Slashdot Mirror
USB FlashDrives The New PC?
olddotter writes "Yahoo has an article about how large capacity USB drives might be redefining the concept of the personal computer. The article is windows specific, but think knopix on a flash drive." From the article: "When you check into an average hotel room and find -- alongside the alarm clock, hair dryer and DVD player that once were bring-your-own items but now are as standard as the furniture -- a cheap PC for guests to plug into, as our truly personal computing environment travels with us."
Yea, but you still have to bring your own virus and spyware. It will be years til they provide that.
Tequila: It's not just for breakfast anymore!
Yes, because Knoppix is so much more familiar to the Slashdot crowd than Windows...
Real programmers can write assembly code in any language. -- Larry Wall
...check out VirtualPrivacyMachine. DamnSmallLinux made completely anonymous with Tor.
It would be nice to have that accessability in hotels, but I have one small problem with USB drives. They're too freaking small. I keep losing them.
I have always been fascinated by the programs that can boot off a flash drive because I don't own a computer yet. These programs are quite useful and so far I know of three. (Open Office, Mozilla, and an HTML editor) Does anyone else know what programs can be booted off such a drive?
Ooo man the floppy drive is broken. No wait. The computer is just upside down.
By BRIAN BERGSTEIN, AP Technology Writer Fri Oct 7, 9:09 PM ET
Students at Eastside Preparatory School in Kirkland, Wash., are getting class materials in a new way this year: on a tiny flash-memory drive that plugs into a computer's USB port.
Small enough to wear on a necklace, this "digital backpack" can hold textbooks, novels, plays, study aids, the dictionary, graphing-calculator software -- almost anything, really.
Falling prices in computer memory have made these little flash drives -- also called pen, thumb or key drives -- into enormously powerful tools that are on the verge of changing the concept of "personal" computing.
With a gigabyte of flash memory now available for less than $100, these inexpensive digital storehouses can hold not just important data but also entire software programs. The information they carry can be encrypted and accessed speedily, a benefit of faster microprocessors.
What this all means is that computer users are no longer at the mercy of the machine that happens to be nearby. Everything we need to interact with computers -- even down to the appearance of our home PC's desktop -- can be carried with us and used on almost any computer.
"What's your personal computer, anyways?" computing pioneer Bill Joy said in a speech that touched on the trend at a recent conference. "Your personal computer should be something that's always on your person."
A few years ago Jay Elliot was looking for a way to help doctors move medical information securely and decided that flash memory -- which has no moving parts, unlike hard-disk storage -- was the perfect solution.
But as memory prices kept falling, he realized there was room for more than just data. So he invented Migo, software that lets removable storage devices such as USB drives and iPods essentially function as portable computers.
Plug a Migo-enabled device into a computer and enter your password, and a secure session launches in which you can send and receive e-mail and work on documents, with the background desktop and icons from your own PC rather than the ones on the host computer.
When you're done and remove the drive, all traces of what you did are removed from that computer. The next time you plug the drive into your home computer, data on each are synchronized.
Multiple people can share one USB device, with separate password-protected profiles for each. So when Elliot recently went on vacation, he, his wife and two sons each called up personalized desktops on a hotel computer -- all through a drive smaller than a cigarette lighter.
"People are carrying very expensive devices with them, but they only use 4 or 5 percent of their capability. What a waste," said Elliot, who heads Migo's maker, PowerHouse Technologies Group Inc.
Instead, he said, the model should be that "your data goes with you, in whatever form you want it. You just find a place to use it."
Another reason this flexibility is now possible is that software makers and flash-drive manufacturers relatively recently settled on technological standards that let programs be stored and run off the tiny drives.
Two hardware vendors, SanDisk Corp. and M-Systems Inc., formed a separate company, U3 LLC, to license and facilitate that technology.
Now a spate of U3-enabled drives have hit the market, preloaded with everything from photo-management software to the Firefox Web browser and instant-messaging programs.
Skype Technologies SA's Internet phone software is also available, meaning almost any computer can be used to make free calls over Skype, even if the computer owner never bothered to download Skype.
"The next time you go to install software that's going to be locked to the hard drive, your first reaction is going to be `Man, I want this on my U3 so I can have this anywhere,'" said Kate Purmal, U3's CEO.
The only big missing element for now is Microsoft Corp. software.
Alt
They crap out after so many read/writes. If a company can make a better flash drive all the better.
I wouldn't trust a hotel (or net-cafe) computer with a USB stick with my private keys, certificates, or banking password. Even if you boot off your USB stick, how do you know it's not booting under Xen? I think it's more likely that the hotel computer has malware already. chambermaids are not sysadmins.
...came to mind as i read the article - keystroke logger. One could be embedded into the "cheap hardware" and you wouldn't necessarily even know it.
There's nothing magical about USB, or even a local disk.
