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As a result, suppliers of complete (hardware/software/services) thin client solutions have started emphasizing two other benefits of thin client computing: compliance/security and user experience benefits.

It also shouldn’t be a surprise that the historical “cheaper but not as good as a PC” storyline around thin client computing never had a whole lot of grassroots support. However, today, we have faster networks (both wide area and local area); this helps at the infrastructure level. Perhaps fundamentally, we’re starting to see a variety of application and desktop virtualization approaches.

The compliance and security aspect is pretty obvious. If data and applications aren’t stored locally on a user’s PC, they can’t “walk” out the door. And, in general, it’s pretty commonsensical that centralized applications and desktops would be easier to control whether we’re talking software licensing or enforcing data retention policies.

One reason is that, to be frank, a lot of buyers don’t believe ROI claims. The size of an up-front check you write is something tangible. Purported savings over the next three years? Not so much. Especially given that the savings are often “soft costs” that posit things like lower management costs or higher user productivity. Vendors may not be able to justify literally anything with the right ROI study. But they can try.

This, in turn, means that many of the past justifications for PCs as locked-down corporate assets no longer apply. But that’s a topic for another post.

In fact, the only thing that surprises me is that vendors didn’t more widely focus on this aspect on thin client computing before now. To be sure, there’s a broader awareness of data security issues, more compliance regulations, and more remote contract workers today. But ClearCube, an early “Blade PC” company, built its business largely on demand from three-letter government agencies and others for whom security was a front-and-center requirement. So antecedents were there to see.

The specifics differ considerably but these new (and “reimagined”) forms of virtualization collectively focus on delivering applications and operating systems to a user PC in a controlled way. For IT, this means a thin client-like degree of centralized management. But users still have a conventional desktop–or even notebook–so they retain the PC experience. And that experience can be even better to the degree that their operating system and applications can be easily refreshed (”de-crappified” to use the technical term).

Think of it as a sort of hybrid client model. In fact, this model has even broader implications in that it means that IT can selectively control and wall off parts of a PC without necessarily taking control of the whole thing.

Moreover, justifying thin client computing strictly on a cost basis depends on these sorts of soft cost savings. After all, in a typical thin client architecture, you still need a desktop device (with a hardware bill of materials that isn’t really all that much slimmer than that of a regular PC) plus you need all the back-end servers and software to deliver applications.

As for the users? Well, so long as the thin client pitch has been mostly about gear for call centers and the like, it’s hardly surprising that IT buyers often haven’t put of a premium on richness of experience for that class of user. It’s about the basic function.

The resulting business that this approach has driven has been respectable enough–especially for Citrix–but it’s been fundamentally niche-y. Something for specific uses and users, rather than something broader.

They’ll admit that up-front costs are higher. They’ll even reluctantly concede that the user experience (in the sense of response time, adding a unique application, and so forth) may not be as good as for a traditional PC. But, the pitch goes, management costs will be so reduced that you’ll make back your money.

For as long as I’ve been following alternatives to traditional “fat client” desktops, most vendors have been touting thin client and related technologies mostly in the context of better return on investment (ROI).

The Wall Street Journal, citing a person familiar with the matter, wrote that “though the talks between Sirius and Liberty are advanced, a deal remains far from certain. It wasn’t clear how much Liberty would be willing to invest in Sirius and whether it would end up with control.” Liberty Media Chief Executive John Malone is “known as a careful negotiator and is unlikely to cut a deal in haste,” the Journal added.

Time is of the essence, however, for Sirius: $175 million in debt payments come due February 17. “The company is unlikely to be able to meet those obligations,” The New York Times wrote.

Bloomberg cited an analyst at Stanford Group who said both EchoStar and DirecTV could use Sirius’ satellite capacity to integrate radio and television services.

A deal between the satellite radio giant and the largest U.S. satellite-TV provider could help for Sirius fend off bankruptcy and an unsolicited takeover attempt from satellite company EchoStar, which has bought up Sirius’ debt.

And PaidContent.org noted that “DirecTV already has a relationship with the satellite radio company, offering XM channels in its own packages.” It added that Liberty is “in the midst of its own reorganization to gain value for assets that include DirecTV, Starz Entertainment, and Liberty Sports Holdings.”

It appears Sirius XM Radio is seeking some sort of an investment from Liberty Media, which controls DirecTV, according to several media reports quoting anonymous sources close to the matter.

The $104 million is partially offset by “$9 million of reversals for accruals from prior periods that are no longer needed,” according to the filing (thanks Silicon Alley Insider). “All three of the company’s business segments, as well as various corporate functions, are impacted by these plans.”

