[CLUE-Talk] Walmart selling mandrake systems

[Grant Johnson]

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>Do enough people know what Passport is for it to gain acceptance? I have to
>say that I *still* don't understand what it encompasses, but I guess I've
>really dropped out of any sort of M$ clue-fulness...every time I hear/read
>about .NET, for example, there is this internal voice going,
>"la-la-I-don't-hear-you-la-la" - which could probably hurt me in the long
>run, but I just can't help myself.
>

Passport:  Centralized authentication.  So....  Whether you go to 
Starbucks or Barnes and Noble, whether it is online or in the real 
world, there is a single authentication that knows enough about you to 
authenticate that you are who you say you are, and that the money comes 
out of the right bank account.  (Cracker's translation: honeypot)

.Net:  Web services using SOAP (RPC over HTTP in XML format).  In order 
to do this, a common language runtime is in place (like a JVM) with the 
distinction that rather than one language into bytecode for any 
platform, it is instead any language into one common runtime.  This has 
issues, already demonstrated are that this hinders performance (like 
JVM) while reducing functionality in languages (because only those 
constructs available in the CLR are available in the language).  The 
other problem is rather than one language, many platforms (Java) it is 
becoming many languages, one platform.  There is a reason people program 
in C or assembler, it is bit twiddling and performance (or masochism) so 
this negates it.  If I don't care about speed, I write PERL, but at 
least it is because the language has specific strengths, and it is still 
cross platform.  MS has claimed that they will provide the CLR on other 
platforms, the only (even partial) one delivered by them so far is FreeBSD.

So far in the real world:  Lotsa hype, lotsa people who love MS saying 
how great it is, no one really using it for anything real....