http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/192123/infosec-08-virtual-desktop-on-a-flash-drive.html

This is brilliant. Everybody (who is anybody?)  has a PC or access to one. Using virtualization and this you could carry “your” pc on your keyring then slap it into your home desktop / laptop / friends PC / the machine in your holiday home / flat / hotel…

I used to use Tanden removable drive PC’s when I first worked from home. I just took the disk into the office & booted what looked like my PC. 

Imagine never being more than a fiddly bootup away from your PC - hot desking worldwide! 

Impressive figures (why does “multiplying it using industry standard metrics” worry me? but I guess it must be good even if not that good).

“According to VMware, for every server virtualized, customers can save about 7,000 kilowatt hours, or four tons of CO2 emissions, every year. (VMware said it got the figures by using the average electricity consumption of servers and multiplying it using industry standard metrics.) To date, approximately six million desktop computers and servers have been virtualized using VMware software. VMware says this has saved approximately 36.9 billion kilowatt hours of electricity each year - or more than the electricity used for heating and cooling the entire country of Denmark.”

http://www.vmware.com/solutions/consolidation/green/
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/145169/vmwares_green_virtualization.html

You sometimes wonder if in a world of management speak stating the obvious is genuinely seen as a clever thing. Over at

http://www.forbes.com/technology/2008/04/09/virtualization-rsa-malware-tech-virtualization08-cx_ag_0409virtual.html

Someone is (being paid for!) saying if malware controls the virtualization host it will have access to all the virtual machines and their data without the virtual machines knowing!!! Well I never, that’s as if someone bugs the telephone exchange you won’t find the bug on your handset and they’ll hear all the calls not just the ones on your phone.

Who’d have thought it? Well who’d have thought you could get paid for telling people something quite that obvious.

Then again someone is probably being paid for the comment “Rather than the usual pattern, where we deploy a technology and wait for it to get hacked, wouldn’t it be cool to try and secure it first?”

Wow, someone should suggest to the O/S people to try adding some security when they design things. OK, you may think Microsoft didn’t but I think you’ll find they just didn’t do it very well. They didn’t design it to be full of holes (except maybe any employees who moonlight for anti-virus companies).

And “wouldn’t it be cool”??? Surely doing the obvious is the opposite of cool, what we used to call “sensible”.

I am assuming the people designing virtualization software are putting some security in there and that it will be considerable more secure than end user systems just because it is not designed for end users. It can’t be tweaked with downloaded screen savers and won’t have clots (oops, busy, non technical people) opening dodgy emails.

 Going back to the phone exchange analogy, I hope it might be a bit harder to get in there and plant a bug - or am I being optimistic and expecting people to do the obvious (cool?) thing?

In these days of (stories of) obese students, classroom thuggery and global warming comes a story of good news on all fronts:

http://www.itpro.co.uk/news/184326/york-school-virtualises-desktops.html

This seems to be an ideal solution. Talking to teachers about IT I always hear stories of support and administration nightmares and talking to kids about IT in schools I hear of slow boots, crashes, sneaky ways of getting to play games & competitions to see who can make the machine most unbootable. Thin clients should make the support and admin easier (once the initial learning curve is mounted), be less nickable, cheaper to install & gloriously quiet & fast to boot to boot (do you see what I did there?).

One extra thing I would sugest is to use optical mice - teachers who have glued the mice shut to stop kids nicking the balls tend to find them hard to clean!