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Getting Inside People’s Heads

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Today it dawned on me how some technology can have the unforeseen consequence of allowing us to get a view inside a person’s head.

While driving down the street today my radio station was overwhelmed by the broadcast of a nearby car’s iPod FM broadcast device. Curiosity took hold; I looked around and only saw one car close enough to be the source. I sped ahead at the next light to test my theory.  Yup, as I pulled away from the car, the car’s broadcast ended and my radio station came back in; they had to be the source.

When I pulled up to the next stop light I glanced over to see the driver; I was curious to see if my mental picture of the person who the music belong to was accurate.  Not even close.  Looking at the driver, I just couldn’t  quiet imagine them listening to the music I had heard.  And yet, the music had to be coming from her vehicle.

Sometimes you get a chance to see beyond the surface of a stranger. Thanks to the wonder of technology this can happen when you least expect it.

Technology Industry’s Dirtiest Little Secret

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In general, I don’t like to post a link to someone’s blog post without providing something of additional value to the original post. Then there are those rare occasions where you just want to share something (thank goodness Twitter & FriendFeed are perfect for taking up the slack there!).

This is one of those in between cases.

All I have to add is that this is one of the technology industry’s dirtiest little secrets, not just Programming’s Dirtiest Little Secret.  It is also a huge pet peeve.  How can you work in an industry and not invest the time to learn the most basic skill of that industry?  Follow that link for a well written and humorous take on the subject.

(For the record, in the past I have freaked poeple out becuase I would do business interviews with various people from IT organizations and take all my notes touch-typing…while look at them, not at the keyboard or screen.  Maybe now I know why some of they really tended to squirm during those interviews…it wasn’t the questions…it was the feelings of inadequacy.  🙂

I also freak my wife out when she watches or hears me type…  )

Is The Future VDI + Employee Owned Laptops?

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A few weeks ago I was casually talking with one of my enterprise clients about VDI. This client has a few VDI enabled desktops in their enterprise primarily for users who demand high powered systems for computationally intense work (it was cheaper for the company to invest in a small VDI infrastructure with powerful servers for these users than buying true high end desktops…especially since this customer makes the powerful servers themselves).  My client mentioned how maybe he’ll just buy a MacBook Pro himself (a laptop he hasn’t been able to convince his employer to buy for him) and run his desktop as another VDI instance.

This is where I shot the conversation off on a tangent to talk about a friend of mine who was interviewing at a startup that expected him to buy his own laptop.  The surprising thing about the startup was that they just expected him to already own a laptop that he would be willing to use for work purposes.  I commented on how the future may be allowing employees to use what ever laptop they want for the work computer and the employer will just provide everyone a VDI desktop for use as their “corporate desktop”.  This definitely eases the administration, security, and hardware refresh burden for the company.  One would just expect some sort of stipend for the employee to go toward a personal laptop computer.  (I’m purposely leaving the hardware support issue out of the conversation, but with Apple Stores proliferating this could be the outsourced hardware support for my MacBook craving client.)

So I was surprise this week when I received my latest copy of CIO magazine and found an article asking Is It Time For Employee-Provisioned Hardware Programs? Some analysts are saying that this is the next logical step in consumerization of IT, especially when you see how many non-approved smart phones, or laptops are already finding their way into corporate workplace (I’ve done this myself with my previous employeer…but that’s another story). Why fight the trend?  With VDI, IT Executives can make their end users happy by letting them use whatever hardware they like, install any applications they want on the hardware (they own it, and there is only one application on the hardware that IT cares about…the VDI client).  They can make their finance people happy by reducing the endless cycle of desktop hardware refreshes by using VDI to run the desktops on server hardware and use VDI to scale user’s CPU and Memory “power” as needed by the users business workload.  They can also keep the security people happy by providing a locked down environment that lives in the data center.

I can see this being a total desktop solution that more and more companies will start implementing in the near future.

Let’s just hope that the hardware stipends are reasonable…