Desktop virtualization, which is also called client virtualization, enables the use of virtual machines to let multiple network users maintain individualized desktops on a single, centrally located computer or server. The central machine may operate at a residence, business, or data center. Users may be geographically scattered, but all must be connected to the central machine by a local area network, a wide area network, or the public Internet. The central machine acts like a server to the virtual machines that are connected to it.

Desktop virtualization requires a computing model known as Virtual Desktop Infrastructure (VDI). VDI includes the hardware and software systems that are needed to support the virtualized environment. Desktop virtualization separates a personal computer desktop environment from a physical machine using the client-server model of computing.

The network environment has gone through several transformations over the years. The good old mainframes became dinosaurs with the proliferation of PCs, which ushered in the client-server model. The Internet led us to the web-based applications model which has since transitioned into cloud-based computing, thanks to the availability of reliable bandwidth, increased processing power and cheap storage.

Here are some advantages of desktop virtualization:

• Businesses can reduce the number of servers they need which translates to cost savings
• IT staff can reduce planned outages and greatly minimize unplanned downtime
• Maintenance, upgrades, updates and patches can be done efficiently by moving applications from impacted areas to other locations and restoring them back when maintenance activities are completed
• Users get to run multiple operating systems on their computers and access hosted desktops from any location and any device.

For people that worked with the dumb terminals of mainframes where they could get any colored font as long as it was green (akin to Henry Ford’s black Model Ts) desktop virtualization may seem like Déjà vu, but in reality, it combines the best of both the mainframe and the distributed computing models by enabling applications and user settings to be stored on a central server and accessed via any device that can support the virtual desktop application.

Desktop virtualization is not just for large enterprises. One-person firms and small businesses also have the option to take advantage of this technology.

2011 will soon be history. Just like any year, this one also had its share of good, bad and ugly events. Without ranking them in any particular order we’ve come up with our own list of events that left their mark on 2011.

Jan 8: Arizona Congresswoman Gabrielle Giffords was shot at a supermarket in Tucson, AZ while she was having a public meeting with her constituents. Six people died in the shooting. After going through several surgeries and months of rehab, Ms. Giffords has recovered some of her ability to walk, speak and write.

Jan 14: Using the popular uprising in the Middle East called Arab Spring, the people of Tunisia ousted President Zine El Abdine Ben Ali’s after 23 years of autocratic rule.

Feb 6: The Green Bay Packers won the Super Bowl by defeating the Pittsburgh Steelers 31-25.

Feb 11: Pro-democracy protestors overthrew Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak after capturing his palaces.

Feb 20: Civil war breaks out in Libya after the military shoots and kills over 200 protesters in Benghazi

March 9: NASA’s space shuttle Discovery, the most flown spaceship, was retired after making its final touchdown at the Kenney Space Center. In its 27 years of service, it had completed 39 successful missions.

March 11: Japan’s Pacific coast of Tohoku was hit by a triple disaster. A massive 9.0 magnitude earthquake at an underwater depth of 20 miles triggered powerful tsunami waves that reached heights of up to 133 feet and traveled 6 miles inland. It wiped out entire towns and claimed the lives of 20,000 people in its path. The powerful quake which reportedly shifted the Earth on its axis by an estimated 4-10 inches caused a number of nuclear accidents in the Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant complex. At an economic impact of$235 billion, the World Bank reports it as the most expensive natural disaster in world history.

April 6: Following Ireland and Greece, Portugal became the third debt-ridden European country to seek a bailout.

April 27: Hundreds of powerful tornadoes rocked the South and Midwest, killing over 300 and causing a wide swath of destruction. Tuscaloosa in Alabama was the hardest-hit town.

April 29: Britain’s royal celebrities Prince William and Kate Middleton had a well-attended and widely televised wedding at London’s Westminster Abbey.

May 2: The world’s most wanted terrorist Osama Bin Laden was captured and killed at his hideout in Pakistan by U.S. Special Forces in a well-executed operation and then quickly buried at sea, ending over ten years of search.

