Microsoft & SanDisk To Provide Desktop on Thumb Drive

Jesus Christ writes "An Information Week article reports that Microsoft is teaming up with SanDisk to provide users a complete image of their desktops in their pockets, allowing them access not only to their data...but also their applications and user interface setup while on the go. 'The companies plan to add a security layer to the offering using SanDisk's TrustedFlash security and digital rights management technology. The effort will elevate "simple flash storage to a whole new level of customer benefit," said Will Poole, corporate VP for Microsoft's Market Expansion Group. Microsoft also plans to seek out third party-hardware developers to support the initiative, the company said. As part of the plan, SanDisk will phase out its U3 technology, which adds some smart features to USB devices. Independent software developers that have created U3-compatible applications will be offered help migrating their products to the new technology, which has yet to be named.'"

Comments

TrustedFlash security?

[mangu]

Why do I keep seeing "DRM" in this?

Funny, nowadays anything that has "trusted" in it seems to me like something I have to distrust...

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

Euphemisms mangle language.

I was just having a discussion the other day about the word "fantastic". These days it means "great" or "wonderful", but I have been informed that the century before last it meant "unlikely".

This was because it meant "fantasy-astic", in other words, "unrealistic".

This use of the word, "trusted" is seeming to me to be meaning "inflexible" or simply "restricted in action".

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[aichpvee]

Fantastic still does mean that, you just don't see it in that context as often. But I think you're mischaracterizing a bit when you say it means "great." It means great in the same way as if you say something is "unbelievably good!" It's less a new definition and more hyperbolic slang.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[Anonymous Coward]

Trusted computing isn't about providing an environment you, the user can trust. It is about providing an environment copyright holders can trust you to have.

Like the Soviet Russia jokes, only real.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[Hatta]

Funny, nowadays anything that has "trusted" in it seems to me like something I have to distrust...

This has always been true, whenever someone says "trust me" you know they're up to no good. I guess if they were trustworthy, they wouldn't have to say so.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[Nimey]

In Soviet Russia, computer trusts YOU!

Damn, now I hate myself for succumbing to that temptation.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

Hmm, I will agree with you one this.

Another example: "awesome" of course still means awe-inspiring. Thus a person may call a spectacular tragedy "awesome", even though the most common, spoken usage means "great".

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[Skapare]

It's like any sales pitch. If they have to tell you it's trusted, it obviously must not be.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[kodomo]

some kind of usb key perhaps... it's already used for signing or licencing... although it can be used so nobody else can access to you private data in case you lost the flash drive.

In any case, this can be a good thing. In case your pc die... you just go to another one, and voila! all your software and data redy to go again... meantime you can fix the other one.

A really movile profile, with all your goodies in there... The only problem i think it's the flash memory speed... it really suck

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[ricera10]

It's because the laws of slashdot dictate that if any story is related to the unholy triangle (M$, DRM (DCE), MAFIAA), it must include a reference to another member of it

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[cheater512]

Plus when Microsoft starts saying it, you know to run away in the opposite direction.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[ChameleonDave]

Thus a person may call a spectacular tragedy "awesome", even though the most common, spoken usage means "great". They may speak like that on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, but no one I know uses "awesome" to mean anything but "awe-inspiring".

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[noidentity]

Trusted here of course means that the device does not trust you, the buyer. But you have to trust the device if you want to use it, even though it's not at all worthy of it.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[noidentity]

Another misused word is "incredible".

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[Kuciwalker]

The current use of "trusted" actually makes a certain amount of sense. Trusted computing, for instance, derives from the idea of a trusted system (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trusted_system):

"In the security engineering subspecialty of computer science, a trusted system is a system that is relied upon to a specified extent to enforce a specified security policy. As such, a trusted system is one which failure may break a specified security policy."

The idea is that by including some sort of trusted hardware (with its own encryption key) in a computer or system, the server can trust that the client will behave in a certain way. In practice this is often used to enforce DRM, but is also useful in other situations where you want to restrict the abilities of the user (e.g. workstations in a corporation). The technology is actually a fairly interesting application of cryptography and information theory.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[Inner_Child]

And of course, one of the most misused words ever, "inconceivable".

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[CastrTroy]

My favourite example of this is "terrific". The root word is terror. You still here some people (British?) use it to describe things like "a terrific storm". However, most people use it as a positive word.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[bhiestand]

Thus a person may call a spectacular tragedy "awesome", even though the most common, spoken usage means "great". They may speak like that on Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure, but no one I know uses "awesome" to mean anything but "awe-inspiring". I raise you five anecdote points. I know many people who use the term to mean "great" instead of "awe-inspiring".

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[Dachannien]

This is like putting a chocolate coating on a cyanide pill. Go ahead, eat it, it tastes great!

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[ChameleonDave]

I know many people who use the term to mean "great" instead of "awe-inspiring". I don't doubt you. But you're probably from the land of Bill and Ted.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[indiechild]

I had the darnest time with this word when I was learning English as a primary school kid. My teacher used to give me stamps which said "Terrific!" on them, but when I looked it up in the dictionary the definitions there really confused me -- no mention was made of "terrific" in a positive context.

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[raphae]

As someone who knows the difficulties of learning a foreign language, I sympathize with you regarding what happened. But it is also extremely funny considering that with this particular word the two meanings are so completely opposite one another. I can only imagine the confusion you must have initially felt after looking up the definition!

Re: TrustedFlash security?

[Dolda2000]

In this particular (let me repeat that: "this particular") case, though, that seems arguable. Of course, I don't actually know what they are intending to do (no, I haven't RTFA yet :), but I would be guessing that the DRM, in this case, works in the favor of the actual user, against the owner of the computer.