The key issue isn't that the data is on a USB disk, but that it is easy enough for you to carry around all your data (including OS and apps). E.g. compact flash would suffice. Or serial flash.
Furthermore, just having secure access to the data (perhaps over the internet) would suffice. Imagine a system where to boot up, the PC fetches your data off the web. Perhaps you use a kind of use-once key to access some of the data, with which the PC computes.
The thing I've not been satisfied with yet is the idea that the PC itself would engage in a man-in-the-middle attack. E.g. it stores a copy of whatever data you've accessed (off your USB, compact flash or network storage) -- and the bad guy gets that stuff later. There's no defense against this attack, because the PC is doing the processing.
E.g. imagine a compromised PC running something like bochs. It emulates a real PC, but gives away your secrets.
http://www.thebricktestament.com/the_law/when_to_
Assuming that you are willing to trust that this machine isn't (either by design or by tampering) just grabbing and logging all of your data.
Granted, I'm sure protection mechanisms would be built in to address this, but I think I'd still be a bit skeptical.
I'm puzzled: once I was told the network is the computer and now I learn the flashdrive is the computer.
I'm totally at a lost.
Now only if Windows can correctly boot on completely different box... Author probably never tried to take his Windows XP disk and boot in different box with different mainboard, video and network card...
Yes, of course, but how long does it take before you can without too much risk do to them what you once did to those soaps and towels now in your bathroom?
Well, this is almost as old as the live-cds, a quick search within slashdot gives us even servers in a usb key.
--
Superb hosting 4800MB Storage, 120GB bandwidth, ssh, $7.95
Kunowalls!!! Sexy wallpapers (NSFW!).
You can see them posting on Slashdot. That's some Anonymous Coward!
You'd think at least they'd be spreading dissent against governments. Not worried about being flamed.
I already have my "Personal Computer" in form of a 1.2kg subnotebook. While 1.2kg is still not the ideal weight the new models get better each year (unlike some years ago when notebook manufacturers only cared about the performance and not about the size). All I need is an open accesspoint so that I'm able to check my mails when traveling. If there's no AP nearby I can still use bluetooth to connect to my mobile and then use GPRS to get onto the net. And when I'm at home I just put the notebook into the docking station and I have a "normal PC" with a large monitor and a connected soundsystem.
Am I the only one who was disturbed to hear that the Cruzer Freedom seems to be some sort of DMA-enabled disk? Yeah, it's great that textbook companies can sell their books digitally and completely eliminate that pesky hassle of buying and selling *used* textbooks.
Perhaps this would work if the client machine were truly memory-less (no HD, no NVRAM, no flash ROM, etc.). Then the machine could be a secure blank slate for whatever the USB user needed to do. Given the prevalence of flashable firmware on everything (and the need for persistent machine configuration data), I doubt this is very feasible.
Two wrongs don't make a right, but three lefts do.
Then how do you know it's not a virtual machine that's emulating a diskless PC?
...One can have USB cameras..., not One USB cameras...
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
I had been doing something similar with my 20gig iPod for a while. At the time, I owned a desktop computer, so portability was a problem. Eventually installed OS X and all of my graphic design applications onto the iPod and used it as a boot disk.
It worked pretty well. Whenever I came to a new mac, I would turn it off, plug in the iPod, and boot while holding down the "T" key to target the new drive. Unfortunately, the iPod's hard disk is not the speediest thing in the world. Moreover, I doubt toshiba drive would last long if it was being used 8+ hours a day, everyday.
But as for the article. They harddrive-less / headless computer is not a new idea. As well all know, it's older then dirt. Yet ballooning operating systems, massive applications, and multimedia content have made it fairly impractical. Although flash drives and micro hard drives will grow in reliability and size, the amount data people use will undoubtedly grow as well.
I doubt we'll go back to harddrive-less computers any time soon. However they might be useful within academic institutions. Diskettes were handy in computer labs back in the 80's and early 90's. Students could carry their applications and projects with them... lab computer's weren't littered with crap like they are now.
"Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
The article makes reference to this new "U3 technology" that enables a flash drive to run programs. Exactly what is the point of this? Does anybody know. As far as I know, any program should be able to run off any flash drive as long as it doesn't do something like store all its settings on the host computer's registry or something. Isn't that how stuff like Portable Firefox, Thunderbird, etc. work? So why exactly is this concept so hard to do that one needs a special software SDK and specially designed hardware?
About 10 years ago, an engineer from our systems vendor predicted that one day, our computers would be the card-sized. We were looking at a PCMCIA flash card at the moment. Keyboard/mouse/display terminals would be everywhere, and we would just carry the cards around and plug them in wherever. PDA type terminals would be available for portable use. Sounds like it's coming to pass. Wonder if the guy got a patent out of that idea?
If God had meant for man to see the sunrise, He would have scheduled it later in the day.
