KV Pharmaceuticals, a specialty pharmaceutical firm in St. Louis, wanted to virtualize desktops and turned to "containers" rather than the virtual machine approach.

The contrariety might seem minor. In effect, Parallels, with its Virtuozzo product (formerly offered through SWsoft), partitions a hardware server into logical units that function under the host server's operating system. Virtual machines, on the other hand, each be in possession of their own operating system; you need as many copies of the operating system as the number of virtual machines that you plan to create.

Sun Microsystems used the container approach in Solaris 10 before it launched its xVM Xen-based hypervisor. IBM also uses the equivalent of containers on the mainframe with its logical partitions, or LPARS.

So what's the benefit of containers? With the container approach, memory consumption and processor overhead are reduced through the use of one operating system per host.

Ben Foxx, systems architect for KV Pharmaceuticals and its implementer of desktop virtualization, says his company "can get three to four general condition of affairs more virtualized desktops using Virtuozzo, running in the state Windows 2003 Server" than it could with a virtual machine draw nigh.

in opposition to KV Pharmaceutical, a host is an HP ProLiant two-way server running dual-core processors. Under Virtuozzo, he can run 30 to 40 desktops for server, versus the nine to 10 VMware virtual machines he's been able to run on such a host. His breakeven point is nine users per host, so with Virtuozzo, he's careful money. That favorable ratio "is the reason why we came up with the whole idea," he before-mentioned in an interview.

So far he has had 45 end users running in containers for seven months. By this occasion next year, he wants 200 virtualized desktops; he'll still have 400 to go. But some KV Pharmaceutical customers don't want the KV end users they work with tied to virtual machines. The area of concern is KV lab workers or researchers focused on KV's specialty drugs. A few customers don't want any technology they don't understand intervening betwixt the lab workers and the results they're reporting, lest there be an unexplained glitch in the results, he noted.

Nevertheless, as KV switches to desktop virtualization, it is retiring older PCs and giving end users a Wyse S10 or V10 thin client tied to a Virtuozzo container. End users run standard Windows XP applications in the container along with specialized lab applications, and are allied by Microsoft Remote Desktop Terminal protocol services. Foxx estimates desktop virtualization software costs $80 per user and the thin client $200 per user. Each desktop PC or laptop that gets replaced has a price tag of $800 to $1,700, and thin clients may have twice the lifespan of PCs, he said.

But direct comparison between virtual and PC expenses is elusive. Some part of server expenses must be allocated to end users under the container approach, and then there's always the question of end-user maintenance. Foxx thinks the real savings lies in reduced end-user support. "Servers don't go out same PCs do. You don't have all these video card and motherboards going bad," he said.

End users see a personal desktop — their Windows XP application settings are stored with their container profiles — and it starts up faster than a PC. So far he claimed container performance was comparable to PC performance, and the security of user desktops has been solid, said Foxx. These factors have smoothed the way to end-user acceptance.

"We have not at any time been able to go and just back up complete desktops," he added. "With Virtuozzo, I can."

A set time before the United States celebrates its independence, we continue to question our individual freedoms online. In Thursday's Daily Debrief, CNET News.com Editor in Chief Dan Farber and I consider a founded on judge's recent ruling in the ongoing Google-Viacom suit in law that orders Google to turn over YouTube user sprightliness. This will include videos watched, IP courtship, and usernames as part of an ongoing copyright infringement case.

Understandably, this news is disconcerting for YouTube users. Sources tell CNET News.com, however, that if Viacom uses this information since anything other than investigating piracy issues, it will be held in contempt of court. Regardless, Farber makes the point that this ruling could now set a precedent for other online privacy and security battles. Representatives from the Electronic Frontier Foundation agree, arguing that this court order will slowly erode the online rights we have come to enjoy and appreciate. Sounds like fireworks of a different kind this Fourth of July.

Music on mobile devices is expected to account for $7.3 billion of the global amount spent on recorded music by 2011, according to fresh data from eMarketer.

The report, titled "Recorded Music: Digital Falls Short," predicts that music sales as a healthy will continue to decline, but online and mobile markets will grow rapidly.

viewed like more and more multimedia-capable handsets are released, the mobile music market is expected to jump from $1.7 billion in 2007 to $3 billion by the end of the year. The form is estimated to grow to $4.8 billion in 2009, $6.2 billion in 2010, and $7.3 billion in 2011.

As CD sales plummet, the music industry is expected to see a $5 billion decline in total music sales in the next three years, from $31.8 billion to $26.2 billion. Because of this, record labels will look to the mobile space for additional revenue.

On Tuesday, Nokia inked an agreement with Warner Music Group to make its library available on Nokia's Come With Music service and music store. According to a report from The Register, the record labels are receiving a very lucrative deal with these types of mobile ventures.

For this report, "mobile" includes master recording ring tones, full-track audio downloads, ringback tones, music video downloads, and streaming services. It did not include licensing revenue or polyphonic or monophonic ring tones in its estimates.

Online sales will increase as well, going from $1.9 billion in 2006 to $7.5 billion in 2011, the report said. In three years, online and mobile sales will account for the majority of music sales, with 56% of the total mart.

Music companies need to integrate with online platforms to enhance the mobile music listener's experience, eMarketer said. In this stripe, Verizon Wireless and Rhapsody announced Monday a partnership that allows wireless customers to download DRM-free MP3s directly to a mobile handset.

NEW YORK - This doesn’t sound good: The nonprofit agency in charge of the Internet’s addresses recently lost track of its own.

The Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers, or ICANN, said it happened when an Internet registration company it oversees got fooled into transferring the domain names to someone else.

The attack was quickly noticed, and ICANN’s domain names were restored within 20 minutes. However, because many Internet directories retain notice for a day or two, visitors could have been redirected to an unauthorized position for longer.

ICANN said Thursday that recently made known, unspecified security measures should prevent such attacks in the future. The organization also said it was reviewing other security procedures.

The domain names hijacked were ICANN.com and IANA.com — for the ICANN subdivision known as the Internet Assigned Numbers Authority. Visitors to those addresses are normally redirected automatically to the organization’s main sites at ICANN.org and IANA.org, neither of which was affected by the attack.