Technique News

Windows 7 RSS Desktop Wallpaper

Technique — Wed, 23 Sep 2009 09:16:00 +0000

Did you know that it is possible to subscribe to RSS desktop wallpaper themes in Windows 7? This basically offers an option to the Windows 7 user for changing the Windows 7 wallpaper frequently without having to pick or rotate through a series of photos and pictures that are already located on the computer’s hard drives. It means free new photos whenever the RSS feed gets updated with new photos.

Stephen Edgar posted RSS desktop wallpaper themes on his website that are taken from AFP photos. Eight different RSS wallpaper themes are currently offered at his website with the promise to add more in the future. The RSS wallpapers for Windows 7 come in the .theme format that is supported by the operating system. To use them a Windows 7 user needs to download one or all of the themes offered on the website. Once downloaded they can simply be double-clicked to be added to the operating system.

The operating system will show a prompt at first startup asking the user if the wallpapers should be downloaded locally. If not they will be used until the next wallpaper image becomes available. Downloading the images has the advantage that they can be reused at a later time.

The following RSS wallpaper themes are currently available for download:

AFP photos — “Basketball” – Windows 7 ‘Basketball’ Theme
AFP photos — “Fashion” – Windows 7 ‘Fashion’ Theme
AFP photos — “Football (Soccer)” – Windows 7 ‘Football (Soccer) Theme
AFP photos — “Italy” – Windows 7 ‘Italy’ Theme
AFP photos — “Obama” – Windows 7 ‘Obama’ Theme
AFP photos — “Television” – Windows 7 ‘Television’ Theme
AFP photos — “Tennis” – Windows 7 ‘Tennis’ Theme
AFP photos — “Top Shots” – Windows 7 ‘Top Shots’ Theme

Article Source: Windows7News.com

New Citrix Receiver Application Now Available on Apple App Store

Technique — Tue, 01 Sep 2009 11:05:00 +0000

Gives iPhone Users Instant Access to Windows Applications and Documents from Anywhere

Citrix Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CTXS) announced the availability of the Citrix Receiver application on the Apple App Store. The app gives iPhone and iPod touch users access their Windows applications and documents from anywhere. Businesses will be able to quickly and securely leverage their existing Citrix XenApp™ infrastructure to tap into the power of an agile and productive mobile workforce.

“For the 230,000 corporate enterprises that already use XenApp to deliver virtualized applications to their employees, Citrix Receiver provides a simple and ubiquitous method for accessing desktops and applications wherever employees are located. Whether they are using their desktop, laptop or smartphone, Citrix Receiver ensures a consistent, high-definition experience for accessing corporate applications, and allows IT to deliver applications as a service that is scalable and always available,” said Mick Hollison, vice president XenApp product marketing, Citrix Systems. “We are delighted to offer this capability to the millions of iPhone and iPod touch customers with the same cool user experience they’ve come to expect from their devices.

“Citrix Receiver will enable our customers to run existing enterprise applications on iPhone while maintaining control of their corporate data and intellectual property,” said Roman Pacewicz, senior vice president, strategy and applications services, AT&T Business Solutions. “The combination of ease of use on iPhone, access from virtually anywhere via the AT&T wireless network, and the delivery of critical business data via Citrix offers a seamless communications experience.”

Citrix Receiver is a lightweight software client that resides on user devices, like PCs, Macs, and smartphones, and is the self-service user entry point to the Citrix Delivery Center™ product family. Citrix Receiver for iPhone and iPod touch takes full advantage of the innovative Multi-Touch user interface of the devices offering the ability to zoom, pan, click and scroll within documents. Leveraging a unique Citrix feature called Doc Finder, it also provides fast, one-click access to important documents stored on the corporate network. Users can now quickly find, view, edit, save and send business documents from their iPhone and iPod touch. Since these documents are stored in the datacenter and delivered over a secure encrypted link, data and applications always remain completely secure. Mobile professionals who previously could not access full-featured Windows applications from anything but a laptop will now be able to experience true mobility. Lawyers can review and edit briefs, executives can update PowerPoint presentations and physicians can access patient records or view X-rays directly from the palm of their hand, whether they are in court, sitting in an airport or away from the hospital.

