Category: Review

Remote access to a Mac from a Windows (Vista) box

If you find that you need to access a Mac from a Windows box, probably you’ll find yourself surfing the specs of a variety of Win32 X-Windows clients. Here are some that I tried:

Cygwin also has an X client, but I didn’t muck around with that.

RealVNC is (I think) the original. I’m guessing that the others are forks of Real, and that either Echo is a fork of Ultra or Ultra a fork of Echo. Tight seems to be a fork of an earlier, simpler version of RealVNC. And, according to their website, is “fully compatible with the standard RFB protocol used in VNC.”

It’s not surprising then that, out of the box, TightVNC is the only client I could get to connect to a Mac from my Vista machine at home. Tight’s refresh/rendering is plenty slow, but gets the job done.

Posted on by nurikabe 0

Silverlight… would appear to suck.

Maybe I’m completely missing the boat here, but Microsoft’s new Silverlight seems to be little more than a cheesy Flash knock-off, minus the standards, supporting technologies, install base, and developer community.

What the heck is Microsoft thinking? Why didn’t they just buy Macromedia like the rumor mill has been threatening for the last half a dozen years? For that matter, why didn’t they release it bundled with Vista so that there would at least be an instant user base?

Unless Redmond does something sneaky, like pushing out Silverlight in automatic service packs, I just don’t see it achieving any market penetration for a long time.. if ever.

Posted on by nurikabe 0