May 22: With winds reaching upwards of 250 miles, strong tornadoes ripped through the town of Joplin, MO causes over 160 deaths and destruction of over 8,000 homes and businesses.

May 25: The Oprah Winfrey Show aired its final broadcast after running for 25 years.

June 12: The Dallas Mavericks win their first NBA title by defeating the Miami Heat 105-95.

June 22: Boston’s crime boss James “Whitey” Bulger, one of FBI’s 10 most wanted was arrested in Santa Monica, California.

July 5: A jury in Orlando finds Casey Anthony not guilty of murder, manslaughter and child abuse in the 2008 disappearance and death of her 2-year old daughter, Caylee.

July 21: After its 135^th flight, space shuttle Atlantis landed in Cape Canaveral and brought the 30-year old space shuttle program to a close.

Aug 5: The credit rating agency Standard & Poor’s downgraded the stellar AAA rating of U.S. debt by one notch to AA+ citing the federal government’s ineffective and unstable policymaking to stimulate the prevailing anemic economy.

Aug 6: London and several parts of England were rocked by rioting, arson and looting by violent mobs, causing widespread damage to local businesses. The austerity measures taken by the United Kingdom apparently triggered these ugly riots.

Sept 11: A memorial plaza was inaugurated at ground zero in New York to mark the 10^th anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks on the U.S.

Sept 17: A demonstration named Occupy Wall Street began at Wall Street in New York. Calling themselves the “99 percent,” protestors were voicing their unhappiness over their perceived economic unfairness. Within a few weeks similar protests started springing up around the U.S. and the world.

Oct 5: Apple’s icon and co-founder Steve Jobs succumbed to cancer after leaving his mark forever on the world as an unconventional and highly innovative entrepreneur.

Oct 20: Libya’s dictator Muammar Gaddfi was killed by revolutionary fighters after capturing his hometown Sirte.

Oct 31: The world’s population crossed 7 billion today according to the U.N.

Nov 7: Michael Jackson’s doctor Conrad Murray is convicted of involuntary manslaughter for supplying an anesthetic which allegedly caused the entertainer’s death in 2009.

Nov 9: After a record 409 victories and 46 seasons as the head coach of Penn State’s football program, Joe Paterno was fired over the handling of child sex abuse allegations against former assistant coach Jerry Sandusky.

Dec 13: Scientists claim they are close to a breakthrough in finding the subatomic particle “Higgs boson,” which if found would reveal how the universe’s building blocks work.

Dec 18: North Korea’s ruthless dictator Kim Jong II died after bullying the world with his rhetoric threats and nuclear ambitions for over a decade.

Today we witnessed a classic example of what happens when a company sets a very high standard for itself and comes up short on expectations despite delivering a very good product. Over the past decade Apple has successfully managed to marry technology and design to such an art form that it has left not only its competitors in the dust, but also shifted the paradigm for all types and sizes of business around the world.

While Apple had diehard fans even for its bombed Newton – a tablet like personal digital assistant that was released way back in 1987, the company started getting worldwide visibility in 1998 with the launch of its iMac G3  – a brightly colored all-in-one eye candy personal computer, which forever disrupted the monotonous, beige box PC structure. But this was just the tip of the iceberg.

Apple instantly attained cult status with the release of its digital music player, the venerable iPod in November 2001. The rest as they say is history. Since then, Apple has had a Midas touch like no other enterprise in the world. Every product it has launched in the past decade has sold like hotcakes and become a must-have status symbol for geeks, teenagers, executives, soccer moms and everybody in between.

Let’s fast forward to the present, to today actually. The world had been waiting with bated breath for Apple’s long overdue announcement of its next generation iPhone, the iPhone 5. Just like the U.S. auto industry, Apple had been consistently releasing a new or updated iPhone in the second quarter of each year. But this time that was not the case. The third quarter had passed without any sign of a new or updated model.

