The boot disk itself doesn’t really contain an awful lot, and the SMS distribution point can be updated to ensure builds are always up to date.

There are options to put more of the source onto the boot disk, and if this is the case then using USB can speed up the deployment significantly, however just booting into WinPE can be very handy for diagnostics / repair options.

When it comes to Client development, there isn’t really a source safe as such, however BDD allows you to make several configuration changes and then update your various deployment points to take the new configurations into account.

Something like hooking up the source control checkout location of your build image to a copy of something like http://tftpd32.jounin.net/.

That way you could make a change, check it in, then just load up a virtual or physical machine to network boot and it’d automagically get the new boot image.

Richard and Greg talk to Scott Kveton about OpenID. OpenID is a single sign-on solution that could very well make the classic username and password obsolete. This is a fast half hour – you’ll find yourself wanting to listen again!

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Interesting proximity in time to our discussion. Just something I’ve been listening to whilst coding today, really interesting half hour show on openId and unification of functionality.

The roll of an identity provider isn’t one of competition. It’s one of pure interoperability. A provider is within their rights to advertise to the people who choose them to control their “master identity”, however it’s important that a provider is purely a store and it means that other applications making use of common identities can focus their marketing and profit generating activities around unique features, enhancing both user choice, and the company ability to stand out based on their product rather than me-too features (“ooh a login system! a profile!”) which will be replicated and horribly duplicated.

You touch on the subject of online schizophrenia, which I find quite an interesting subject, but not one that this paradigm of unified interoperable identity providers prevents. I personally use an openId server that I host myself, and will always live at davidwhitney.co.uk/id. under that provider, I’m able to configure multiple identities, understandable as the seperation of concerns between professional, personal, and even various recreational occupations is an important one. I’m just more interested that this be by choice rather than necessity.

What I’m really trying to encourage is that competitors compete on features, and gain revenue from providing new and original products and solutions in a manner that will actually lead to a more sustainable business. If a combination of Live (Microsoft), OpenId (blogger, livejournal, many OSS platforms) and a network aware revision of ActiveDirectory (Windows, already loosely coupled with Live) (the most prominent identity providers that come to mind) are the foundation of centralised identity structure I’d be very happy.

I see features based performance as the platform for sustainable ecommerce and network awareness over the next decade as a consequence, it’s about giving the users the choice, and making your business have valid metrics on which to base profit, where users are drawn in by advertising and functionality and word of mouth. I beg for the day when “active users” is the valid metric rather than “raw traffic”.

Good read! Thank you!