Look closely and guess what they could be…

Are they pens with cameras?

Any wild guesse? No clue yet?

Ladies and gentlemen… congratulations!
You've just looked into the future… yep that's right!
You've just seen something that will replace your PC in the near future.

Here is how it works:

In the revolution of miniature computers, scientists have made great developments with bluetooth technology…

This is the forthcoming computers you can carry within your pockets.

This "pen sort of instrument" produces both the monitor as well as the keyboard on any flat surfaces from where you can carry out functions you would normally do on your desktop computer.

Can anyone say, "Good-bye laptops!"

And Citrix has added intelligent policy controls to its XenDesktop desktop PC virtualization application.

The move by the two vendors comes at a time when desktop PC virtualization is taking off in the wake of the boom in the server virtualization market.

VMware, of Palo Alto, Calif., this week said it plans to launch VMware ThinApp 4, the latest version of its technology that virtualizes applications for use by virtual and physical desktop PC users, said Ed Albanese, senior product manager for application virtualization at the vendor.

ThinApp 4 is based on technology VMware got with the acquisition in January of Thinstall, a San Francisco-based developer of application virtualization technology.

The ThinApp technology adds a new layer to virtualize an application from the operating system, Albanese said.

"It virtualizes the registry, file system, and services, and turns them into an encapsulated, mobile file," he said. "Customers can package an application as a single file that can be deployed to a Citrix Server or to Terminal Services, or to a PC or a virtual desktop or a USB key."

The most important part of the ThinApp technology is that it is agentless, which means that customers do not need to install a driver or any other software to run the application, Albanese said.

Customers can also plug such applications into their PC-Config solutions from a wide number of vendors. "About 94 percent of customers have PC-Config solutions installed," he said. "Our technology works with any PC-Config environment to let customers get the full set of features."

Application virtualization is handy for customers who need to package applications for multiple environments, such as for Windows and Terminal Services, or when each department in a company has different system images, Albanese said.

"Our technology allows them to package one application that works in each environment without breaking it," he said. "It dramatically cuts the cost of deploying test applications."

New with ThinApp 4 is Application Link, which lets customers decouple the virtual application and allows multiple applications to work with each other.

For instance, Albanese said, a customer can virtualize .Net, virtualize a .Net application, deploy it, and then a week later virtualize another .Net application which can use the same resources as the first. It works with several environments such as .Net, Java, Internet Explorer, and Microsoft (NSDQ:MSFT) Office, he said.

Also new with ThinApp 4 is Application Sync, which allows companies which deploy virtualized applications to a user to also easily update those applications.

Without Application Sync, if a minor change is made to an application, it must be repackaged and sent to each instance, Albanese said. With Application Sync, every time an application is run, it checks online to see if there are any updates and, if so, handles the updates automatically, he said.

Citrix Systems, Ft. Lauderdale, Fla., this week unveiled a new release of its Citrix Access Gateway to provide scalable secure access to virtual desktop infrastructure (VDI) environments.

The new release of the Citrix Access Gateway appliance now integrates with Citrix XenDesktop, said Sanjay Uppal, vice president of product marketing for the company's Application Networking Group.

Citrix Access Gateway is an SSL VPN which provides policy-driven secure access to ensure that users can access their virtual desktop PC image and specific virtualized applications regardless of whether the users are at the office or in remote locations, Uppal said.

The new Citrix Access Gateway 8.1 release provides policies that specify which applications are not available in specific cases, such as when the user is working from a public kiosk, in order to improve corporate security, said Sai Allavarpu, senior director of product marketing for the company's Application Networking Group.

The new version also scales to thousands of XenDesktop users regardless of where they are located, and has wizards to simplify and accelerate deployment in a virtual desktop environment by automating several commonly performed XenDesktop configuration tasks., Uppal said.

Citrix Access Gateway 8.1 is now available. Its license costs are included in the company's XenDesktop application at no extra charge. The server appliance which runs Citrix Access Gateway is priced starting at $3,500.

The goal of Project Big Green is to provide customers with high computing capacity in a smaller footprint while saving on power, cooling and space costs, Armonk, N.Y.-based IBM said.

According to IBM, the underpinnings of the second phase is the addition of three modular data centers to IBM's product line. The Enterprise Modular Data Center (EMDC) is standardized between 5,000 and 20,000 square feet and can be online three to six months sooner than traditional built-out data centers. The Modular High Density Zone (MHDZ) is a 200-square foot system that combines power and cooling with high-density servers that can provide up to 35 percent cost savings when compared to a new data center. The Portable Modular Data Center (PMDC) is a fully functional data center, complete with raised floors and protection from fire, smoke and temperature changes.

The second step of Project Big Green is designed to introduce new technologies that customers will be able to use in order address energy challenges in data centers, said Mike Daniels, senior vice president and group executive, IBM Global Technology Services.

"We're unveiling the most advanced green technologies and services to help clients become much more efficient in how they consume and pay for energy, not only in their data centers, but across all their operations," Daniels said.