All this uncertainty created an avalanche of rumor mills. The main stream media and even the likes of the Wall Street Journal were infected by the contagious iPhone 5 fever. The Internet was rife with stealth pictures, exclusive videos and debates about the likely features of the new phone. Some even went as far as touting drool-worthy features like a holographic display and a laser-projection virtual keyboard which would display the image of a keyboard on any surface for full-Qwerty typing experience! Other speculations included a curved glass 4.4 inch display, a teardrop shaped design, near field communication (NFC), 4G LTE and a Starbucks coffee dispenser to boot (never mind…that’s one of the expected features of iPhone 7).

It is no wonder that the euphoria, excitement, and nail-biting anxiety were reaching a crescendo just before Apple’s “Let’s Talk iPhone” event at its Cupertino campus this morning. The Internet was on fire from the numerous live blogs and millions of tweets that were zapping around at breakneck speeds. Many popular websites experienced crashes due to the constant refreshing of browsers by frenzied iPhone crack-heads.

It was not just about the iPhone 5’s expected announcement. It was also Tim Cook’s first event as Apple’s CEO and Apple’s first without their super hero Steve Jobs. After a 60-minute long and sometimes boring speech about the features of the new mobile operating system the iOS 5, Tim Cook finally woke up the crowd with the announcement of the iPhone 4S, an updated version of its current generation phone. As he was going through a long list of features many tweets and bloggers swore the best was yet to come. After all, this is Apple we are talking about. They won’t make us wait for more than 15 months for a measly update, would they? No way, they said. Some even speculated that Steve Jobs himself would magically appear from behind the curtains and say…wait there’s more…and erase the malaise of iPhoneAholics in a jiffy by flashing the latest and greatest iPhone 5.

However, before anybody had a chance to blink their eyes, Tim Cook thanked everyone and concluded the event. What? You can’t be serious. Is this some kind of lame joke? It was as if time had suddenly frozen. After a prolonged couple of minutes, which seemed like eternity, most iAddicts regained their consciousness and returned to reality. There was no iPhone 5 after all. For many people in the Apple universe, today’s announcement was a big letdown.

But was it really a letdown? Perhaps a lit bid for a lot of people who were expecting a bigger screen to fall in line with the latest Android phones and the faster  LTE 4G data speed instead of HSPA+, a speedier version of 3G. It was definitely a big blow for fashion-conscious consumers because there is literally no physical differentiator between the 4S and the previous version. A lot of these folks must be saying would it have killed Apple to change the design a little bit? What’s the point of buying one; let’s just hold off for iPhone 5.

While physical beauty is only skin deep, the real beauty of the iPhone 4S lies under the hood. Let’s take a quick inventory of what’s new. A faster dual-core A5 chip that doubles the CPU speed and increases the graphics speed by up to 7 times. The new iOS 5 and a free cloud service called what else…iCloud of course. A new 8-megapixel camera that’s also capable of recording video in 1080p HD quality. It is also a world-phone because of its combined GSM and CDMA radio. The hallmark of the new phone is a voice-to-text digital assistant called Siri. Because Siri understands context, you can ask questions like “Do I need an umbrella this weekend?” or “What time is it in Paris now?” It makes phone calls, sends messages, schedules meetings, sets reminders and a whole lot more.

It may not be the mythical iPhone 5 that everyone was clamoring for. But I bet it’s a damn good phone and the most advanced iPhone yet. Is it good enough to hold its own against the onslaught of Android phones? Let’s ask Siri, and while we are at it, let’s also ask when’s the iPhone 5 coming? Gee I wonder what the answer might be!

If the proposed merger between AT&T and T-Mobile is approved by the FCC, the resulting colossal company would become America’s largest telecom player with about 130 million subscribers. Financial analysts claim the $39 billion T-Mobile acquisition deal is a great bargain for AT&T and it’s pretty good for Deutsche Telekom too, as they will be able to exit profitably. On the flip side, the U.S. will end up with only three major mobile carriers instead of four.

Instead of looking at this merger from the usual winners versus losers angle, let’s look at the good, bad and ugly side of this gigantic deal. Continue reading →