Mind you, of course, that working in the favor of the user isn't enough to make it a good thing. First of all, I would argue that it merely puts the user in a false sense of security, since any DRM system is breakable. Second, it would work against the public in general, seeing how Microsoft is going to use it to lock users into their particular DRM system. Good luck reading that desktop stick of yours on a computer not running Windows. Third, it also works against the public in general, since it might, potentially, be a drive for DRM, which is bad.

To make your post more specific, Trusted Computing isn't not about creating an environment that the user can trust, but rather isn't about creating an environment that the owner of the computer cannot trust. The user and the computer owner aren't always the same person -- which is also why I suspect that corporate purchasers might not come to love DRM either...

Re:TrustedFlash security?

[iminplaya]

It is about providing an environment copyright holders can trust you to have.

Yep

Re:Let me guess

[ClaraBow]

I RTFA, it will support XP. I jumped the gun!

Re:Let me guess

[Anarchysoft]

Microsoft said it plans to add support for the technology into its Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems. Needless to say, GNU/Linux, etc has ran beautifully on removable media for years. I'm surprised MS didn't go for a specialized Windows CE.

Remember the good old days...

[TheLazySci-FiAuthor]

...when a program was a single executable file?

And by "file" I mean made of manila paper, and by "executable" I mean with holes punched in it.

Seriously though, why aren't most modern desktop applications portable by design?

Re:Remember the good old days...

[ModernGeek]

I'll be the first to mention that they normally are on the Macintosh. I could make a joke about modern - mac and legacy - windows, but I won't go that far.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[Anarchysoft]

...when a program was a single executable file? I hope those weren't the good old days when applications came with their own slew of device drivers (graphics, audio, scanners, mice, etc.) Especially on old XT/AT hardware. Those were the days... ;)

Re:Remember the good old days...

[dvice_null]

> Seriously though, why aren't most modern desktop applications portable by design?

I studied programming for about 4 years. Only somewhat relative courses to portability were courses about Java and PHP. After the school I'm quite amazed that there was nothing about wxWidgets, or SDL or any other library that allows programmers to create portable applications easily, and still maintain the look of the native application.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[Anarchysoft]

I studied programming for about 4 years. Only somewhat relative courses to portability were courses about Java and PHP. After the school I'm quite amazed that there was nothing about wxWidgets, or SDL or any other library that allows programmers to create portable applications easily, and still maintain the look of the native application. It seems strange that programming classes would generally be platform specific. Even if a person had some sworn allegiance to an OS, that OS will almost certainly (A LOT) change over the course of their career. Learning how to write programs in general, portable ways is very useful. On the other hand, it's good to go all the way wiht the limitations of a machine/OS now and then! :)

Re:Remember the good old days...

[vux984]

On the other hand, it's good to go all the way wiht the limitations of a machine/OS now and then! :)

Agreed.

But I'm not sure why my RSS reader needs to be skinnable, semitransparent, dockable to other windows, resident in my tray with an animated popup notification, with a media player widget built in, and hooking into task manager to change the process name to show the currently playing track, finally adding an extra button to every window next to minimize so that I can tweak its settings from anywhere.

For too many programmers out there test the limitations of an OS utterly needlessly.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[nschubach]

Agreed. Just give me an RSS reader object that I can drag and drop into whatever container object I so desire...

Re:Remember the good old days...

[N3Roaster]

That was previously the case on the Macintosh where the executable typically had everything it needed in the resource fork of the file, but these days the executable file is buried in a folder with a .app filename extension and the folder also contains graphics and other resources that normally would have been in the resource fork or as separate files somewhere else. It's a nice solution, but the default shell Apple provides isn't as smart as the Finder when dealing with these, so running graphical applications from the command line isn't nearly as nice as it should be (you can't just add /Applications to $PATH and say, Preview list_of_files). Still, that's much nicer than the application being an executable file, a few dozen DLLs scattered throughout the system, and a couple hundred registry entries. (On a related note, why do I think I've heard about this already being done with Linux without the DRM?)

Re:Remember the good old days...

[maxume]

Some lunatic decided that more than one person should be able to make customizations on a computer, and that it should be as seamless as possible. Then a bunch of idiots implemented it poorly(Of course, Windows XP implements it just fine, but a lot of software makes sure to break it, so no one twist my words in that direction please).

Re:Remember the good old days...

[rm999]

Two reasons that I can think of:
A. It's harder to secure a program from privacy when it's portable to another computer. The registry allows them to tie a program to the computer - if you can put the program on a disk and then put it on another computer, it can now be pirated
B. A lot of programs use the same files as other programs. A common dll may be used in 20 different applications. Space can be saved if the programs take advantage of some common location for these shared files, installing only if they don't already exist. It seems like this requires applications to be tied onto a computer.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[rm999]

Well, that may have been the original reason - my "c:\program files\common files" folder is about 250 megs, which is still a decent amount on my 30 gig laptop hard drive.

I personally hate they way things are not portable, and have been trying to figure it out myself for some time. I wish MSFT would just get rid of the registry

Re:Remember the good old days...

[Rufty]

Just "open /Applications/FooBarBaz.app" What's so hard about that?

Re:Remember the good old days...

[quantum bit]

(Of course, Windows XP implements it just fine, but a lot of software makes sure to break it, so no one twist my words in that direction please)

Well, in general it's implemented okay, but Windows does have a few pretty stupid design choices. Example: the default web browser being a system-wide setting rather than a per-user one (I think they finally fixed that in Vista, sort of).

The worst is file associations. There's three places they could be set: the system-wide Classes key, the per-user Classes key, and HKCU\Software\Microsoft\Windows\CurrentVersion\Exp lorer\FileExts.

The two Classes keys are actually a pretty decent idea -- you have the system one, then you have the per-user one that overlays that. When you look at HKEY_CLASSES_ROOT what you actually see is the result of that overlay. Any user settings override the system ones. Unfortunately, they screwed up in that the shell doesn't know how to set per-user file associations, so the nifty per-user Classes key goes almost completely unused unless you edit it by hand. How it _should_ have worked would be for writes to HKCR to get redirected to your user one, especially if you don't have permissions to modify the system one.

