Real World Computing
VM licences
The tool allows you to run "private" web sessions in which nothing is recorded about you, the history is trashed when you log off, and so forth. But so what, Apple's Safari browser already does all this just fine. No, ZoneAlarm definitely seems to be claiming more than just that sort of history scrubbing. The website is staggeringly vague: words such as "virtual" are bandied around as the new bling term, but we really need it to have a proper meaning. If ZoneAlarm is wrapping up the web session into its own VM space then this would be very interesting indeed. However, if it's just a case of misusing the word virtual, I'll be very annoyed - I may virtually blow my virtual top, no less!
Finally on the topic of virtualisation this month, note that Microsoft has released a new set of tests and qualified support for Linux on Virtual Server 2005 R2 SP1. The list includes Enterprise distributions of Red Hat Enterprise from 2.1 to 5 and SUSE Enterprise 9 and 10, and Standard distributions of Red Hat 9 and SUSE 9.3, 10, 10.1 and 10.2.
Switch not that clever
Apologies to readers confused by my column about the clever Netgear gigabit switches a couple of months ago. The wrong picture was put on the page, showing a mega-expensive switch rather than the GS724T that I was referring to. Worse still, I said the switch has some nice high-end features including spanning tree, and it sort of does in the sense that it has all the settings for it and it's there as a menu option, but all the State buttons are nailed into the Disable state. I can even toggle the button for spanning tree on and off and twiddle with all its features, and all the help is there in the Help file so I assumed it was active. However, Netgear was just playing with me. Hey ho, sorry. And yes, I do hate functionality that's been nailed shut just to satisfy an arbitrary price-point differentiation.
Sysinternals
Sysinternals is a site that I keep returning to. It's filled with tools and utilities that make you want to smack the base OS team at Microsoft because these versions are simply so much better than the ones Redmond produces. Well, a while ago the people behind the Sysinternals site joined Redmond in senior positions and we wished them well, but this move also laid open the question of what would happen to this resource once the Borg implants had taken hold. Well, it's good to report that there's a raft of new releases of existing tools with lots of new features and capabilities. They'll pay for the time spent over and over again.
