News from the interwebs and other useful facts

OS X Lion, the Apple Mac App Store, virtualisation and terminal services

Mac OS X 10.7 A.K.A Lion will ship later this month and there are few interesting things.

Lion will only be available as a download from the Apple Mac App Store.
That brings up a few interesting points.
1. You will need OS X 10.6.6 running in order to download OS X Lion.
2. The download is 4GB per machine. So if you have 19 machines, that is 76+GB of downloads!
NOTE: Site licences allowing a single download a distribution of software start at 20 users.
3. In the USA, Apple is allowing people to bring their machines into an Apple Retail Store to download and install the update. No word on if that offer will be extended to Australia.

Lion will allow you to run several virtual instances of OS X side by side at the same time.
This will be a boon for It people or anyone involved in testing/support.
You could replace a small army of machines with a single one running every operating system in use!
Virtualisation on OS X revolves around 3 programs – Parallels, VMWare Fusion And Oracle VirtualBox.
I currently run Windows XP on my server (a Mac Mini) using Virtual Box and Windows Vista on the laptop using Parallels.

Lion will finally include terminal services – the ability for multiple users to log into a server at the same time and each show their own Account/profile.
I was first introduced to terminal services with Windows NT4 Server and Citrix in 1997.
With a fast network and a beefy enough server, you could buy the cheapest Mac Minis, all log into the server and harness the server’s power to do all the work.
This is actually less important now as macs are so much cheaper and more powerful.
It will be interesting to see if the rumoured re-design of the MacPro takes place allowing it to slide into a server rack and take on the roll of a proper server.
NOTE: A proper server generally means redundant everything, ease of access and management.

Lastly, a big thank you to all the clients that took up the special end of year bulk billing offer.
We booked 3 months worth of pre-paid work last week.
Simply put, we can focus less on chasing invoices etc… and more on finding practical solutions to your problems that you all face day to day.

PS: If you are happy with the support provided by D Revolution, let people know – we love referrals…