To top it off, in order to work around the "problem", the Explorer shell keeps its own set of file associations on a per-user basis. When you do "always open with this application", it sets it in Explorer's private association list (but not in either of the Classes keys), so it seems to work at first until some other program tries to open/edit that file type and you get the old association instead. Stupid, stupid. Classic case of the UI team not communicating with the kernel and core OS teams.

That being said, I agree that the majority of the issues are the result of application design that still assumes the Windows 95 scheme of all applications having access to everything and no user-specific settings.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[N3Roaster]

It isn't hard, but it isn't elegant. If I want to open a particular program, I should be able to just type the name of the program rather than pass the program name as an argument to another program (open). In my Preview example, the better solution would be to just type open list_of_files and let open figure out for itself that Preview is the right program to use, but that only works if Preview is the application associated with with the files I want opened.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[Bacon Bits]

Because you have two options:
1. Statically link libraries. You 4 MB program is now 400 MB.
2. Require an installer to check and configure the environment for the program.

Re-usability of code, one of the requirements for significantly complex systems, requires that the program assume things about *other* programs on the system.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[N3Roaster]

Between your comment about .app's not being recognized by bash and the fact that I can't CD into a EXT2 FS alias, I think I've finally been tipped into modding bash to include that capability on the Mac. Any other requests for bash while I'm at it?

Unless you're an Apple employee or an upsteam source for them and this will magically show up in a future update, shoot me an email when it's ready for beta testing. Source tarballs are fine.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[zsau]

(On a related note, why do I think I've heard about this already being done with Linux without the DRM?)

I'm not entirely sure I know what you're referring to, but if you're referring to fully containing applications in a single relocatable folder and/or shell integration thereof, there's two different free options for this on GNU/Linux and other *nix-like operating systems that I'm aware of.

Firstly, there's GNUStep, which is basically the same as Mac OS X in this regard, being another NeXTSTEP derivative. In terms of shell integration, the only difference that I know of is that "open" is instead named "openapp" (and the default paths are different).

Secondly (and this is the method I use), there's the ROX Desktop, which is based on RISC OS, a desktop OS that used to be made by Acorn in England. If you have an executable file named "AppRun" in a folder, it recognises that folder as executable. There's a patch for bash and a script for zsh that lets them recognise these in your PATH and run them simply by typing the folder name. If you run "rox (arg)", then ROX runs (arg) the same way it would've if you'd clicked on it in a Filer window (i.e. running AppDirs, or opening files with their default association). This is a bit different from Mac's "open" tho, because it has nothing like a search path.

In addition, there's GoboLinux, a distribution which contains all the packages in discrete folders, but they're not, to my knowledge, relocatable. I've never used GoboLinux. I think its package manager automatically symlinks the binaries to a common directory. And everyone's favorite vaporware, the GNU OS, is meant to use a similar albeit more automatic method, just as soon as a stable version of the GNU Hurd is released which I'm sure will be Real Soon Now.

Of course, no method has any DRM, and in fact ROX AppDirs usually contain the source and will (try to) automagically compile it if it doesn't contain a binary for your platform.

Re: Remember the good old days...

[Dolda2000]

I don't really understand the App Folder system either, though. Why not just `ar' those resources together, and put in a separate ELF section of the executable? That way it would be mapped into core as part of the exec call, and the programmer could access the resources through merely a pointer, without even needing to do explicit I/O (though the resources would be demand-loaded by the kernel). It's not as though it would even be hard.

I know OSX doesn't use ELF, but whatever it uses (isn't it COFF?) surely must support the same thing, right?

Re:Remember the good old days...

[GiMP]

2. Between your comment about .app's not being recognized by bash and the fact that I can't CD into a EXT2 FS alias, I think I've finally been tipped into modding bash to include that capability on the Mac. Any other requests for bash while I'm at it?

What do you mean that .app's aren't recognized by bash? They're recognized. Bash's built-in 'echo *' can see into it fine, and bash's built-in 'cd' can change directory into the .app. If you want to make them executable, that isn't a job for bash. What you *can* do with bash is edit /etc/completion, if your tab-completion for these files isn't working as you expect.

If you want to make .app directories executable, you're looking at a kernel hack. Which, luckily, the OSX kernel (darwin) is open source, so this could be facilitated by a determined hacker.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[Ravnen]

Yes, and as far as I know, Mac OS X hasn't any solution to this problem. Apple's system architects have simply decided to sacrifice some degree of code sharing for the ability to encapsulate applications, to some extent, although the key system libraries are still shared. The disadvantages are things like longer application startup times and higher resource requirements for a given feature set, but it can at least be argued that modern hardware makes these downsides less important than they were, for example, in the 1990s.

Beyond code sharing, if you assume multiple users, you also have to separate the user's data, preferences, etc. from the application. This is the reason for per-user resource files on Unix-like systems and the per-user registry hives on Windows. It's also generally a good idea to separate per-machine data and settings from applications, hence per-machine resource files on Unix and the per-machine registry hive on Windows.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[Chelloveck]

It isn't hard, but it isn't elegant. If I want to open a particular program, I should be able to just type the name of the program rather than pass the program name as an argument to another program (open). In my Preview example, the better solution would be to just type open list_of_files and let open figure out for itself that Preview is the right program to use, but that only works if Preview is the application associated with with the files I want opened.

This method is, of course, designed to be more elegant than what you're used to. You don't have to know which program handles a particular type of data file, you just "open the_file" and let the system figure it out. "Open", in effect, becomes the Universal Application.

Now, I don't necessarily agree with this, but that's the rationale. And from one perspective it is more elegant. But folks like you and I who use the command line aren't completely comfortable with it, especially considering that we might want to open any given file type with a number of different apps depending on what we want to do with it. The whole file-association thing starts to hinder rather than help at that point. "No, dammit, I don't want PhotoShop! I just want to look at it, not change it!" "No, dammit, I don't want Preview! I want to edit it now, not just look at it!"

