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OSX To Feature Portable User Accounts?
eldavojohn writes "A new patent filed by Apple is causing speculation that OSX is soon to receive a new feature. From the article: '[the patent states] that the user account may be stored alongside general data storage or "other functionality". All of which seems to suggest that at some time soon we may be able to load our user accounts onto an iPod, hard drive or USB keydrive and take them wherever we go.'"
So, ideally this would be part of a uber road warrior ultraportable solution rather than an addition to a USB drive or iPod. Since the demise of the 12in Powerbook G4, many of us have had to shlep around larger form factors (15in Powerbooks/Macbook Pros) that are a bit harder to deal with on planes, trains and such.
I would hope for a little tablet much like the Newton, but running a full version of OS X and given the costs of flash drives, this may in fact be possible at 32 to 64GBs in size which would make for a usable battery life as well. Travel is difficult enough and for really long flights (international ones), battery life simply does not cut it, even with the new MacBooks. And even if you did have a power outlet in your seat, they are incompatible with the current magnetic and oh so cool MacBook power systems.
Having something like this that one could back up photographs to, give talks from, check email and calendar and address books, read ebooks and mark up pdf documents, be able to link via Bluetooth to your cellular phone and such would all be possible in a small form factor that one would not necessarily want/need the ability to run big apps like Photoshop on.
And when the trip is over, you plug into your desktop at home and automagically have everything sync up.
Oh, please... oh, please... oh, please.... Come on Steve! You and I have talked about this going back..... what, years now! The technology is there, the market is there, all the pieces are in place.
Visit Jonesblog and say hello.
Maybe for movies the studios are demanding only the paying user can view on their iPod - so movie downloads will be tied to a user account on each device.
This was actually once promised and even advertised as part of 10.3 "Panther" and then was inexplicably removed. Here was the marketing blurb:
Home away from home
Ever thought you could carry your home in the palm of your hands or in your pocket? You can. Panther's Home on iPod feature lets you store your home directory - files, folders, apps - on your iPod (or any FireWire hard drive) and take it with you wherever you go. When you find yourself near a Panther-equipped Mac, just plug in the iPod, log in, and you're "home," no matter where you happen to be. And when you return to your home computer, you can synchronize any changes you've made to your files by using File Sync, which automatically updates offline changes to your home directory.
Mac Rumors has some of the history.
... to turn on a new business model. I am pretty sure that Apple is waiting for two things before they release this feature. First, next generation EFI based PCs and second for 8GB flash memory to come down in pricing.
This way, you could safely run OS X off the portable device (mini-hard drives in iPods are not meant to take repeated read/writes...). Apple will then make a business of selling a 'home to go' device that you can take with you and plug into any next gen PC. Voila! Instant access to all your Apps and files.
This way they can make up any lost sales of OS X/Mac by selling us a portable device.
-S
You may want to consider that the problem is more subtle than that.
Just because you have your home directory on an iPod connected to a foreign Mac doesn't mean that you can authenticate and log in. Wouldn't it be interesting if you could have, in your home directory, credentials signed by a trustee that you could use to log in to any system, with your access limited to writing to public areas or your own home directory. Furthermore, encrypt that image on the iPod so that it can't be accessed unless you authenticate successfully. I'm not sure what the scope of the invention is, since I refuse to read patents or patent applications, but it might be a great solution to a tough problem. It also has implications for DRM licensing schemes -- licenses that apply to the user, not the computer.
I know sarcasm is like breathing after a few years on slashdot, but this might actually be an interesting invention. We'll have to wait and see.
Liberty you never use is liberty you lose.
I think the idea here is that the home directory is mirrored on the internal hard disk AND an external device of some kind. Then again, I think InterMezzo has prior art on that. So this may seem like a novel idea for your average PC user, but it's not novel enough to warrant a patent.
Of course, it's not like the USPTO hasn't ever issued a patent on something that should never have been patentable...
I used to have an external SCSI HD that I booted from on my mac. Back then I could plug it in to any Mac and boot to my Desktop with all my software I thought that was so awsome. Someone had a boot problen or what ever I just plugged in my HD booted then fixed it.
I life was so easy then
http://Lenny.com
Interestingly enough, this is almost identical to the system I implemented for using USB flash drives as authentication tokens as my MSc thesis. I might put up the PDF of the project up if people are interested.
It would be fairly simple to create a PAM module and daemon that, when detecting a USB device with certain information on it (say a passwd file), could mount that disk in /home/thatuser (overriding file permissions so that all items are owned by that user and nodev, nosuid), and allow that user to log in. It would not take any more modifications than that to make any Linux or BSD system be capable of doing roaming profiles on a removable drive. Quick, someone implement it!
Ugh I hate these nonsense emails.
So much crap in this one I don't even know how much the V14gr4 is...
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