That's what the MTBF rating is all about. It's just that flash drives do it sooner. But we all know what to do about it, right? Have a tight schedule of backups. Take your pendrive home and back that sucker up. Every time.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
ISR has exactly these goals. It is essentially the concept of running a Virtual Machine that can migrate between different computers. Migration can happen via the network or via portable storage devices such as USB keychains. The ISR project was also covered in a previous Slashdot story here.
The key issue isn't that the data is on a USB disk, but that it is easy enough for you to carry around all your data (including OS and apps). E.g. compact flash would suffice. Or serial flash.
The key issue is that you have a reader available for the type of flash memory you carry. If you carry your life on a CF Microdrive card, and your hotel's card reader just has an MMC/SD (SPI serial flash) slot, tough sh**. At least USB is all but guaranteed to be on every PC motherboard manufactured since 1999.
but how many fucking times to I have to read on Slashdot that the time of the PC as we know it is obviously at an end thanks to [X] technology?? But now I really understand what's going on: Dvorak is a /. mod.
...with "Instant On" technology. Of course, so far everything is vapour-ware, but here's the site:
http://www.go-l.com/home/index.htm
libertarianswag.com
I don't think over-sized USB drives would sell very well.
O'really?
This is, for all intents and purposes, what NeXT tried to do in the late 80s. The optical drive they used was ruinously expensive. The software was limited. Now, twenty years later, theidea is coming into its own. Devices like the USB key, the microdrive, and the Palm LifeDrive are actually spacious enough to make all of this work. Twenty years ago Jobs said you should be able to walk up to any personal computer and make it your own. Ten years ago Ellison said that you could access anything from anywhere. In five to ten years these visionary things may just really happen. Funny how the world works, isn't it...
Ross Winn "not just another ugly face..."
Why wouldn't there just be a monitor and keyboard?
The article assumes that the processor/memory etc are bulky by definition. Movement towards miniturization and disposable computing mean that having an entire system may become nearly as cheap and small as the stick of memory you are booting off of.
The only way to be truly secure is to have full control over the system you are using, so bringing your own entire machine will be a necesity for the crowd for whom inovations in hotels are usually designed for: business people.
Also a USB key with an OS compiled for an alternative archetecture would be useless in a hotel box.
The only two things which a handheld device cannot offer are a full sized display and interface. Why not just make everyone's handheld device interface with a monitor/keyboard/mouse console? Leave architecture compatibility issues to the user. Leave security to the user. Just provide a pleasant work environment.
runs off a 128 MB flash dongle:
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/
It has everything you need to get a job done.
Oh well, what the hell...
Isn't the real future the phone/pda? Those are getting good computing power. You just plug it in or dock it to a terminal that provides a better interface and removeable media drives. You can build a gig of CF into a phone and allow for USB( maybe the rise of Bluetooth? ) peripherals. This article just sounds like a good idea for a few mobile users, not a solution for the future.
WTF? How in the world did this get modded insightful? It's a flippin' joke without a bit of insight at all. Mod it up funny!
Remember, open source is free as in speech, not free as in bear.
and that should be long enough. I don't see what your problem is.
Oh well, what the hell...
I think as long as I can see the computer then I am okay with it. There should be a way to turn the wireless card off, that way you know the computer has no connection to anything but the computer you are plugging into. You would plug your USB drive into the comp, turn it on and it would load your OS. When you are ready to surf the web you can turn on your wireless card that is built into the box, and go.
After reading a few posts on this subject, people are afraid that something might be loaded on the box that steals your information. Well someone also might be sniffing frames wirelessly and steal your information that way. Having personal information on your computer has and will always be a risk. You just have value the convenience vs risk and to what extreme you want to take it.
Someone also mentioned Windows not being able to load well enough on different hardware. This is 100% true and would be a major set back to this idea. Well, the idea of having your own personal Windows OS. You can still tote around your Windows programs if the hotel had personal desktops.
Geez, I must be getting old. These young whipper snappers are so used to networked computers that they all think removable media is a new idea...
Oh well, what the hell...
That's why I'm going to keep carrying my laptop. I don't trust non-free software, especially Microsoft junk. I'll use a windoze box in a pinch, but I won't put a password into it. There are just too many key loggers out there and the platform is too open to abuse. As long as there's a network, I have full OpenSSH access to my data from my cable box. It's rare that I need all of it, but what I need is unpredictable. That's not something the average Windoze box can do and I would not trust it if it could.
Would I trust a free computer? That depends on my trust of the owner. I trust my friends and their computers. Do I know a hotel chain? No, and so the laptop saves the day again.
My trust in businesses has been shattered by the last decade of data mining they have done. The grocery store tracks my spending and spits out coupons. The credit card company tracks my spending even the gas station want's a piece of the "action". This is only the tip of the database nation iceburg.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
Because virtual machines still have to boot. Lemme put it this way - reboot and in the BIOS, make sure that flash drives boot before hard drives.