You can get bash to treat .app directories as programs, though.

alias Preview='open -a Preview'

It'd probably take about 5 minutes to write a script that iterates through /Applications and builds a similar alias for each .app. Source that from your .bashrc and you've got exactly what you asked for.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[soliptic]

Which RSS reader is that? In the unlikely event that I ever feel the need to install such a piece of software, I want to make sure I don't pick that one.

Re:Remember the good old days...

[gozar]

It's a nice solution, but the default shell Apple provides isn't as smart as the Finder when dealing with these, so running graphical applications from the command line isn't nearly as nice as it should be (you can't just add /Applications to $PATH and say, Preview list_of_files).

You can use the open command, so for example you can type: open -a Preview somefile.pdf

And Preview will open with that file. You can also just use: open somefile.pdf

And whatever application is associated with the file will launch.

Been There, Done That

[spotter]

We've done this on Linux, including supporting checkpointing the state (very quick, its under a second ignoring writeback time, which is a function of the device one wants to use) so one can migrate to a different machine where one can restart it.

http://www.ncl.cs.columbia.edu/publications/compsa c2006_fordist.pdf

Re:Been There, Done That

[Mahjub Sa'aden]

What I didn't see from the article was whether or not this is a bootable OS type thing, or just a collection of portable applications. Which already exist, though most of them are open source, and thus not particularly suited to Microsoft's vision of the future, I suppose.

If there was a way to dump a select bit of your desktop data and sync it back up with your home comp, that would be cool. I'd want one of those, even if it wasn't bootable.

Re:Been There, Done That

[aichpvee]

You could use udev to mount your USB drive to /home/[username] under Linux.

Re:Been There, Done That

[spotter]

Basically, you want a nicer version of coda.

Re:Been There, Done That

[Lumpy]

Hell I've been there with windows for at least 3 years now.

BartPE - you can install BartPE live boot CD's onto a thumb drive. It works but is far less useful than a CD because the number of pc's the boot from a USB device are incredibly small compared to those that boot from a CD.

Portable Apps

[flyingfsck]

It looks to me like MS finally caught on to Portable Applications and BartPE bootable CDs or USB sticks.

Damn Small Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is that oxymoronic?

Or just moronic?

I give up.

Re:Damn Small Windows?

[Tuoqui]

Both...

But we all know the only thing that can shrink Windows that much would be a black hole.

Why is this so hard?

[nine-times]

Is it just the BIOS that gets in the way? I've been running OSX from external drives for years now, and it makes a whole lot of recovery and imaging tasks unbelievably easier, and I keep wondering, why the hell does Microsoft have to make it so difficult?

Even with Linux, you can't just run your normal Linux install and point it towards an external drive and have that work. You have to do extra tricks that are... tricky.

So really, is it a problem with the BIOS? Can't we just fix whatever it is and be done with this problem?

Re:Why is this so hard?

[DaftWally]

Maybe its harder to get linux to boot from an external hdd, but can you run OS X from a CD?

Your turn.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[MoxFulder]

Yes, it's largely a BIOS problem. BIOS is a freaking travesty of junk 20-year-old code zealously protected by a evil, backward-looking cabal of motherboard and BIOS vendors. It's slow and nonstandardized and often buggy, and it needlessly initializes lots of hardware that's going to be reinitialized by the operating system anyway. Of course, it would be great if we were all running LinuxBIOS, like the OLPC is. It can go from power-on to kernel load in about 1 second, and is completely modular and customizable. Oh, and it can boot Windows and xBSD and probably OSX too. But unfortunately, the chipset and motherboard vendors mostly don't release their docs, so the odds that your desktop mobo is supported by LinuxBIOS are sadly very small.

All that being said... with modern Linux kernels (2.6.1+ I believe) you can mount partitions based on the UUIDs stored in the partition table (e.g. 8F3B6029A471238F), rather than by what particular interface BIOS sez they're connected to (e.g. /dev/sdg1 or /dev/hda1). This goes a long way to making it easy to install Linux distros on portable drives.

With Ubuntu Edgy or Feisty, you *can* simply install Linux to a USB hard disk (I've done it without a hitch). It will look for the hard disk partitions based on UUID rather than /dev/whatever, so it won't get confused when you move it from computer to computer. Unfortunately you will still have to figure out how to make each computer boot from USB in the first place, because BIOS IS SO FREAKING GHETTO!

Re:Why is this so hard?

[nine-times]

Maybe its harder to get linux to boot from an external hdd, but can you run OS X from a CD?

As a matter of fact, you can. But why bother when you can install it on a USB drive so easily?

Re:Why is this so hard?

[nine-times]

And BTW, I wasn't attempting to badmouth Linux, which could probably have been noted from my repeated attempts to blame the BIOS. I suspect that part of the reason it's easy to install OSX on external drives is that Apple doesn't deal with Linux anymore.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[nine-times]

Apple doesn't deal with Linux anymore.

CORRECTION: Apple doesn't deal with BIOS anymore. They've been using OpenFirmware and now EFI.

Re:Why is this so hard?

[maxume]

Because I don't like giving me usb drives to other people.

Re: Why is this so hard?

[Dolda2000]

I don't think it has anything to do with the BIOS, or booting at all. It isn't all that clear from the article, but I would think that this idea is merely that one carries one's home directory on a USB stick, not the entire operating system. Then, when you get to a computer running Windows, you can insert that USB stick and use it to log on, without halting the running system.

A replacement to U3?

[micah_hainline]

As part of the plan, SanDisk will phase out its U3 technology, which adds some smart features to USB devices.

