This is my chaos

Anyone remember SimCity 2000?  One of the power stations you could build was the microwave receiver, that accepted power from satellite solar arrays.  Well, now there’s a company who reckons they can have a working system by 2016 (which is 4 years before it becomes available in the game! Maybe fusion power *will* actually happen!)

Read the interview here.

The company’s website is here.

And while we’re on the topic of strangely useful inventions, how about the ‘bumpy road’ aircon compressor!

To be honest, I started this post so long ago, I needed to check what I told you before.

I finally fixed 99.999999% of all graphical/other crashes/hangs/general instabilities.  The remaining trace problems I put down to the fact that I now overclock my machine and I have a minor (as in crash to desktop or random unexplained event) every once in….actually, I can’t remember when the last one was.  It’s pretty much fixed.  I’ve even been able to reinstate stuff like the Catalyst Control Panel (so I can overclock). The key change that solved everything was… (more…)

With the release of .NET 3.0, I was able to test drive InfoCard (now known as CardSpace). I actually had some problems with it due to some bizarre configurations on my machine (somehow I was no longer the owner of my user profile folders), but now that it’s up and running I can say I’m still excited about the whole concept. Still early days, but the process is seamless enough. The proof of the pudding will be when people start using it in anger. As yet, only a couple of ID related blogs support cardspace, so we’ll see how it goes when the amazons and banks of the world get in on it.

One of my crawlings re: InfoCard et al wound up at the blog of a guy called Bob Blakley. He has some rather interesting ideas on what identity is and how that interacts with the previously mentioned ‘Laws of Identity’. I happen to disagree with just about everything he said in those articles. I was going to put a couple of comments on his blog, but he’s turned off anonymous comments and as I’m not a Blogspot man I’m out in the cold.

So I’m writing my comment here instead! (more…)

During a very slow day at work I was reading one of the random magazines that we keep getting, and I saw an article about InfoCard, which at a cursory glance looks suspiciously like .NET Passport 2.0, but really isn’t.  Honest, guv.  The article was a little out of date for something published this month(!), considering that InfoCard is actually no longer called that, but the concept is extremely intriguing.  I highly recommend reading the article ‘The Laws of Identity’ to get a feel for what the project is aiming at.

To be honest, this is something that absolutely positively must be gotten right if the internet is going to become as universal as it thinks it already is. The problem at present is that the current methods of dealing with identity simply don’t work in a way that’s reliable, trustworthy or user-friendly.

It’s encouraging to see Microsoft involved so deeply in a project resulting in fully open standards (concurrent Linux/Apple/name your flavour implementations are also being developed right now).  This is something I’m gonna try to follow more closely in future.

Yesterday I was on the verge of writing a ‘Where are they now?’ piece on Homestar Runner. Now thankfully I don’t have to as the site’s finally had an update after over a month of absolutely nothing, and now that I have some money, I can seriously consider getting a T-shirt!