Slashdot Mirror
Ultaportable Apps: Take Your Thumbware Anywhere
museumpeace writes "On his blog, Jeremy Wagstaff makes available a list of the apps now packaged for USB thumbdrives. He also wrote these up in WSJ but that will cost you. My personal favorite is the FireFox in a box...every where I went, I had a different crop of bookmarks, now my browsing is the same wherever
I go."
Apparently "spell checker" is not on the list...
Please help metamoderate.
How about Putty.
Then I don't have to carry around all those apps. I just ssh to my machine that does.
Some of these apps fit on a small USB (e.g. 64MB.) But if you want to start doing more than one or two of them, or want bigger apps like some of the Linux flavors, it's really helpful to know how big they are. For some things, like Email, the big problem isn't really the code, it's the data (e.g. you might have a 4MB program install but 100MB of email.)
Bill Stewart
New Fast-Compression-only CPR http://preview.tinyurl.com/dy575ks
You can rag on them all you want, but we need more spelling and grammar nazi's in the US.
I do government contract work, and correspond with all sorts of bigshot muckety-mucks from cities across the US, from city IT managers to police and fire chiefs, mayors, judges and city attorneys.
Coming from a Canadian living in the US: It's downright sad that Americans are not taught to read or write, and lack basic communication skills. Or maybe they're taught, and forget, because the general culture doesn't place any importance on proper use of language. After all, deriding someone for using slang isn't "PC".
I shouldn't have to recieve an email, only to play phone-tag all day to find out what the fuck they're talking about.
This one particular dork tries to make everything read more "official" by Capitalizing Every Word In Every Sentence.
Gah, beurocrats. All they do is have meetings and set up phone conferences all day.
I don't need no instructions to know how to rock!!!!
"She wouldnt let me use it for 'security' reasons!"
She did the right thing, good for her.
She'd be a real moron if she let anybody come in, attach a rewritable drive to her business computer, run executables from it, then let you have your drive back.
You should be happy she made that choice.
"Derp de derp."
With USB thumb drives costing about or less than $50 for 512MB, I'd have to say that space isn't much of an issue at all. I've seen 1GB flash drives for under $70 (though $90-100 is somewhat more common).
What is more of an issue to me is that the application not go bonkers with write cycles being somewhat precious with flash memory. It would be nice if the various linux filesystem drivers could have a mount option that spread out writes (since fragmentation isn't much of an issue on a media with essentially no seek time).
Please help metamoderate.
So I guess by "ultra-portable" they mean software that installs files in one place, doesn't touch the registry, and is easily 100% removable without bits o' crap left over behind?
Isn't this how all software should be released?
"[T]he single essential element on which all discoveries will be dependent is human freedom." -- Barry Goldwater
That's the way it used to work with many personal computers before people started creating "installers" that would mess with your system.
With modern PCs, you have to think seriously about whether this is a good idea, though. Unless you actually boot from the thumb drive, you risk exposing your data to viruses and spyware.
Plug your USB drive into a virus-infected machine; run firefox; and you now have a virus-infected copy of firefox on your USB drive. Carry it over to another machine; plug it in; run firefox; and you now have another virus-infected computer.
I'm sure McAfee, Symantec, and Sophos will all love this idea, but I think I'll take a pass here...
Tarsnap: Online backups for the truly paranoid