The idea of carrying your "desktop" on a USB key is a solid one, and as the size of flash drives goes up and cost goes down it starts to make practical sense. If the U3 technology is any indication however, the idea still has a long way to go. U3 is clunky and invasive, and Microsoft and Sandisk will have to do a lot better than Sandisk has been able to do thus far to see the product become viable. Microsoft's forays into this area have been unimpressive as well. Briefcase anyone?

As technology improves, it will be interesting to see if someone one-ups this idea and provides the entire operating system in something closer to an Ubuntu Live CD.

Re:A replacement to U3?

[nine-times]

As technology improves, it will be interesting to see if someone one-ups this idea and provides the entire operating system in something closer to an Ubuntu Live CD.

Everyone is doing this already. Ok... everyone except Microsoft. You've been able to run a complete version of Linux or OSX off of a USB drive for a while now.

Re:A replacement to U3?

[gbjbaanb]

Maybe MS doesn't support it directly

but... http://tomshardware.co.uk/2005/09/09/windows_in_yo ur_pocket/ or http://www.sureboot.com/ or http://articles.techrepublic.com.com/5100-6346-592 8902.html

Here's the reason you can't install Windows directly on the USB drive... turns out its all to do with pageable kernels (that OSX and Linux don't support)

Re:A replacement to U3?

[rapidweather]

The Damn Small Linux people have been selling a USB drive that one can run within Windows XP:
http://www.damnsmalllinux.org/usb-qemu.html
The cost is $65.00 plus shipping, but I think they also offer everything for the do-it-yourselfer to
make one of these on your own USB drive.
Booting an OS off a USB drive requires a bios (newer computers) that can be set to look to the USB ports for a bootable OS first. Most machines still around today can easily be set to boot off a CDROM, that's the way all livecd linux OS's do it. Something like a Dell Inspiron 1505 laptop is new enough to boot from a USB drive, one OS that comes to mind is the Kanotix CPX Mini, which when the OS comes up, has an icon on the desktop to start the USB installer. I have a CD of it, but I regret to say that the website and download link is now dead.
There may be others that have an installer to USB drive, Damn Small being the most reliable to work with, since they have an active support forum.
I don't plan on doing anything like that with my livecd linux, because I focus on older computers, those that ran Windows 98, that now need a secure linux system to get some more useful life from them. All of my computers are in that category. 128 MB of RAM is enough. None of these have BIOS that can boot off USB.

I do have an Insprion 1505 coming, Dell takes nearly 3 weeks now to build one, and will run Rapidweather Remaster of Knoppix Linux (See screenshots, below) on it, with the "toram" cheatcode, since we will have 2GB of RAM. I'll have to use the network cable for broadband, I don't have a driver for the new Intel wireless setup in the 1505. I have run it on one other 1505, so I know it will boot up OK.

Re:A replacement to U3?

[lordtoran]

As technology improves, it will be interesting to see if someone one-ups this idea and provides the entire operating system in something closer to an Ubuntu Live CD. I don't know what planet you are from, because Mandriva has been offering a full-blown Linux on a USB stick for quite a while now.

Hmmmmmm sounds familiar

[zappepcs]

Windows on a stick? Yes, sounds familiar.... oh, sorry, that was 'shit on a stick'

Seriously though, I wonder what nick names will be found for this product?

Re:Hmmmmmm sounds familiar

[thrawn_aj]

Well, parent was a lot funnier than grade school grandparent :P. "4 funny". ZOMG o_O

U3, gen 2

[tverbeek]

I don't know whether to cheer that the U3 flash drives are going away, or to tremble in fear of what these new ones will do.

I manage college computer labs, and those damn U3 drives have been a recurring hassle. They try to auto-install software on every Windows machine they come into contact with, and require two drive letters (which doesn't work so well in an environment where several key letters are already in use). When used on a Mac, they mount an extra pseudo CD on the desktop, loaded with software that's obviously (but not to many students) utterly useless. If this is in any way an extension or "improvement" upon that, then my job is about to get even harder.

Re:U3, gen 2

[mooreBS]

U3 has a removal program available on their website. Available here: http://www.u3.com/uninstall/

Re:U3, gen 2

[tverbeek]

The problem isn't just how to get rid of the crapware, but how to prevent it from begging to install itself in the first place. I want the ability to erase the ROM. In my experience, people don't buy these U3 drives for the software; they buy them oblivious about it: because it was the first drive that caught their eye in the store, or because some salescritter told them it was "the best".

Re:U3, gen 2

[Rufty]

Doesn't yet come with a feature to autorun on 120 different machines every hour... Might as well let it install. Can't do any harm. (Does Sony do a rootkit stick yet?)

Re:U3, gen 2

[mooreBS]

the uninstaller completely removes any traces of u3 functionality.

Re:U3, gen 2

[Cervantes]

I concur, those things are a POS. I have the same problem... we have several mapped network drives, and they tend to not check if the drive letter is in use before they autoinstall. So I get calls of "I can't find it".
The first time i tried a U3 on my system, the autorun program hung, and then every time thereafter as well. Eventually I got sick of trying to troubleshoot it, and just nuked it.
If I were in a lab though... I'd have hot glue in all my USB ports, and one managed computer up front with a hub. "You want to use a USB stick? Sure, I'll just pop it in here, run a virus scan, and then map it as a network drive to your computer"
USB sticks (and other portable HDs) are a PITA for labs or managed environments. Autoruns, virii, pr0n, data stealing, etc etc etc.

And yes, yes, it's possible to uninstall the proggy... but that doesn't help when some schmuck buys a new stick down at the campus bookstore and wanders up and plugs it in. What's so wrong with just letting Windows do all the work, why do we need a fancy autorun that does nothing?

Re:U3, gen 2

[windex82]

Well, since it seems you have to allow users to use their flash drives so disabling USB ports is not the answer. Could you make a policy to not allow the installer to run? This article describes how to prevent executables from running based on various merits such as the hash value for the executable, certs, paths, or by zone.