Ewww, a keyboard in a motel room. Now Wash Your Hands.
The difference between the sheets, keys and Windozed is that Windoze lets 250,000,000 13 year old punks put their seed on the machine from anywhere. Now that's dirty.
Friends don't help friends install M$ junk.
The aforementioned computer at the hotel doesn't need a hard drive to run an OS. Just a boot source, standard hardware, and a lot of RAM.
I see computers every day (they are at my school) that use USB flobby drives. Guess what? They can still boot off floppy disks. And they'll freak the same way if your flashdrive isn't bootable.
So why not carry your OS of choice on your disk and boot off that? The only software that you don't control is the BIOS.
Think about that next time you're traveling.
It ain't personal unless your sure it isn't bugged.
And even still... how good can a free comp. in the room be? Not very useful for more than basic web browsing.
IMHO the laptop will still rule this domain.
Ideas like this one are always based on one assumption: that everybody will be totally happy with the same keyboard layout. While it might be true US-wide for US-only customers, it's not true in Europe. All the European languages require keyboard layouts more or less different than the typical English QWERTY - such as the German QWERTZ or French AZERTY, not to mention all those weird accented characters that the Swedisch chef need to correctly spell his "bork! bork! bork!". Don't get me started with Slavic languages, especially those of Cyryllic alphabet... No European hotel would seriously consider offering this service as it would lock-out foreign visitors. Personally, I'm just totally happy traveling with my powerbook as my personal computer, all I want from the hotel is to have Airport and access to their printers.
http://linux.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=05/08/12
Where the heck are you finding hotels that provide a DVD player when in-room PPV movies are $10-$15 each? None of the hotels I've ever stayed in provide that; the TV's don't even have accessible A/V inputs and the cable hookups are protected with a user-proof collar.
"Lawyers are for sucks."
- Doug McKenzie
The matrix has you.
-
...when i do
ssh -X user@domain.com
i'm years ahead because i don't need ANY media to carry around with me?
geesh...
Is there a CPU in there yet? No? Wake me up when it's in.
Karma: It's all a bunch of tree-huggin' hippy crap!
Just replace "USB FlashDrive" with "Google YourLifeLive" or something, and you might be hitting the nail... dumb hardware everywhere, good Internet connections, and Google taking care of all your stuff. It's already working with e-mail, right? :-P
Try Ubuntu GNU/Linux, it's great!!!
One of the nice things about booting off of a knoppix CD image is that almost the entire CD is compressed, so it would be pretty difficult to play with that.. .The remaining parts that aren't on the image are pretty easy to keep track of... You could even have a boot CD that double checks all of the SHA1 checksums for the OS image, and looks for any other wonky files before continuing with the boot process.
Granted, It still doesn't protect you completely from keylogging hardware and virtual machine trojan boxes, but it's getting about as good as you can get for casual computing without carrying around an entire laptop.
One thing that you can do, if you're worried about keylogging, is have a different set of keys for your remote box, and change them on a more regular basis than you do for your 'trusted' boxes.
Sometimes boldness is in fashion. Sometimes only the brave will be bold.
You don't own a computer yet? Say...
Flash drives as the future of computing is an idea that just doesn't add up for one simple reason... Removable harddrive technolgy has existed for years... you don't see people carrying their harddrives around, do you?
No, the future of computing always has been, and still is over the network. As networks pipes become fatter, an increasing number of applications are appearing over the network. Think Hotmail. Think Google Office. Soon Google will offer their operating system that functions entirely over the network. You will have a nice big chunk of disk space that is for your own personal stuff, and every machine will share the same operating system code. You will turn on your computer, it fetches Google's boot loader over the net, you enter your name and password, and within minutes you're at your personal Google desktop.
It will happen, I promise.
I think most people call those "distribution" (ie: Knoppix) not "operating environment"
Synonyms. Sun has used the term "operating environment" to refer to the "Solaris" distribution of the "SunOS" operating system.
Having read the majority of the better posts, it seems the majority are concerned with two issues: security and booting. Both can be resolved rather well. There is now available a USB device (I haven't tried it yet, but I want one!) that, when plugged into a running computer, takes over. The PC boots the way it wants to, and you don't care. It could be a thin client with no HDD, CD, FDD, etc. No matter. As long as there's a USB device. And, since it takes over the local unit to use its resources to its own ends, security is a minor issue. (Security will ALWAYS be an issue. Don't be foolish with your data.) Unplug and no traces left behind. Hell, the hosting PC could have all kinds of garbage on it, some mailicious in intent. Doesn't matter. One example of the device (the only one I'm vaguely aware if right now) is from Baddog, or Blackdog, or some such name. The USB device includes its own processor! This really IS the personal PC. I look forward to more options in this realm. My job is made harder by these things currently (public PCs in a library, where a few rules have to be enforced), but hell, as long as they can't eat all my bandwidth and they don't screw up my PCs, then maybe I don't have to catch them. I plan on getting one because it makes a great tool for getting onto a messed up PC and fixing things, including stuff done to it by a malcontent that got on the same way. On a slightly different note, there were a few mentions of PDAs and having an environment to plug into. PDAs and micro PCs are getting more powerful and cheaper, so, yes, their a good idea as well. So, maybe a hotel/airport provides a place to plug your USB device into a PDA with a nice wired link, monitor, and such, or they can be real cheap and make you bring your own PDA. I think it works. As for hotels providing such things and their rarity, I'll be staying in a hotel in Budapest next week (Park Flamenco) that has in-room PCs! Lovely world we live in, eh?