Motorola took another hit Thursday in announcing, through a filing with the Securities and Exchange Commission, that it will lay off 2,600 employees. As a result, it will take a $104 million pretax charge in the first quarter of the year for severance costs.

Motorola has seen its handset market share plummet, mostly due to a lack of compelling new products. In January, amid pressure from activist investor Carl Icahn, the company said it would consider separating its handset business from the rest of the company in an effort to increase shareholder value and revive the struggling business. Late last month it officially announced its plan to break the company into two publicly traded entities.

Ouch.

(Credit:
Motorola)

Thursday’s news brings to about 10,000 the number of employees the company has eliminated since early 2007, according to The Wall Street Journal. The layoffs come amid a barrage of headlines documenting the recent death spiral of the company’s cell phone business.

This week’s CTIA wireless industry trade show could have been a place for Motorola to show that it’s bouncing back, by my colleague Charles Cooper noted that the “dearth of interesting product news out of Motorola” at the show “underscores its current plight.”

Sheraton and Microsoft built a jukebox application for the table, and while the song selection is extremely limited–it’s got about two dozen albums, all from Sony BMG, each with a single song on it–I saw how Surface could be a great jukebox. You drag albums from a menu onto the main surface, touch them twice to see a list of songs, and drag the songs onto a playlist. In this case, the music played through small speakers on the side of the table, creating a little ambience for folks sitting on the chairs around the table, but I could imagine it working like a regular jukebox hooked into a house sound system in a bar or restaurant.

(Credit:
Microsoft)

I’ve seen Surface in a controlled demo environment at Microsoft, but this was my first time encountering it “in the wild,” and despite the big-ass table criticisms that some have leveled at the product, there’s an undeniable thrill in seeing something so weird and new in a public place. No, it’s not going to revolutionize computing like the
iPhone, but I think it has great potential in public spaces like hotel lobbies and restaurants. At 7 a.m. in the Sheraton lobby, all four tables were occupied, and three of them had people actually using them. (The fourth was serving as a more conventional table, as one traveler rested his bag upon it.)

Come on, come on, come on and touch me, baby.

For this to happen, Microsoft would have to make the tables more broadly available and offer a software development kit to the general development community, who will think of all sorts of clever ways to use it. Imagine what Pandora or Last.fm could do, for example. Right now, the company’s limiting rollouts to a few customers to make sure the first apps offer a consistent experience. (For example, making sure that they’re all multitouch and that drag-and-drop works in the same way.) But I expect the company to open the program up by the end of this year, at which point the product could really start to flourish.

Starwood Hotels, one of Microsoft’s initial partners for the Surface touch-table, has begun rolling the tables out in some Sheraton Hotels. I happened to be in downtown Seattle this morning and stopped by the Sheraton there to check it out.

Ruby still makes sense for much of what Twitter does–essentially sending messages around the Web–but the company has left the door open to using other languages. The Twitter developer blog says this:

In the Twitter developer blog on Thursday, an engineer said that Ruby on Rails still rocks as a Web development platform. The service’s woes are due more to a creaky architecture, he said.

We’ve got a ton of code in Ruby, and we’ll continue to develop in Ruby with Rails for our front-end work for some time. There’s plenty to do in our system that Ruby is a great fit for, and other places where different languages and technologies are a better fit. Our key problems have been primarily architectural and growing our infrastructure to keep up with our growth. Working in Ruby has been, in our experience, a trade-off between developer speed/productivity and VM speed/instrumentation/visibility.

We have some limits, and we’re adding more. Legitimate users should never notice them, but these new limits should help mitigate the worst case failures and attacks.

Are Twitter’s performance problems due to flimsy engineering or the choice of Ruby on Rails to build the application?

Ruby is a scripting, or dynamic, language, which means that it can be slower than Java or C for some applications. The trade-off is that in general it’s faster to write code with. Rails, meanwhile, is a Web development framework optimized for speed.

Many people have questioned whether choosing to write the application using Ruby on Rails was a smart move and whether Twitter should shift to a different Web development technology.

The outages and slow performance are due to “popular” members of Twitter with many followers who “tweet” a lot all at once, according to Twitter. Because of that, the company says will put some limits on what some users can do, but it should not be noticeable.

Twitter performance problems have brought heaps of scorn from the busy Web 2.0 digerati. That has prompted the company to disclose more technical details like today’s Q and A format blog.

The advantage of the specification will not only be better resolution, but it will also give more image control to cinematographers and editors. The format can be useful for archiving films which could be reissued with a different look as well.

