virtualization

I've been following the evolution of client-side computing off and on for over 20 years. Remember ASCII terminals? Green screens? Beehives? X terminals? If you do, they're most likely dimming memories.

The history of client side computing is filled with efforts to shift the balance of power between the server (ne host) and the client device. Which side is responsible for what, and how the sides communicate with each other, determine the cost, control, security, flexibility, and richness of the result. Some years it's "do everything meaningful on the server." Others, "do most work … Read more

A virtual club onboard an asteroid in the online game Entropia Universe has been sold by its owner for a cool $635,000, the BBC reports.

The club was sold by British virtual entrepreneur Jon Jacobs, who operates under the online alias '"Neverdie." Jacobs made headlines back in 2005 when he purchased the then-unnamed resort for a honking great $100,000, a sale that broke the record for the most expensive virtual purchase ever. (The record keepers clearly never witnessed the under-the-table sale of our godlike World of Warcraft character.)

Read more of "Virtual space club sold for $635,000. No, really&… Read more

Between 2007 and 2010, virtual goods revenue increased 245 percent, according to a study released today from market-research firm In-Stat.

According to the company, consumers will purchase $7.3 billion worth of virtual goods in 2010, up from the $2.1 billion they spent in 2007. The company's statistics include revenue generated from social-networking titles like Zynga's FarmVille, and casual games both online and on mobile phones.

In-Stat found that 70 percent of the revenue generated from virtual goods originated from consumers in Asia and Pacific countries, while the remaining 30 percent of the cash was generated from … Read more

2011 will be the Year of the X. Next year, Technology Y will kill Technology Z. Something will "die."

These sorts of predictions are commonplace as we approach the end of the year. They have a satisfying finality to them. They're dramatic. They're also, with few exceptions, rarely correct--certainly not in any literal sense.

That's because IT rarely advances in a way that invokes mass extinctions and spontaneous generation. Rather it's a more evolutionary process. There's lots of change but even when rapid the new stuff often doesn't displace the old--and overnight replacements are rare indeed. For example, proclamations about the death of Bluetooth were wildly premature even though that technology didn't live up to early promises.

This is especially true of cloud computing, given that it refers as much to the way the industry is moving to implement IT as the technology it uses to do so. Will those changes lead to broad shifts in where and how computing is done? Certainly, that's what makes cloud computing of so much interest after all. But we're mostly talking about transitions rather than sharp inflection points.

Within that context though, cloud computing is a rapidly developing set of trends that's generating lots of interest and discussion. And those discussions suggest to me some things that are going to be qualitatively different next year compared to this past one and some that will remain elusive.

Less focus on definitions (and dare we say hype?). If we were to do a survey of presentations, articles, and analyst research reports throughout this past year, we'd find that many of them spent a lot of time defining and categorizing cloud computing. I myself wrote a Cloud 101 white paper earlier this year. This sort of content may be old hat to the analysts and vendors who have been writing about or implementing cloud strategies over the past few years. But, as I've discovered to only partial surprise, themes that some of us consider well-worn are still fresh to many mainstream audiences. That said, in 2011, we can collectively start to move on from talking about the big picture while remembering that the future doesn't happen everywhere at the same time.… Read more

This week IBM announced new cloud offerings for federal and state governments aimed at providing the scalable infrastructure and ease of deployment available from public cloud providers such as Amazon Web Services and Rackspace.

These clouds are hosted at IBM data centers and are multi-tenant offerings restricted to government entities. And while the world doesn't need yet another definition of cloud, this use case of hosted private cloud (note: I'm not sure if this fits as virtual private cloud) is one that I suspect we'll see more and more large data center providers move toward.

For clarity, these clouds are both private and hosted, leading me to wonder if this type of offering will be more appealing than behind-the-firewall private cloud solutions. After all, in this scenario you don't have to buy hardware or hire staff to manage your infrastructure.

To a large extent, these new services look just like hosting did a few years back with the only real difference that the infrastructure is designed to be used in a multi-tenant manner as opposed to having dedicated servers. (Note: most hosting companies ran multi-tenant servers anyway, but the actual technical way of separating the tenants is different with cloud providers.)

It's not that services such as Amazon Web Services EC2 can't perform at the same level of a government-specific cloud offering, but the often challenging requirements related to government computing require a specific way of doing things.

A few weeks back I spoke with IBM CIO Pat Toole, who emphasized the fact that IBM corporate IT has a strong focus on optimizing virtualized servers in cloud-like ways to reduce costs. With nearly 400,000 employees, IBM is as big or bigger than many government entities and has similar challenges related to uptime, security, and storage.… Read more

Virtual desktop managers have been common third-party Windows accessories at least since the days of Windows 98, and they're even more common for Unix users, for whom they're essential productivity features. Virtual desktops add capabilities to the Windows desktop by creating copies of your desktop that you can customize for specific uses--work, e-mail, and gaming, for example--and rapidly switch between. It's almost like having separate computers, except with all your files and settings on each. Portable VirtuaWin is a free and totally portable version of VirtuaWin, a free virtual desktop manager. It's compact and runs from … Read more

Of the products I've seen recently, Intellitar's Virtual Eternity is the most likely to make children cry.

It is a service, which recently released its beta, in which you create an AI-based animated avatar from a picture of yourself and the answers to a questionnaire. Why? So you can bequeath this cloud-based avatar to your descendants. They can then ask your avatar questions about your life, which it will answer by animating virtual lips on a picture of your real face, with a generic voice (unless you pay extra to have the service create a custom voice library … Read more

Facebook's Credits currency will be the official payment method in the social-gaming portfolio from games giant Electronic Arts, which consists largely of what it got when it paid $300 million for Playfish last year, according to a five-year agreement that the two companies announced yesterday. Playfish had previously been a holdout among the big social-gaming companies in that it wasn't strictly using Facebook Credits in its games; now, it promises "a simplified, more accessible experience for people who play games and purchase virtual goods on Facebook" through the exclusive use of Credits.

"Since gaming has … Read more

Microsoft this week unveiled the Release Candidates for Windows 7 Service Pack 1 and Windows Server 2008 R2 Service Pack 1.

The new releases are the last public test versions before the RTM (release-to-manufacturing) editions for both products hit the market early next year, according to a Microsoft blog. The Release Candidate for Windows 7 SP1 holds no new features since the product's initial beta came out in July. Microsoft has previously said that Windows 7 SP1 would offer nothing new but would simply be a collection of minor updates and fixes already released.

Still the launch of a … Read more