I heard you can boot OSX from a Firewire flash drive like the Kanguru Drive. Though it is a little more expensive then the USB ones. ($122 for 1 gig)
"That's so plausible, I can't believe it!" - Leela
On my drive I have:
Firefox (portable version prepared by John Haller)
Thunderbird (also Haller's prepackage)
7-Zip (cause my flash drive is only 256MB)
NetRadio (simple Shoutcast player/ripper)
XMPlay (for other audio files)
Miranda IM (would use GAIM, but don't want to install GTK and the autologging is so useful)
BitComet (more features and half the disk size of the official BitTorrent client)
WinMTR 0.8.7 (if only the Windows shell had this built in)
SSH Secure Shell (there's a free-for-non-commercial-use licensed version somewhere)
don't let the snotty tone of the responses get to you.
you have a great point, and the company or person who figures out the answere is going ot make a lot of money
imho, it is the cell phone usb drive; one tends not to loose ones cell phone.
Sure I do. People have 1 GB Memory sticks as key fobs, or have it just like little accessoires in the pockets, They carry around iPods and similar devices with 5, 10, 20 GB in their bags and jackets.
Currently I see a mixture of both evolving. There are applications you use over the internet like mail and other things regarding communication. But very often people carry around data on their USB stick, or even applications of their choice, which are not available over the net.
In the long run the net might take over everything - but this has been announced for years and years. In the meantime a mixture of both, internet and mobile storage devices will define personal mobile IT infrastructure.
Although a bit more bulge in your pocket, this way you can boot from the CD drive if the USB boot option is unavailable but still mount and massage the data on the stick as usual.
Since the machines lacking the USB boot option tend to be relatively ancient and often lacking in the RAM department as well, I carry a CD version of DamnSmallLinux just to be safe, and Knoppix on a 12cm/5" CD too since in my experience it often works on tricky hardware and carries a decent set of tools as well.
Carrying both media naturally undermines the stealth and ultra-portability arguments of using a single USB stick but with DSL on a mini CD you get pretty close while having better chances of getting your distro to boot.
Besides, the mini CDs aren't all that uncool considering every jock and his dog is carrying an "MP3 stick" these days anyway. ;-)
Should invading one's peaceful neighbours be opposed, or rewarded with trade deals?
...finding a motherboard that will support booting from USB. My Asus board won't let me boot from my USB stick. :-(
You chose a really bad example up there ;-). At least in Europe fraud using manipulated or even completely bogus ATMs is not too infrequent according to police reports. Apparently there are a lot of mostly Eastern European gangs that either "enhance" real ATM systems with add-ons for the card reader and the keyboard that, while often not discernible on even closer inspection to the non-expert, can log the users PIN codes and grab the transmitted card data. Sometimes they even use complete real-looking fake-ATMs that trick you into entering your PIN and swallowing your ATM card afterwards. Until you have contacted the bank to get your card back from the presumed read ATM they are already spending your money using your real card and the PIN you gave them.
... they've taught us for years that putting your private things, unsecured, into a system you don't own is dangerous. They just called it "Sex Ed" when I heard it.
Let's face it, if people can just carry a tiny device that loads all their stuff from location to location - then laptops are dead and stationary desktops are the new black.
And finally people can watch the movies on planes again...
When I was looking to buy a usb key drive all of them came with an extension cable so that you didn't have to crawl behind your computer all the time. Well all of them except the one I wanted, the Sandisk Cruzer Mini. Anyway, the sales-guy gave me an extension cable for free because I was going to walk out of his shop without buying anything if he didn't :)
Check out http://www.debian-administration.org/articles/179.
I've had good luck using that base install and the discover package to boot up and get console mode running on 15 different systems. X up on 7. With no user interaction during the boot process.
I can see it now, people completely hosing their Windows installations by going in between "terminals" like these.
Knoppix, I can see...
It is pitch black. You are likely to be eaten by a grue.
...when they pry it from my dead, cold fingers.
Seriously, I don't want a hotel to determine my computing experience by pre-selectting any aspect of it, let alone all the inherent security issues. You have to be careful where you insert your stick.