A modular data center may be the right move for a company that doesn't want to take on the additional cost of building out a data center, but is still looking for high computing efficiency, IBM said. Off setting costs and adding efficiency — not just the fact that they are billed as green — are driving IBM and its customers to adopt ecologically friendly products, said Gordon Haff, principle IT advisor with Illuminata, a Nashau, N.H.-based advisory firm.

"Very few companies are doing power efficiency or space efficiency because it is the ecologically right thing to do," said Haff. "In fact, in most cases, they aren't really doing it to decrease the power bill. What they are concerned about is when they run out of power and space. A lot of vendors are wrapping efficient power and cooling stories in Green because it's the fashionable thing to do."

Resellers are also encountering luke-warm responses from customers when mentioning the eco-friendly benefits of products, said Jay Tipton, vice president of Fort Wayne, Ind.-based Technology Specialists. The reasons are pretty straightforward: clients simply have a hard time getting past up-front costs.

"For my customers, heating, power and cooling doesn't come out of their budget, so they aren't taking them into account when they look at the data center," said Tipton.

Even though heating and power aren't the main concerns of Tipton's customers, when he outlines the savings that accompany blade servers and virtualization, for example, the customers may begin to come around. Ultimately, however, the accountants are the ones who have the final say in the matter.

"It's the upfront costs of these products. Can you lead a horse to water? Sure. Can you make it drink? Not really. The only other option is to hold their head underwater and drown them," said Tipton.

The speed demon was built for the Department of Energy's National Nuclear Security Administration to ensure the safety and reliability of the nation's nuclear weapons stockpile.

IBM said that in the past 10 years, supercomputer power has increased about 1,000 times.
Today, just three of Roadrunner's 3,456 tri-blade units have the same power as the 1998 fastest computer.Now, a complex physics calculation that will take Roadrunner one week to complete, would have taken the 1998 machine 20 years to finish.

As for the software, chalk up another one to the open source community: Roadrunner uses Red Hat Linux.

Tri-blades

The supercomputer's custom configuration uses two IBM QS22 blade servers and one IBM LS21 blade server that are combined into a specialized "tri-blade" configuration. Each tri-blade unit can run at 400 billion operations per second (400 Gigaflops). In total, Roadrunner has 3,456 tri-blades.

PDU Cabling

The system has 80 terabytes of memory and is housed in 288 refrigerator-sized, IBM BladeCenter racks taking up 6,000 square feet. Roadrunner's 10,000 connections — both Infiniband and Gigabit Ethernet — require 57 miles of fiber optic cable and weigh a whopping 500,000 lbs.

1st Stage Switch Rack Back

Roadrunner uses a first-of-a-kind design, the Cell Broadband Engine. Originally designed for video game platforms such as the Sony Playstation 3, the engine will work in conjunction with AMD's x86 processors. In total, the computer connects 6,948 dual-core AMD Opteron chips on IBM Model LS21 blade servers, in addition to 12,960 Cell engines on IBM Model QS22 blade servers.

Production Tri-blade Rear

Roadrunner's speed is roughly equivalent to the combined computing power of 100,000 of today's fastest laptop computers — users would need a stack of laptops 1.5 miles high to match Roadrunner's performance. It would also take the entire population of the earth — about six billion people — each working a handheld calculator at the rate of one second per calculation taking more than 46 years to do what Roadrunner can do in one day.

 Wiring Up CU2

Roadrunner was built, tested and benchmarked at IBM's Poughkeepsie, N.Y. plant, which is also the home of the ASCI series of

supercomputers the company built for the U.S. government in the late 1990s. IBM's site in Rochester, Minn. contributed to the

project by constructing the specialized tri-blade servers. Later this summer, IBM will load the behemoth supercomputer onto

21 tractor trailer trucks to deliver it to the Los Alamos National Lab in New Mexico.

Supercomputers capable of tasks such as modeling clouds at the 1- kilometer scale are usually built by increasing the number of microprocessors at a cost of about $1 billion–plus they require about 200 megawatts of electricity to operate.

The approach proposed by Michael Wehner, Lenny Olike, and John Shalf in Towards Ultra-High Resolution models of Climate and Weather would use about 20 million embedded microprocessors at a cost of $75 million to build, require less than 4 megawatts of power, and operate at a peak performance of 200 petaflops.

To move this into reality, the Lab has signed an agreement with Tensilica to explore new design concepts for energy-efficient, high-performance scientific computer systems. The effort focuses on novel processor and systems architectures using large numbers of small processor cores, connected with optimized links, and tuned to the requirements of highly parallel applications such as climate modeling. Under the agreement, the research team will use Tensilica's Xtensa LX2 extensible processor cores as the basic building blocks in a massively parallel system design. Each processor will dissipate a few hundred milliwatts of power, yet deliver billions of floating-point operations per second and be programmable using conventional programming languages and tools.

Konfabulator was originally launched on February 10, 2003, for Mac only. A Windows version launched in November 2004.

Konfabulator required a download and works on both the Mac and Windows platforms. The Mac download is 5.4 mb, and the Windows download is 10 mb. The service previously required a fee but is now free.

Konfabulator looks and feels very similar to Dashboard on OSX for the Mac, although some people claim creating widgets is easier on Konfabulator.Overall, it’s cool but it will be uninstalled by the end of the evening.