In other announcements, Adobe will announce that it is now natively supporting Sony’s XDCAM EX tapeless video file format in its
Creative Suite 3 video-editing tools.

Adobe will demonstrate the feature on a version of its Soundbooth audio-editing product under development and on Premiere Pro.

The group’s hope is to have a specification ready sometime this year and to submit it to a standards body to encourage broader industry adoption, he said.

Initially, the specification will only affect “high-end Hollywood and top-end indie” filmmakers because equipment that supports this format would be the most sophisticated and expensive available. But eventually, this format could be used more broadly.

And it is adding support for H.264 standard, high-definition video format on its Flash encoding software. It added support for H.264 for Flash video playback last year.

“You want enough space to innovate but have commonality so that you are implementing technology when there is a genuine need for it to be different,” Hayhurst said.

“It lays the foundation for the correct way that you want to do cinema in the future,” said Hayhurst.

Adobe intends to support the format in future versions of its video work-flow products, like After Effects and Premiere Pro.

Creating a common standard will help accelerate adoption of higher quality imaging, he said.

The transcription information will be stored in XMP (Extensible Metadata Platform), another format developed by Adobe.

Adobe Systems thinks we can do better with the quality of digital video images. It is also developing a way to search on the audio within video clips.

For example, a person could search a CNET video review for a product name and a specific feature, such as camera zoom.

The company intends to support the feature in the next major release of its video work-flow software. There was a two-year gap between the releases of Creative Suite 3 and 2, so the next major version is likely to come some time in 2009.

The effort is called CinemaDNG, named after the DNG (Digital Negative) raw digital still image format designed by Adobe. The company is working with others in the industry including camera makers and software developers, said Simon Hayhurst, senior product manager for dynamic media at Adobe.

(Credit:
CNET Networks)

Video to text
Separately, Adobe will give a preview at NAB 2008 of technology that automatically transcribes the audio track of a video file.

At the National Association of Broadcasters (NAB) Show 2008 in Las Vegas this week, Adobe will announce a joint initiative to develop a specification that it hopes will eventually lead to a file format for higher image quality.

Adobe will show a preview of technology that will create a text transcription of the audio within a video clip at editing time.

“We keep saying that metadata is the most important thing happening in our industry and we want to prove it,” said Hayhurst.

For editors, this will allow them to more quickly find passages within a clip based on a text read-out of the audio. The output of the video-editing software will also include that transcribed information.

As a result, viewers of a Web video will be able to search on terms to find a specific location within a video.

The employee initially thought it was a personal attack, until learning from customers that a video of the prank had been posted on YouTube. The employee then engaged in a little sleuthing and tracked down the teens.

The sentence, devised by the judge, prosecutors, and defense attorneys, was created to serve as a deterrent to what is viewed as a growing problem of youths filming malicious, or violent, acts and posting them online, in the hope of generating notoriety.

The driver, who threw the drink, and the teenager who filmed the attack were charged with two counts of battery and one count of criminal mischief, according to the report.

As part of their sentence, the teens had to write, film, and post their video apology on YouTube, as well as pay $30 to clean the restaurant and serve 100 hours of community service.

Using a phone book, she located the mother of one of the teens, who identified the others involved in the prank.

From the YouTube video, she found the boys’ MySpace pages, where they had bragged about the incident. While keeping her identity secret, she befriended the boys and confirmed that they were involved in the attack, according to the Florida Today report.

Two teenagers who posted a malicious “fire in the hole” prank on YouTube were slapped with a court order to post an apology on the same video-sharing site, according to a report in Florida Today.

In this particular case, a 23-year-old Taco Bell employee was stationed at the drive-up window, when a
car loaded with teenagers drove up. After taking their order and handing the group their drinks, the teens yelled “fire in the hole” and threw a 32-ounce soda at the employee as she handed them their change.

iPhone (aka the JesusPhone)
Baby’s first Walkman
Facebook
Windows Vista

If none of our poll options quite fits, in your view, be sure to suggest your own ideas in the Talkback section below. We know you’ll come up with some great ones.

As part of CNET News’ election coverage, we thought we’d turn the Crave Friday Poll to a burning question on the minds of so many voters. If the two major presidential candidates were tech gadgets, which would they be? We’ll start with Barack Obama and move on to John McCain next Friday. After all, we believe in equal opportunity (that’s equal opportunity harassment) here.

Democrats’ quest for the White House

News.com Poll Obama as gadget
If Barack Obama were a piece of tech gear, which would he be?

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Republicans try for four more years