I like the idea of loading software onto a flashdrive. Most of my primamry software is locked onto a dongle anyway, might as well have the software on the dongle as well. It would make it easier to work both at home and the office. I use my person software at work, company is too cheap to buy their own set. I'd love to be able to keep all my setup and plug-ins already installed on a USB drive then plug it in to use. Hopefully they can also end the DLL hell we all go through on windows systems. Things have gotten better but in years past I have had endless nightmares with missing or incompatible DLLs that every software wanted to cram into windows. Always gave me the willies when it wanted to "update" the DLL file. Gee I wonder what this is going to kill? I already store my working files on a flashdrive. Not a big step including software. It won't be long till they hit 10 gig. The one no one seems to be pointing out is once flash drives get large enough and fast enough why have a hard drive in the first place? Microsoft will definately be caught off guard by that little innovation. I'm guessing Linux will be the first to allow an operating system to be loaded strictly onto a flashdrive and not require a "C" drive. Microsft will take years to embrace that little innovation. They really won't like the idea of easy migration of one operating system between multiple machines. I wonder collectively how many operating systems we each have? I personally have dozens going back to I believe DOS 2.5. Some of them I'd still use if I could simply plug a USB drive in to use them. Could change computing forever.
A small folding keyboard with a 4Gb microdrive, and WiFi built in. Then public computers could be reduced to a simple display terminal, with basic processing capabilities. Store all your information online through a service provider, or your home PC running a server. Granted, there is no security, but who here honestly belives that using even your own computer over a hotel's network is totally safe and private? The beauty of this idea is without any storage or an operating system (aside from BIOS) on the terminal, public places would have far fewer concerns about viruses, crashes, inital cost of installation etc. And the consumer would have a cheap subistute for a laptop, (mabey under $200) that would weigh less, and get far greater battery life. Pus with the bulk of the storage happening online, sensitive documents would not exist physically on the device, so theft is not as major a concern. Laptop theft has been getting progressivly worse in the last 5 years, accounting for nearly half of computer information theft. Put the OS on a small 512MB flash drive built in, and develop connection standards for other devices, so the end user never has to see any settings that could be skrewed up, save possibly an OS upgrade announcement when they logon occasionally to patch security problems or expand hardware compatibility. Only downfall I see would be low refresh rates for the connected moniter. Sounds like a good soloution for many people though. I on the otherhand will still need my fullpower laptop.
When I looked into these, it did not seem like you could install apps on them. Am I right?
We have laptops at work, but we lock them down. The HD is encrypted and no local admin rights. If I need to install something for myself or someone else, I have to login with a special "install account" that has desktop admin rights. It is all very secure, and I want it to stay that way.
At the same time, we have sales weasels and IT guys that travel A LOT. As one of them who has to spend at least 6 - 10 hours a week with laptop in some mode of transportation on ground or air, I understand first hand the repeated request for a way to use a USB drive to make "personal" use of the laptops. I ran this up 3 layers of management to the Group VP and showed her what I could do with both a BartPE/USB drive combo and with linux on a thumb drive. She bought a 1 GB drive that evening and, with my help, now boots to it to surf and check email on the road. Needless to say, we now have formal permission to do this as long as it is understand that it is unsupported by the tech staff (in other words, me and my fellow sysadmins).
Linux is all great - FireFox and Thunderbird rule - but I want to run Windows games on the road. Particularly, I would like to run Civ3 Conquests or, even better, Civ4 when it comes out later this month. I have tried starting with BartPE and the DirectX 8.1 plugin I found, but I have not been able to get Civ3 to work. I just don't have the free time to invest in the trial and error of getting BartPE configured right, and there is no guarentee that BartPE will even be able to handle it (though the 1 GB RAM in my laptop gives me hope).
Any advice? Does anyone know of anyone else who is running a configuration that runs WinXP and DirectX games from a DVD-R and/or thumbdrive? Heck, I might even be able to get some of the sales weasels to pitch in some bucks and pay someone a little something for their time!
Thanks in advance for any advice or assistance!
When you check into an average hotel room and find -- alongside the alarm clock, hair dryer and DVD player that once were bring-your-own items but now are as standard as the furniture -- a cheap PC for guests to plug into, as our truly personal computing environment travels with us.
The Doubletree I've been staying at for the past million months recently replaced all the regular clock radios with new ones that, in addition to four other preset "memorised" stations, has a button designated to an input jack -- so that MP3 players can be connected.
I think the watershed development is not bootable flash drives (although those are intriguing) but rather tiny handheld computers with flash memory and no hard drive at all. Palms and Dell Axims and the like have been around for many years, but the big breakthrough has just happened--devices that can access 2GB, 4GB or 8GB of affordable flash memory. The first commercial device to exhibit this potential is the Apple iPod nano, which was made possible by a special deal between Apple and Samsung where Apple essentially gets the flash memory at a steeply reduced cost.