As a part of Citrix Receiver for the iPhone and iPod touch, Citrix is also introducing new App Viewer technology that makes it easy to create mobile-friendly views of enterprise applications. This feature facilitates displaying just the information a user actually needs – for example, viewing dashboards with dynamic graphs and frequently accessed reports from ERP and CRM applications while in a meeting or away from a computer. Citrix has posted simple directions on how to use App Viewer with industry standard development tools to easily create custom views of enterprise applications, both pre-packaged and custom developed. The combination iPhone and iPod touch, App Viewer and Doc Finder allows users to view apps and edit any kind of business document on a small screen. With iPhone, iPod touch and Citrix Receiver an increasing percentage of business travelers may actually find they can leave their laptops behind on shorter trips. By connecting millions of users to the corporate XenApp infrastructure that already exists, Citrix is able to help expand customer use cases and provide a simplified IT service delivery model that is flexible, scalable and always available.

“Citrix Receiver on the iPhone allows access to any application delivered by Citrix XenApp. In the health arena, Citrix-delivered electronic patient records represent an increasingly significant role in this expanding market,” said Dr. Paul Altmann, Clinical Director - Health Informatics - NHS South Central & Oxford Radcliffe Hospitals. “The ability to respond to an inquiry from a colleague in real time by being able to securely log on to the EPR remotely via the iPhone and Citrix represents a major advance that I know will prove popular amongst physicians who find the iPhone one of the most attractive PDAs to use.”

Cloud-based Demo Showcases the Power and Elegance of Citrix Receiver
To demonstrate the simplicity of Citrix Receiver for users and IT, Citrix has created a public demo environment that is available to any iPhone or iPod touch user. After downloading the free Citrix Receiver app users simply click on a link to receive credentials to an open demo system located at http://www.citrixcloud.net. Using this demo environment, users will be able to experience first-hand the simple and intuitive navigation of the pre-loaded sample applications installed there.

The demo system is built on the Citrix Cloud Center (C3) platform and allows anyone to experience the power of the Citrix Delivery Center product family, featuring XenApp, XenServer™ and NetScaler™. The environment leverages technology from Citrix C3 partner SoftLayer and the ability to seamlessly cloudburst into Amazon EC2 for additional capacity and storage to support periods of peak user activity. This unparalleled combination demonstrates the power of a completely virtualized delivery center.

Citrix Receiver for iPhone is available for free from Apple’s App Store on iPhone and iPod touch or at http://www.itunes.com/appstore/

For more information on Citrix, Xen Server, Xen Desktop and othe related virtualisation solutions please contact us.

In the spin of SSDs on database servers

Technique — Wed, 26 Aug 2009 10:15:00 +0000

Interest in solid state drives (SSDs) is growing as their initially terrifying price plummets: Intel recently (http://www.intel.com/pressroom/archive/releases/20090721comp.htm) announced a 60 per-cent reduction in the cost of its X25-M Mainstream SATA SSD since its launch last year.

SSDs are attractive because they radiate less heat than traditional spinning disks, they're smaller, quieter and consume less energy. And, of course, they're fast. So naturally we bung them into laptops.

However, there's growing use of SSDs in servers, and particularly database servers. Teradata, one of the world's leading business intelligence companies, recently unveiled a prototype data warehouse running entirely on SSDs.

Do the same reasons reasons for using SSDs on a laptop also apply to database servers? And what do SSDs mean for the applications that will access the data they hold?

Performance improvement is certainly top of the list of appealing factors, but uptake is also being driven by energy issues. Keeping servers cool is an ongoing battle so anything that reduces the heat generation is welcome, so how do the two technologies stack up?

A 600GB HDD might use about 16 watts when active: that's about 30W per terabyte. The X-25M has an active power consumption of 150mW. Running six of the 160GB SSDs gives a figure of about 1W/TB - 30 times less. If that wasn't reason enough, the cooler disks can be packed more closely together saving space, another server-room plus point.

