I know that's a pretty unpopular thing to say, after all, the faithful still hope that Mandriva and Lycoris, et. al. will take the world by storm, but in my gut, I feel that it just ain't gonna happen.

And it's not a crushing-dreams thing (though I have to admit I love doing that), it's more of a reality check. That's because I take to heart the idea that the desktop is less important than the laptop market. Sure, laptops have been outselling desktops, depending on who you ask, either just recently or for a while now, but I'm primarily in it because it poses (or at least makes more urgent) specific problems in the world which interests me.

It's that on laptops that people in the directory services and strong authentication spaces are forced to deal with problems that they used to be able to ignore.

Problems like disconnected operation. Personally, the idea of attempting to provide strong network-based authentication when live data isn't available gives me the heebie-jeebies (what if the user's access was revoked in the meantime?), but no matter how much I wish it were not the case, I've had to accept that the real world is not like that.

Right now, all we have is solutions which try to make things work. And most of the time, that's enough. We have solutions like nss_db, which don't hit the network at all, and nscd, which make glibc and applications more robust, but at the core of them, the assumption that live data is available remains — an assumption which is fatally wrong for the laptop case. Sometimes all you've got to go on is impossibly-old data, a cold cache if you will, but you damn well better make it work.

So basically I think that the whole set of naming service and authentication modules will be inadequate in a disconnected world. But very few people seem to care about that case.

Went and saw V for Vendetta last night with a couple of guys from work. The thing that really stood out (other than that that guys who did The Matrix, for whom I still haven't forgivin The Matrix Reloaded (seriously, you wasted how much time on a freeway chase that ultimately meant nothing? and the guns? what happened to the guns?) was that the message was so heavy-handed. More so than Rufus Sewell running around screaming Wake up! Wake up! over and over again in Dark City was. And I love that movie. [Goes and digs out his copy.]

Not to say that it was less than entertaining, mind you, it just ran longer than films usually do in this day and age. Check-my-watch-in-a-bad-way long. Contrast with the check-my-watch-in-a-good-way that Red Eye represented, the way that makes me check my watch so that I'll know how much more awesomeness I'm in for, hoping that it's a large number.

Still better than most of the crap I watch. (And yes, I've just sat through Necronomicon: Book of the Dead, which, contrary to most descriptions, doesn't appear to be directliy based on any of H.P. Lovecraft's stories, which I've been slowly reading.).

You said HCL list.

"And for those of you from Boston seeking a little local color, if you just look out the right side of the bus, you'll see someone driving a John Deere Tractor." — Nitin