Seems like a decent course of action. If people start complaining let them know the problem and that the drive if perfectly fine but you cannot allow the software to install it self on your institutions computers. Let them know where they can get a USB drive that works with the PC's without the message. If someone manages to defeat your attempts it should be easy to track down the user and warn them that their access to USB ports is coming close to being removed for circumventing your networks security.

Re:U3, gen 2

[sodaquad]

Unfortunately it doesn't, on a Mac at least. I cannot remove the extra volume, it appears to be hardwired, and it mounts every time on my Mac. There was nothing on the packaging to warn about this and when I took it back to the shop to complain they said it could not be removed and made out that it was a feature, not a bug. U3 is so annoying that I've stopped using the stick.

Re:U3, gen 2

[tverbeek]

USB sticks (and other portable HDs) are a PITA for labs or managed environments.

So are users, but it doesn't make any sense to ban those either. What kind of lab doesn't need removable media... other than maybe a web browser farm? Our students use our labs to create files, which they have to take with them when they leave. (Yes, they have some file server space, but that's not permanent storage and would simply delay the need for using removable media.) The use of flash drives, portable hard drives, etc. is the whole freakin' purpose of our computer labs.

Re:U3, gen 2

[darkwhite]

I manage college computer labs, and those damn U3 drives have been a recurring hassle. They wouldn't be if you managed to set your users' permissions correctly. I've seen dozens of "college computer labs", and not one of them would allow U3 to make any changes to the configuration.

Re:U3, gen 2

[Cutterman]

Personally I (and quite a few other people) actually LIKE the U3 system.

I use mostly Linux at home, but work in a MS environment. It's neat to be able to carry my apps and data around and the U3 system looks and feels polished (I agree about the pseudo CD drive, but it doesn't bother me).

In comparison the Portable Apps Suite is clunky and slow with a very so-so interface.

So MS is going to kill a neat little system and stuff in some terrible space-hogging DRM-ridden pig that I wouldn't dream of using...

Embrace and extend, embrace and extend...obviously there'll be no more U3 enabled apps.

Really fucking irritating!

The Cutter

Re:U3, gen 2

[callmevinny]

To stop any media from auto-installing, google for NoDriveTypeAutoRun. Review
the information and then run regedit and set every instance you find to the
value \xff. Reboot. Nothing (CD, usb, whatever) should ever autorun again.

I do this regularly on any windows system I own. Very handy.

Re:U3, gen 2

[Cervantes]

The problem isn't removable media, it's unfiltered removable media. Users just don't understand the problems that can come with the memory stick from home. I stand by the rest of my comment... no sticks in the machines, if you want to bring one in it gets scanned and linked from a machine up front, where the lab monitor sits. People can still take their stuff with them, this step just gives them one less way to fuck up the machines. (not that they won't find 99 others... damn users)

Re:U3, gen 2

[tverbeek]

Have you actually done this, or is this just fantasizing? When I was hired, the job description was not Bastard Lab Operator From Hell, nor was I given a staff of 40FTE to cover all of our labs during all of the hours they're open, so I've had to go with configurations that are actually convenient for students to get their work done without hand-holding. Setting up policies that discourage students from backing up their files regularly is not any way I'd want to run college labs. With good anti-malware software in place and restricted user accounts, I get by pretty well. It's just that this U3 crapware is a disruptive nuisance.

Re:U3, gen 2

[Cervantes]

Actually, I have done this before, admittedly I had enough staff to provide semi-reasonable coverage to all our labs, but we still locked down everything. We tried a good malware program, and even restricted user accounts, but we still ran into users doing stupid things, and it got to a point where the computers were too restricted to be useful (students need some flexibility, after all)

Eventually, we just took out the floppy drives, locked up the USB ports, set up network boot images to reimage the PCs if needed, and had the students give us a ring if they needed us to load one up. That coincided with a severe reduction in staff (well, they cut the staff, then said "figure out how to make it work") so I don't want to make any claims as to relative effectiveness... but at the end of the day it still worked.

Students, of course, had some network space for file backups, and it was pretty rare for us to turn away a usb stick or floppy (usually it was too infected to clean). And FTR, no, I wasn't exactly thrilled to be running a lab that way either... but it worked, computers stayed clean longer, and students were still satisfied with the service. All in all, for a crappy situation, it worked out rather well.

All this talk...

[bubba451]

and no one thinks it's interesting that the rapture is apparently imminent, and all that's relevant is Windows and thumb drives?

Re:All this talk...

[JordanL]

JC isn't here to stay yet, he's here for a brief visit cause pops decided that this development would be so disrupting to all his poor little geeks that they had to be warned. Poor JC had to log out of his Mac OS 23.19.3.2.0.4.5 box which was divine protection and come down to utter a warning to the non-believers.

in other news

[voislav98]

Microsoft has also announced they will start producing a revolutionary new device, enabling for much more efficient transport of goods. They are calling it the Microsoft Wheel.

Re:in other news

[aichpvee]

Don't you mean Microsoft Live! Wheel?

Re:in other news

[Delkster]

Not to mention that it's not only revolutionary but also revolving.

I have to say that I'm a little disappointed at Microsoft Wheel. I was expecting something really fresh and innovative, but it really just recycles the ideas found in previous Microsoft products. After all, a Windows CD will do about the same thing if you place an axis in the central whole.

Re:in other news

[fuego451]

I think most folks should wait at least until sp2-axle comes out.

No Wait! It's a Whole New Thing!

[norminator]

That's what I thought of when I saw this... but then I read:

The effort will elevate "simple flash storage to a whole new level of customer benefit," said Will Poole, corporate VP for Microsoft's Market Expansion Group.

So apparently it's a whole new, totally different thing that's just like how some current things work. Now that's innovation at work.