This can't only be to the benefit of music or media players. This technology is bound to break out in fully functional sub-notebook computers running Windows, Mac OS or Linux, without a hard drive. These devices would be lighter, more durable, and run for more hours on the same battery charge due to flash memory needing less power than a spinning hard drive.
As Apple and Intel are promoting things, it's all about computing power per watt of electricity.
So I look forward to a new generation of devices bridging the Palm space, cell phones, and the notebook computer space, relying on flash memory and not a hard drive. I think with the new flash memory developments, we are much closer to carrying around our whole computing experience in our shirt pockets rather than our briefcases.
Check out this one Project Black Dog a cigarette pack sized computer that plugs via USB into an existing WinBox the using biometrics allows the user to run their apps, do what they need to do, and then disappear without affecting or changing the host OS.
I'm sorry, I'm to tired to be witty at the moment so this message will have to do.
It has enough computer power to do most of what people need to do anyway.
What is missing is a good head mounted display and wireless keyboard and
you could do anything. Add some gesture magic, and you dont even need
the keyboard.
Using your USB flash drive in conjunction with your portable means you can use a known clean portable to work on your flash drive.
Store the two separately so that when your portable is stolen, your data remains safe.
--Kirt
Puppy Linux already has a complete operating system and applications on a flash drive. You can have Mozilla, Open Office and a host of others in less than 100MB of space. http://www.goosee.com/puppy , or if you prefer you can use a CD/RW to save your files.
that is really cool, but to have access to the gpl'd code they want 10 dollars to cover the cost of a cdrom and shipping. That seems like selling the code to people since shipping a cdrom is a stamp or two and a cdrom cost less than a stamp. I might report them to the FSF because of this and not buy their product, despite really wanted it out of my ethics of them voilating the gpl. Yeah-- you can have the code, but we want you to pay for the cost of doing so (which is reasonable), but at a price much higher than doing so. This is a clear violation.
I actually took the time to mail the company and ask them about it. When you request the source code from them they simply order it from DamnSmallLinux and remail it to you. To get the source code for DSL you have to send them $7. VPM said that they never needed the source code because their modifications are only script based which come as source code itself. They don't keep a static copy to make duplicates of because DSL releases new versions randomly and they don't want to order a new copy everytime DSL releases a new version just to have the source on-hand.
/ damnsmall/GPL_Sources.txt
Take a look at http://distro.ibiblio.org/pub/linux/distributions
It's not VPM, it's DamnSmallLinux.org that is making the source code hard to get. The $10 VPM charges is $7 plus the cost of remailing the CDs which is $3 for postage and an envelope. So if you want to report anybody, report DSL. Or better yet send DSL an email and ask them why they are doing it.
With NeXT computers your world was supposed to exist on a MO disk that you could take with you and put in any NeXT machine.
Of course, that didn't happen.
I don't think the hotel example makes a good case for the technology. We have laptops because they're portable and convenient, not just to be able to go between set workstations. You can't take a USB stick on a plane, to a cafe, etc.
Not to mention, I would never touch a hotel room computer keyboard that God knows how many lonely travellers have done God knows what to before I got there...
But what if you applied the same principal to your own computers? Say a powerful desktop and ultra-portable laptop that both ran from the same swappable flash drive? Or a drive that you could take from work to home, so you can have the same experience on both systems? No more remote desktops and transferring files back and forth...
NO-INSTALL.COM has all types of applications and links to Linux distro's made for this purpose. Feel free to stop by, read up on the latest portable media and different ways to use them.
$xx fee = Time & Materials. thats what i would guess
Who run Barter Town?
With this set up, any Mac in the computer lab will become "mine" simply by booting from my drive. Unlike Windows, most of the programs on the regular internal hard drives will run without issue when booted from my drive, so I still had access to word processors, stats software, etc. This was particularly useful since at the time, the standard quota on the file servers for individual students was only 10 MB. It filled up quickly once I discovered the 'net and started downloading every piece of shareware game I can find.
Unfortunately, the drive was a Full height, 5 1/4" monstorisity, so carrying the thing was a bit of a pain. The chassis fan was quite loud, too.
It seems x86 machines with BIOSes that can boot from external devices have finally become common enough to make this viable. (Not saying they didn't exist before, but it takes a while for the older systems to get flushed out of the general population so that you can assume that a machine you run across is capable of it.)
-- "This world is a comedy to those who think, a tragedy to those who feel."
U3 is an initiative of flash card vendors to make applications available on any (windows) computer with a USB socket, without installing, changing the registry or leaving data behind on the host's harddrive.
Of course, security is always an issue - not everyone would (or should) trust a random PC not to sniff all the data on the inserted disk-on-key.
Ubi dubium ibi libertas: Where there is doubt, there is freedom.
