Stories by: Tom Henderson

We noted the customer intake procedures for each of the five DaaS vendors, focusing on what options and what type of process were used. We set a platform consisting of several Windows 7 virtual machines, as well as a Lenovo T520 running native Windows 7, another T520 running Linux Mint 2, and three MacBooks running Mac OS 5, 6, and 7 respectively, as well as an Apple iPad running iOS 5.

I sat recently at the Grand Opening Ceremony at CeBIT 2012 in Hannover. There was a huge crowd of dignitaries, business people, and captains of German industry. They were waiting to hear from the President of Brazil, the Chancellor of Germany, and the Executive Chairman of Google, Eric Schmidt. Each gave a keynote. As the event's them was Managing Trust, it seemed salient for me to listen specifically to Schmidt, perhaps one last time. It's not that I don't respect the German Chancellor or the President of Brazil, but I wasn't trying to divorce myself from the organizations they represent.

We had a chance to see the Cius tablet at a Cisco office in Boston, and while we weren't able to bring it back to our own lab and pound on it, we did get a pretty good feel for what the Cius is and what it isn't.

Vendors are touting solid state replacement drives as a way to protect corporate data in the event of a laptop being lost or stolen, and to boost performance at the same time.

We used two identical Lenovo T520 notebooks, that use an Intel i5 chipset, as our test bed. We used a network boot to load a copy of Windows 7 onto the notebook after we entered HDD Master and User passwords onto each drive and formatted them for NTFS.

The first public beta for Windows 8 is expected to be released in February, but we've been testing pre-beta code in our lab. Our overall impression is that Windows 8 represents an aggressive effort by Microsoft to deliver a single OS that runs just about everywhere and takes on all of Microsoft's key rivals.

In testing cloud computing services and observing the growth of cloud activities, we've noticed that there are distinct phases that organizations go through in adopting cloud.

When Ubuntu decided last year to abruptly replace the familiar Gnome UI with its own Unity interface, many users were upset. And according to the latest numbers from DistroWatch, Linux Mint has been the major beneficiary, so we decided to test Linux Mint 12.

In testing cloud computing services and observing the growth of cloud activities, we've noticed that there are distinct phases that organizations go through in adopting cloud.

Ubuntu 11.10 has some jagged edges and documentation isn't easy to locate, but Canonical is certainly dreaming big with this latest update, dubbed Oneiric (dreamy) Ocelot.