As a side note, and as someone already mentioned, I love how these innovative "whole new level" technologies rely on a "trusted" product. It may be trusted by MS, but I don't trust it, and my Damn Small Linux and Portable Apps don't need it!

Phase out its U3 technology

[nurb432]

Phase out industry standards and implement more proprietary ( and restricted ) 'standards'.

Disappointing

[Applekid]

I had visions of hitting a button on my thumb drive and getting a huge desktop folded out that I can rest things on. You know, my notebook, my feet, that 5th cup of coffee...

Re:Disappointing

[Grelli]

You're looking for the Portable Office the movie from Brain Donors

Re:Disappointing

[wkitchen]

My computer has a thing like that, but it only holds the cup of coffee.

Oops, sorry, you fail it.

[glindsey]

digital rights management technology

Ooooh, so close to not being crap!

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

It will only run on Vista.


I didn't realize that there was an 80G thumb drive

Licensing

[NoMoreFood]

It'll be interesting to see how application licensing works for something like this...

Already been done.

[Xoltri]

I'm pretty sure this is already possible. http://www.nu2.nu/pebuilder/

Re:Already been done.

[Xoltri]

Also see http://www.tomshardware.com/2005/09/09/windows_in_ your_pocket/

Re:Already been done.

[flyingfsck]

In the good old MS tradition, they are playing catch-up again, so they are allocating 500 programmers to do worse what one guy did years ago already.

Is that a desktop in your pocket, or...

[gcatullus]

Am I the only one who thought it odd that sandisk is going to give users "a complete image of their desktops in their pockets" I can't vouch for everyone else, but most assuredly there is no desktop in my pocket, and if there was I especially would not want an image of it.

Obligatory

[ObjetDart]

Hey, is that a desktop in your pocket, or are you just happy to see me?

Mojo?

[Niet3sche]

I fail to see how this is one iota different than Mojo. While I don't use Mojo, I've seen an online demo and it looks interesting - exactly, to my mind, what MS & Sandisk are promising in mid-2008.

Well...

[Kanuck]

It could be interesting, but at the same time, as pointed out, I don't see how it's really anything new. If they can manage to make it a bit easier for the user, though, by all means, give it a shot. *shrug*

Ripping off MojoPac.

[PxM]

So, they're pretty much trying to create a copy of MojoPac (wikipedia entry) and call it their own? MojoPac does the same thing for Windows, but it's not tied to a single physical device. The good part about this is that when I upgraded from an iPod to an external HD, I was able to take the entire setup with me without a problem. Unfortunately for MS, they are teaming up with a flash disk manufacturer rather than an HD maker. I found that trying to run any real app such as Office off a flash drive was impossibly slow. The reason I upgraded from my iPod to an custom external 7200rpm drive was for the sake of speed. The iPod was faster than running off a flash disk, but was still too slow for most things. Now, I can run all the important applications (e.g. GIMP, and WoW) without any noticeable performance hit off my external drive via MojoPac. It will be interesting to see how MS/Sandisk compare in terms of performance speed to MojoPac. Given how bad U3 was, I would be surprised if they can get it fast enough to run any games off of the device. Unless they can get enough performance off the flash disk to run Office, I don't see them as being a real competitor to MojoPac.

Re:Ripping off MojoPac.

[CritterNYC]

MojoPac only works on admin-level accounts on Windows XP. No guest or limited accounts (so no libraries, net cafes, offices, schools, hotel business centers, etc). No Windows 2000 or Vista. So, it's pretty limited.

Re:Ripping off MojoPac.

[justindnb]

I tried various portable solutions before settling with MojoPac. MojoPac is the greatest thing since sliced bread! I installed all of my applications to a 2.5" and take it to work with me in my back pocket everyday. It uses many pieces of the host's core operating system but it maintains it's own registry and user profile settings making it efficient and lightweight. Another cool thing about Mojopac is that you can maintain 2 simultaneous desktop sessions (host + mojopac) and use the Windows-S combo to instantly toggle between the two. Check out Mojopac, it's well worth it!

linux

[crAckZ]

mandriva has a 4gb flash that is this. http://www.mandriva.com/en/linux/node_3827 once again "someone" has taken a great linux product and claims it is new technology

bah

[blindd0t]

Just let me have "My Briefcase" so I can synchronize my files with my floppy disk. There's no way this would be more successful a feature than that!

Re:Let me guess

[eneville]

Microsoft said it plans to add support for the technology into its Windows XP and Windows Vista operating systems. Needless to say, GNU/Linux, etc has ran beautifully on removable media for years. I'm surprised MS didn't go for a specialized Windows CE. More to the point, things like FreeSCO (has nothing to do with santa cruz, it's more a pun on CISCO), runs from a single floppy disk. I've used it as a backup router for many years, it's perfect. Then there are things like DSL (damn small linux) that too runs as a desktop consuming some tiny amount of disk space, I forget the exact figure, but I think the desktop install is around 100-500meg.

Re:Let me guess

[toleraen]

64GB should be close enough

Yawn

[ArchieBunker]

Been there, done that. Ever use a Sunray terminal?

Multi-platforms would be nice

[Yvan256]

Since they plan on doing something from scratch (from what I understand), how about defining open standards that could be used on any platform?

I know some things can't be cross-platforms (executables, etc), others can (wallpaper, keyboard, mouse, language, international, email and IM settings, etc).

Put everything in pure (i.e., non-"Microsoft-enhanced") .xml files and keep it simple.

Seeing as Microsoft is part of this initiative, however, I predict that "cross-platform" will mean "Windows Vista and future versions of Windows".

Re:Multi-platforms would be nice

[peragrin]

that's just it, apps can be cross platform. java springs to mind. a fast java is also possible in a properly designed OS, and intergrated JVM.

Odd that first time I heard this I thought of Home on IPod that hits the Mac rumour mill with every "OS X" release.

it is possible. the hard part is that MSF will have to break compatibility with existing systems, something they avoid at all costs including security.

