The Devil Wears OpenID

Heard of OpenID? Chances are you’ll hear of it before long. Basically, we all have a million logins – one for each site we use. It’s a giant pain to login to check your Yahoo! Mail, login to leave a comment on someone’s blog, login to your MySpace, and login to check your bank statement. The smart cookies over at Mozilla gave us the “Saved password” function with Firefox, and all of us Mac users have Keychain.

OpenID is hoping to take the concept one step further. They envision a day where all of our personal digital content is unified and centralized AND accessible through a single user-name/password. It was born out of the open-source community – basically that means it’s free and always will be. And big-names such AOL, LiveJournal, and Technorati are getting in on it.

According to Brad Fitzpatrick, father of the technology:

“Nobody should own this. Nobody’s planning on making any money from this. The goal is to release every part of this under the most liberal licenses possible, so there’s no money or licensing or registering required to play. It benefits the community as a whole if something like this exists, and we’re all a part of the community.”

(http://openid.net/what, 1/17/8)

Did any other religiously-oriented ears perk up? I highly doubt that Brad Fitzpatrick is the anti-Christ, but OpenID’s great-grandchild might go on wrists and foreheads. I may be over-estimating, but it sure did make me think.

Apple Does it Again… or not quite?

Holy cow. Have you guys seen the new product from Apple? A three-pound MacBook that’s roughly three-quarters of an inch thick.

Apple geeks have been watching for a while for this laptop. Originally, the hype was surrounding the solid-state hard drive it was supposed to have. In reality, the MacBook Air can be ordered with an optional solid-state 64GB hard drive, but comes standard with a traditional 80GB hard drive.

Now, this laptop is a great plan for a “grab-and-go” laptop, but there are a few downsides which are not so easy to overlook. For one, there are only four ports: MagSafe AC, audio out, MicroDVI, and USB. It wouldn’t be so bad because this laptop isn’t designed to be the only one you have. But here’s the kicker: no internal optical drive. This is sure to generate a lot of flack.

Cool as it is, I’m sorry to say I would not buy this product right now. Sure, it’s super-thin and a great second laptop, but for a base price of $1799, I really have to see Apple at least revise the no-optical-drive issue. Didn’t they learn with the PowerBook 2400c?