So, what of the speed? To read from a particular place on disk the read/write head in an HDD must move to the right position, which takes "seek" time - quite variable but let's say an average of four milliseconds. Once the head is in position there is a "latency" as the sector containing the data crawls painfully around to it's appointed position under the head.

A 15,000 rpm HDD might have an average latency of two milliseconds. An SSD with no moving parts doesn't really have equivalents but latency may be quoted - for example a recent SSD was rated at 65 microseconds.

Quick service

All the advantages of using SSDs for general servers hold true for database use, but there are other potential advantages. Databases have always, if you ignore punched cards, used rotating media and whilst HDDs aren't serial access, they certainly aren't random access either, so all manner of database mechanisms have been developed to improve data access performance. I'll pick on just two: indexing and column/row oriented databases.

A non-clustered index is often a sorted list of pointers to data and for performance reasons should be kept on a separate spindle. Of course if the table is small enough, and particularly if it's marked as read-only - as it may well be for analysis - any database engine worth its salt will run a full table scan, pop the table into memory and ignore the index. Why? Because memory is much faster than disk. Intelligent DBAs understand all this and modify their indexing strategies accordingly.

Moving down the scale, there are doubtless DBAs who index all fields needing fast access regardless of table size, those who do this and keep the indexes on the same disk as the data and even those who don't know about indexes.

SSDs can be thought of as a hybrid between rotating media and volatile memory and their adoption should significantly change intelligent indexing behavior. At its broadest this simply means that good DBAs will use fewer indexes. Also, the use of SSDs will almost certainly affect decisions about the placement of indexes: for example there may be far less of a performance hit from keeping data and indexes on the same device because SSDs are essentially random access.

Ingres and Postgres creator Michael Stonebraker is well known (http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/01/24/stonebraker_dewitt_mapreduce/) for his controversial opinion of MapReduce and he has also voiced strong views (http://databasecolumn.vertica.com/2007/09/one-size-fits-all.html) on row- and column-oriented databases. In transactional systems we tend to read most of the data in a row and in analytical systems we tend to read most of the contents of a column - somewhat of a simplification, but essentially true.

Stonebraker's argument is that in analytical databases we should store the data column-by-column so that the data most likely to be read together is stored together. It's a perfectly reasonable argument when discussing an HDD and - whilst I'm not suggesting that the argument evaporates completely with random access storage - I am saying that the use of SSDs will materially alter the balance here. In other words, for many systems it simply may not matter whether we use column or row-oriented storage.

Clearly SSDs are going to be seen in wider deployment on general purpose servers. And, just as we’ve developed ways of extracting the best from rotating media, we must now engage upon doing the same for solid state drives.

Then once we've grasped the idea that storage need not rotate, alternatives to SSDs also enter the picture. Why not oscillate instead? DataSlide (http://www.dataslide.com/index.html), for example, is developing a Hard Rectangular Drive (HRD) with a "massively parallel 2D array of magnetic heads" past which the media moves. All sorts of good vibrations surround this device.

Bootnote: SSD explained

An SSD is a block of memory acting as a storage medium (meaning, incidentally, that the D in SSD is a misnomer as there's nothing physically disk-like about an SSD). The latest models, like Intel's X25-M, use NAND flash memory technology, which doesn't use power to maintain stored data. NAND is short for 'Not AND', a Boolean logic operator that describes how data is stored: its use in SSDs was pioneered by Samsung.

There are two flavors of NAND flash: single-level cell (SLC) which stores one bit per cell and multi-level cell (MLC) that - you guessed it - stores two. Both can be read very rapidly but writing to SLC is around twice as fast as writing to MLC.

On the other hand, MLC technology is cheaper: the 80Gb X25-M is MLC and the new bulk purchase price - 1,000 units - is less than £200, which works out at under £3 per gigabyte. One SLC Intel 32Gb X25-E costs around £350 or £11-ish per gig which, whilst not directly comparable for several reasons, at least gives a feel for the price differential.

