Have you ever head the saying “be careful what you wish for“?

Yeah. You might want to study that. For my part, if you really feel that we shouldn’t think of your company as so ubiquitously representing the world of internet search that the term “googling” and “searching” should be synonymous, and if you’re going to spend company $$ litigating against such a concept, then who am I to argue?

I for one will be glad to turn the other cheek. I’m sure there are worthy search companies out there with a bit more common sense and fewer lawyers on the payroll. From now on I’ll do my best to enact your wishes and treat the G-word like the four-letter-word you want it to be.

Here’s hoping that you sink into obscurity as quickly as possible. Good luck with that, from the bottom of my heart, and I really mean that.

Sincerely,

Pamela Dingle

Robert McLaws picked up on remarks that may indicate .NET 3.0 will be released in advance of Vista. If so, we might have a production CardSpace client sooner rather than later! How nice it would be to get things going on existing systems.

This is unverified – so take with a grain of salt.  It sure seems logical though, I’ll keep you posted on what I find out.

Aha!

Looks like Microsoft has released the official name of their Infocard windows client — Windows Cardspace. Well I'm not sure if it's official, but somebody from MS has blogged about it, so that's good enough for me (-:

I like the name – it is catchy and will be easy for help desk personnel around the world to refer to. It is also Googleable, and it doesn't have the terrible generic sound that 99% of the big stack mentality monster corps seem to be blindly adhering to these days (ie <companyname> <concept> <manager>). If it had been MS Card Manager or MS Identity Manager, I would have been very unimpressed (-:

It also solves the question of – "InfoCard" vs "InfoCards" as the official name, and it is also now easy to know whether you are talking about the client or a single card.

The same blog entry also talks about the new name for WinFX – go check it out, I wouldn't want to ruin all the surprises…

Nice work y'all, I bet it feels good to get to this milestone!

… ok not really.

But I do love the new slashdot pony theme… get it while you can, limited time offer…

Update: It’s over. But Pinkdot will live on. Me, I’m looking to get a tshirt made :-)

I've just had an experience that I did not expect.

I'm in Vegas for the Directory Experts Conference, and I just walked away from the registration desk with a tshirt.

(you're all wondering if I've gone batty, right? Conference tshirts are a dime a dozen, most people I know use them in their shops as rags)

I walked away from that registration desk with a women's medium. That's right – somebody actually took the time to think about the ladies here at the conference. I can't tell you how downright respectful that is. And how rare. In my years of attending conferences, I have rarely even been able to find a men's small (all the small sizes go first, so I often end up with a garment that is more suitable as a dress than a shirt).

It seems like such a small thing, but really, it is an acknowledgement. It says to me that the women at this conference were expected, are welcomed, and that somebody out there has finally figured out that a woman wearing a classy, relatively form-fitting tshirt with your logo on it is a very good thing.

Compare this to what usually happens to my tshirts — my Dad gets them, and you might catch a glimpse of one of them if you happened to wander by as he mows his lawn… :-)

Ok. So let me get this straight. Higgins is an API that will let developers consistently manipulate identity information in different systems, such as LDAP, WS-*, Email, and IM.

Similar concept to JNDI, right?

I’m confused as to how this will directly compete with Infocard. Saying that Higgins competes with InfoCard is like saying that Eclipse competes with InfoCard, is it not? You could use Higgins to create an Identity Selector that one day competes with InfoCard, true. You could also write mulitple Identity Selectors with Higgins that compete with each other – so the competition aspect has little to do with the API, as far as I can see. Either way, creation of a competing Identity Selector is hardly a bad thing, MS is actively encouraging development of identity selectors for other platforms, and seems willing to go head to head with anyone who tries competing on Windows. In fact, I personally think that it can’t be anything but GOOD for Microsoft – IMO, the worst thing that could happen to MS is that nobody bothers to compete at all, and InfoCard withers due to lack of adoption.

I’m not saying it isn’t a good idea, in fact I think it could be great.  I just feel like all the press articles were asking the WRONG questions. Personally, I want more concrete information on exactly what the API will sit in front of. If an API separates applications and libraries, what are those applications, or at least what are the libraries? Do those systems really have enough components in common to ensure that using the abstracted interface actually saves developers time, compared to using the existing mature and well documented APIs?

Those are the things I wonder…

This is good stuff:

PDF:Identity Metasystem Design Rationale

There is a lot of info packed into these 11 pages – it is densely formatted, and there are no flowery sentiments. Terse is good. I like terse. I’d have to say that this paper represents pretty well everything I’ve ever heard Kim, John, Andy, Bill, or Mike say about the metasystem… so I guess that makes them terse and consistent :-)