThat are great at finding the best prices before you buy, but PriceProtectr.com and similar services will save you money afterward by monitoring over 130 stores that have price-protection policies. If the price goes down after your purchase, that store might owe you money, but knowing whether the price went down is the trick. You can take advantage of price guarantees by going to RefundPlease.com, or track items on your wish list by using the free Amazon Price Watch software. Travel sites like Farecast and Orbitz also have price-protection systems and e-mail alerts for when prices reach a certain low point.