Article Source: TheRegister.co.uk

Apple to launch revolutionary tablet touch-screen computer

Technique — Mon, 24 Aug 2009 14:44:00 +0000

Apple 'to launch revolutionary tablet touch-screen computer'

Speculation is mounting that Apple is preparing to launch a revolutionary touch-screen computer named the Tablet.

Apple to launch revolutionary tablet touch-screen computer
Apple Tablet concept

The famously secretive company has steadfastly refused to comment on rumours about the hand-held gadget, but one executive recently hinted that it had been working on something "very innovative".

Blogs are alive with rumours that the Tablet's launch will be announced in September by Steve Jobs, Apple founder and CEO, and launched in time for the Christmas market.

Apple joins with publisher to put first picture book on iPhone

The computer will stand out from the competition because it is one flat touch-screen device with no keyboard.

It is rumoured to be anything between the size of the iPhone and the MacBook laptop and users will be able to comfortably surf the web, read newspapers or watch films on it.

The product is believed to have been in development for the past six years, with Jobs personally involved over the last two.

If the speculation is true, it could be the next technological breakthrough for Apple, which has sold more than 200 million iPods since its launch in 2001.

The Tablet will be billed as the solution for people who work a lot on the move, but don't want to be burdened with a laptop.

Leander Kahney, a blogger and author of The Cult of Mac, told the Observer: "People expect it to be the ultimate Apple surprise. This thing will knock people's socks off.

"Apple will totally rejig the computing experience. You won't manipulate a keyboard and mouse any more but rather use an intuitive touch-screen. It will very tactile. It will be a whole new paradigm."

Source: Telegraph.co.uk. All rights acknowledged.

hp G5 Servers - Firmware CD 8.6 is out now

Technique — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 12:35:00 +0000

This one is really really important for G5 servers as there are known iLO issues:

» DOWNLOAD HERE

New Operating system support:
o    Red Hat Enterprise Linux 4.8 (x86 and AMD64/EM64T)
o    Microsoft® Window® 2008 R2
o    Microsoft® Window® 2008 Foundation R2

Added firmware to the CD for the following supported options:
o    Online ROM Flash for Windows - Power Management Controller (HP ProLiant DL380 G5 Server)
o    Online ROM Flash for Linux - Power Management Controller (HP ProLiant DL380 G5 Server)
o    Online ROM Flash for Windows - Power Management Controller (HP ProLiant DL360 G5 Server)
o    Online ROM Flash for Linux - Power Management Controller (HP ProLiant DL360 G5 Server)
o    Online ROM Flash for Windows - Power Management Controller (ML/DL G6 Servers)
o    Online ROM Flash for Linux - Power Management Controller (ML/DL G6 Servers)
o    Online ROM Flash for Windows - Power Management Controller (c-Class blades)
o    Online ROM Flash for Linux - Power Management Controller (c-Class blades)
o    Firmware CD Supplemental Update / Online ROM Flash Component for Linux - Smart Array P212, P410, P410i, P411, and P712m
o    Online ROM Flash Component for Windows - Smart Array P212, P410, P410i, P411, and P712m
o    HP Firmware Flash for Brocade Fibre Channel Host Bus Adapters

Removed from the Firmware Maintenance CD:
o    Support for Modular Smart Array 1000 Series Products
o    Support for Modular Smart Array 1500 Series Products
o    Online ROM Flash Component for Windows - MSA500
o    Online ROM Flash Component for Linux - Modular Smart Array 500
o    Online ROM Flash Component for Windows - MSA500 G2
o    Online ROM Flash Component for Linux - Modular Smart Array 500 G2
o    Online ROM Flash Component for Linux - HP ProLiant ML350 G4 (D17)
o    Online ROM Flash Component for Windows - HP ProLiant ML350 G4 (D17)

Updated firmware for the following ProLiant Servers & supported options:
o    System ROM's for HP ProLiant ML / DL / BL servers
o    Storage Array Controllers
o    Storage Disks (hard drives)
o    Lights Out Management (iLO2 firmware)
o    Network (NIC firmware)
o    HP BladeSystem c-Class Onboard Administrator
o    HP tape drives
o    SAS and SATA hard drives

Dell's Android phone finally official

Technique — Tue, 18 Aug 2009 09:44:00 +0000

Dell's much vaunted smartphone has finally debuted officially in China as part of the China Mobile Application Platform.