Would be nice too if Apple would fix OS X so it didn't reset all the #@*& USB buses 1.5 seconds into boot, so we could boot X off our flash drives.
I regularly boot Mac OS 9 and Mac OS X from USB harddrives, it works perfectly on my IMac G3 DV and PowerMac G4 QS. The trick with Mac OS X is to either install it with the harddrive connected to the internal ATA controller, or write a bootable image to the drive that you prepared earlier. You can not directly install OS X on a USB drive.
...that replaces textbooks!!!
"It becomes very, very malleable, and very creative on the part of the teacher, because the teacher can go beyond textbooks," he said.
Same old story as 25 years ago, when everyone predicted that video was about to replace textbooks. And later on, when multimedia CD-ROMs were all the rage. Sure, flashdrives have some uses, but the only thing that will replace textbooks will be a high-contrast, high-resolution, extremely durable, easy, low-power, cheap e-book reader....
Disclaimer: This post is not directed at you, I agree with your common-sense. The problem with pin numbers, passwords, etc is once you have stolen them you need to turn them into cash. Buying goods is easier to get away with but obviously less valuable. I don't know about anyone else's banking arragements but over here in Australia my bank states in writing that I will only ever have to pay the first $50 of any fraud perpertrated on my account. A hacker could empty my account (all at once or a bit at a time), I get a new one and it costs me a $50 "fine" for asssumed security slackness on my part. It may not be exactly fair if you did everything by the book but by far the main liability is on the bank, this "encourages" the bank to take responsility for their systems security seriously (don't know of a bank that is not serious when it comes to money). The "fine" pays for the occasional "suspisous transfer" letters I get from the banks and I am sure the "fine" is also designed to be just enough "pissing about" to make customers cautious with their cards, passwords and pins.
Consumer based electronic transfers did not take off in a big way until consumers were confident they were not going to get electronically mugged. So why all the parinoia? Do overseas banks let their customers take all the risk?
If your bank won't promise (in writing) to keep your money safe for a competitive fee then I suggest you find another bank.
And did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage? - Pink Floyd.
For a while, I had one of my computers with no hard drive. I just swept together all the spare parts after I built the other two PCs and had enough left over for a diskless workstation connected to nothing. But I have about six different live Linux CDs and a USB flash drive, and we ran it that way for quite a while. /home partition on the USB with all user files, and you could switch operating systems as easily as a DJ swaps CDs. It had enough RAM and motherboard oomph that swap memory wasn't an issue, but later an old IBM 276-Megabyte hard drive from a Win 3.0 box became it's swap drive. I finally got around to putting a real hard drive in it and it runs Mandriva today, but the experiment was fun!
Unless that PC is networked, it's useless. Networked, it can get any of our personal data on demand over broadband. What it lacks is security: privacy and authentication. A thumbdrive can contain one-time-pad data which both authenticates me and encrypts my transactions. And new ones can be postal mailed to me overnight for a few bucks, backed by the security of Federal postal fraud laws and police. That's the real promise of those little jobbies.
--
make install -not war
Fingergear sells Computer on a Stick (COS) that has a bootable Linux distro on a USB flash drive. The current version has about 30mb of writable space, some in a public area that can be read w/o booting linux and some in private fs area that is accessible after booting from the COS. The web site says 1GB and 2GB versions are coming soon. The OS on the current version is write-protected for security reasons and local hard-drives aren't accessible. http://www.fingergear.com/
Just USB drive would be stupid for security reasons.
I would be on cell phones with Video/keyboard/mouse/network connector.
Hotel provides monitor/keyboard/mouse and network cable.
When I'm leaving home, I just remove my data card from one of my computer's driver slots. The data card stores a complete image of my operating environment - the OS, all running applications and their data. When I remove it from the computer, the image is frozen. When I insert it again into a friend's computer using one of the free driver slots on it, it comes alive again (I first have to press a button on the monitor to switch to slot #2 which now hosts my card). The rendering process continues where it left off, as does the compilation of my project. I switch to my editor (on screen #3) and show my friend the problem I wanted to discuss with him.
The computers look like today's flat TFT monitors. They have attached I/O devices like keyboards, mice, background storage (so that data from the running image can be exported/backed up) and printers. They contain a processor, but no memory. The memory is on the data cards. The computers "drive" the data cards. The data cards contain the frozen values of the processor registers as they were when the card was last removed from a computer. This state info is loaded upon insertion.
The main problem with this approach would be how to manage everything (apps and their data) in RAM. This would require a safe in-memory filesystem or some other mechanism (OS API), by which apps could manage the data objects they create.
Here is what i found a few weeks ago - future is now. There is a project call blackdog. Here you can get an usb based embedded pc with linux on it. Power supply comes by usb. Check it. You'll plug the device in and it will take control over the host.
[1] http://www.projectblackdog.com/
the polarizer