Virtual desktop war begins

With server virtualisation well on its way to widespread usage in enterprise IT shops, a new battle is being waged among vendors for desktops, reports IT World Canada.

Alex Topitsch, director of advanced solutions at IT services firm Soroc Technology, says many of his clients are treating 2010 as a 'business case year' for desktop virtualisation. He says the benefits for clients include a more secure environment, better uptime for desktops, stronger data protection capabilities, and if done correctly, a financial benefit.

“The technology was a lot more mature than server virtualisation when it first came onboard,” he says, adding that day one benefits will include a consolidated and efficient desktop operating environment.

Malicious code that mysteriously found its way onto an internal virtual print server took out nearly 800 computers used by the city of Norfolk, Virginia, says Computerworld.

The code apparently was activated when workers shut down their computers, says Hap Cluff, IT director for the city of Norfolk. "It was triggered by the action of logging off," he adds.

The code nearly wiped out the C drives of the 784 affected computers and essentially deleted the Windows operating system. The contents of the system folders on those machines, normally about 1.5GB in size, shrunk to 500MB. The code also affected 11 servers.

One of the features that Google's online office program Google Docs lacks is a cloud-based version of Microsoft Office's 'clipboard' feature, states Read Write Web.

Although users can copy and paste when using Docs, they can't accumulate a collection of copied items for later pasting as with the Office clipboard.

Some may argue that's by design - Google likes to keep things simple. However, it appears that may not be the case, after all. As spotted by the Google Operating System blog, a new server-side clipboard looks like it may be soon introduced.