Author Archives: Sean Gallagher

buzzword compliance

An immodest proposal: RSS configuration of networked desktops

Let's say everything about your desktop preferences was stored as a set of hierarchical XML fields on a server somewhere on your network. Application settings might be on other servers; “cookies” with your saveed application preferences for websites on another. What if, when you were authenticated at login at a desktop (running ANY operating system), the preferences were aggregated into something similar to an RSS file and sent securely to the desktop, and an agent program used the RSS to recreate your settings as closely as possible on the particular platform you had logged into?

So, for example, if you had a set of network drives you connected to, those shares would be established over the best file service protocol available for the client you were on (NFS, SMB, Windows filesharing, AFS). Bookmarks and cookies were configured for the browser available. Desktop icons would be linked to networked or local applications that provided equivalent functionality, with your preferences translated to them.

Most desktop strategies are monocultures. What if you could, through the application of secure web-based technology like SSL and IPSec, create a heterogeneous desktop strategy that gave you 80% of the power of the homogeneous ones? Using RSS as a vehicle, and a cross-platform agent in, say, Java, to do the client configuration?

I encourage someone to implement this model. All I want is “friends and family” status for the IPO.

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General Chaos

Of Patches and Potatoes: Windows and Monocultures.
Monocultures have spelled trouble throughout history. My ancestors who brought the Gallagher name to the US came here in the wake of the failure of a monoculture–potatoes, which supplied an inordinate percentage of the food supply, were susceptible to a fungus “blight”. The failure of potato crops had a disasterous effect that Ireland, it could be argued, only really recovered from at the end of the 20th century.

Windows is the potato of the Internet age. That's basically what the researchers, including analyst Daniel Geer if @Stake, were saying when they wrote, “Most of the world's computers run Microsoft's operating systems, thus most of the
world's computers are vulnerable to the same viruses and worms at the same time.”

[read the extended remix at buzzword compliant]

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