The leaks over the last few weeks have all proved true, with the phone called the Mini 3i, using a modified version of Android and packing some distinctly average specs.

We're talking no 3G, a 3MP camera, no Wi-Fi, a microSD slot and a 950mAh battery, which is more powerful than it sounds seeing as it doesn't have 3G or Wi-Fi to worry about.

Slimmer and sleeker

The new Mini 3i is part of the Application Platform, which also includes handset from the likes of Nokia, and has also been known as 'oPhone' in the past.

The Mini 3i is certainly slim and sleek, but looks like a Samsung wannabe more than anything else. It's also only China-bound for the moment, although it seems that this will be something of a test bed for the rest of the world should the Chinese go ga-ga for it.

And who knows? Average specs might come with a less than average price - if Dell manages to bring Android to the world for a very cheap price point, then it could be the springboard into smartphones the company has been craving.

Article source: MSN Tech & Gadgets. All rights acknowledged.

To find out more about mobile working contact Technique

Windows 7 - Desktop Enhancements

Technique — Wed, 12 Aug 2009 10:26:00 +0000

Windows 7 simplifies how you work with the windows on your desktop. You'll have more intuitive ways to open, close, resize, and arrange them.

With Windows 7, it’s easier to do things you do all of the time. For example, before, when you wanted to compare two open windows, you had to manually resize your open windows to show them side by side. With Snaps, you can simply grab a window and pull it to either side edge of the screen to fill half the screen. Snap windows to both sides, and it’s easier than ever to compare those windows.

Another thing you may want to do is quickly see your gadgets or grab a file from your desktop. To see your desktop just move your mouse to the lower right corner of your desktop. That'll make all the open Windows transparent—so your desktop is immediately visible. Want to get all but one window out of your way? Grab the top of that window, shake it and all the other open windows will minimize to the taskbar. Shake the window again, and they’ll all come back.

To find out more about Windows 7 contact Technique by visiting: www.technique.eu

Will Windows 7 convert loyal XP users?

Technique — Tue, 11 Aug 2009 15:51:00 +0000

Windows XP has been around for quite a long time and will (soon) be behind by two operating systems. It was released in 2001, so this is its eighth year. Yet, it still has the highest percentage in the OS usage share.

According to Wikipedia, the usage share for desktop operating systems in July 2009 was:

* Windows 2000 – 0.92%
* Windows XP – 67.10%
* Windows Vista – 21.56%
* Mac OS X - 4.73%
* GNU/Linux - 1.15%

This means that those who are using Windows XP are three times more than those running Windows Vista. I believe that XP users can’t be blamed for using an ”old” operating system. This is because Microsoft still supports it and provides updates for it. Not to mention that some users who had tried using Windows Vista, decided to return to XP (for whatever reason). Others, including myself, found that in order for their computer to meet Windows Vista’s requirements, they had to either upgrade it or simply buy a new one! Last but not least, many where put off from what they heard about it. Windows Vista was heavily criticized for being a resource hog, annoying the user with UAC messages, being incompatible with older software/hardware, etc.

(Check the Mojave Experiment to see how some people where dissuaded from trying Windows Vista.)

The point of this article is not to argue which operating system is better, but to congratulate Windows XP for lasting for 8 years while still being supported by Microsoft and for running on about 70% of computers. Now that Windows 7 has gone gold and will hit the market after 75 days, the following question arises:

How will the OS usage share chart look like when Windows 7 gets released??

From what we’ve seen during the pre-ordering of Windows 7 (when it ran out of copies within hours in the UK and after 15 minutes in Germany and topped the Amazon sales charts), it looks promising.

To find out more about Windows 7 contact Technique by visiting: www.technique.eu

Article source: Windows7News.com. All rights acknowledged.