An immodest proposal: RSS configuration of networked desktops

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?

[more at buzzword compliant]

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]