Re:Multi-platforms would be nice

[nschubach]

Since they plan on doing something from scratch (from what I understand), how about defining open standards that could be used on any platform?

Thanks, now I have to buy a new keyboard. Stupid coffee.

Desktop on Thumb Drive?

[BenSchuarmer]

If I'm used a thumb drive for my desk top, where would I put my coffee cup?

Re:Desktop on Thumb Drive?

[Larry Lightbulb]

In your CD tray like everyone else.

Re:Desktop on Thumb Drive?

[Pop69]

You put it on the retractable cup holder labeled CDRW same as everybody else !

Re:Let me guess

[Hognoxious]

close enough for anybody. FIFY.

It's BS

[Werrismys]

A live-USB that requires Winblows-side ware to actually work.

It will not be a portable run-anywhere-on-x86-liveUSB like Knoppix or DSL. It will be another useless piece of shit.

Re:It's BS

[wellingj]

Don't forget the part where every one will think it's awesome despite the fact that it's been done before and done better.
This really is just a response to all the Linux USB sticks running around. But of course MS has to lock you in so of
course whatever computer you boot on will need Windows.....more lame ass lock in to make more money in more lame ass ways.

Re:U3

[yaff]

You can remove U3. Look here.

I had to blitz a memory stick for my father-in-law. As I recall, this program hung while reformatting the stick. Scary, but it did work.

Another stupid idea for many reasons...

[Port-0]

Anyone remember losing or damaging a floppy disk? There's a reason why technologies have become "network centered." I'm betting it will be implemented in some stupid way like roaming profiles on a flash card. I can just see it now, you save your stuff, pull out your flash disk, and walk away... "Crap I forgot to 'eject' it." So now, All your data are belong to Xenu.

Re:Another stupid idea for many reasons...

[tepples]

I can just see it now, you save your stuff, pull out your flash disk, and walk away... "Crap I forgot to 'eject' it." That's the fault of FAT. FAT was designed for floppy drives, which put a big red light next to the eject button while the disk was spinning. It was also designed for operating systems that don't do the obscene amount of writeback caching that modern PC operating systems do. Other file systems have more robust support for surprise removal and surprise power loss.

Roaming profiles?

[IGnatius T Foobar]

So, they figured out a way to save their "Roaming Profiles" technology (which is horrendously unreliable) to a flash disk instead of just storing on the network. Big deal. The only "innovation" is the addition of DRM, which itself is predictable, and also a feature nobody wants.

Microsoft: providing you with Innovative Innovations (tm) to Microsoft SneakerNet (tm) at a time when everyone else is moving towards the "always-on" web profile.

Re:Let me guess

[Anonymous Coward]

a desktop consuming some tiny amount of disk space, I forget the exact figure, but I think the desktop install is around 100-500meg.

I must be getting old.

Why DRM is involved in this

[Skapare]

Suppose you have some DRM protected content which you can listen to or watch on your Windows computer. But if you do manage to copy that content over to your USB Flash drive and access it on another computer, like at work, you can't (if DRM is doing what the content owners expect of it). I suspect what the DRM in this new technology will be doing is allowing you to do just that ... listen to or watch your content on the computer you take your USB flash drive to. But it will most likely only let you listen/watch in just one place at a time. And that means to be able to listen/watch on your home computer again, you have to bring the USB flash drive back, and either leave the content on it, or "move" it back to the computer spin drive.

So maybe the existance of DRM in this isn't really making it any more evil ... unless you lose the USB flash drive.

If it weren't Microsoft...

[skelly33]

... I could see some solid imaginative and practical uses for this. A portable "disk" with mass storage available through mapping the likes of a gmail account, and license info for access to web-based applications that don't need to be stored on the disk itself. Reminds me of the memory card for a PlayStation that stores settings for a game and if you take the settings to another location where the game is also available, you're right back at home; with the web, the "game" (or application) should be available anywhere, so I'd buy that for a dollar. Unfortunately, my Microsoft senses are tingling and my guess would be that it's only going to support the MIcrosoft suite of offerings and that I am not willing to buy.

Requires Another License? What about VM?

[VGfort]

I'd like to have VMware on a stick. I cant see wanting to carry around a portable version of my computer with all my emails and stuff, I'm sure others might, but to me its too big a security risk.

Re:Requires Another License? What about VM?

[Anonymous Coward]

VMware already has this. It's called VMware ACE

http://www.vmware.com/products/ace/

Patent Infringement

[kseise]

Didn't someone already patent:
Sudo mount /dev/sda /home ?

Everything needs a name!

[frank_adrian314159]

... the new technology, which has yet to be named.

How about "Virus in a Box"?

Just Use PortableApps.com

[CritterNYC]

Just use PortableApps.com today. It has better compatibility, working with most Windows OSes (95, 98, Me, 2000, XP, 2003, Vista) as well as Wine under *nix. It's open so you can add any software that's already portable to it. And it's much more popular than U3 ever was, with over 20,000,000 apps downloaded. Plus it works from any drive you'd like: USB flash drive, iPod, portable hard drive, network share, etc... so you're never tied down.

It's a great idea, but not with MS involved..

[the_rajah]

I've been doing this for years, going clear back to toting a Zip disk around with me that had Eudora on it, executing the program from the disk along with carrying the files I'm working with at the time.

I'm doing this now with my sandisk titanium Cruzer 2 Gig. I've got my email client, Eudora, that runs just fine executing from the flash drive. My FTP client, leapftp is similar. Effectively, my "My Documents" resides on the flash drive, too. Then there's the suite of portable applications from http://portableapps.com/ I use portable Firefox, OO and Putty and have lots of room left over on the 2 Gig drive.

Since all that good stuff is on that little flash drive, I back it up automatically every night so if I lose it, it's no biggie. Encryption is a good idea..

I'm with the other comments about being nervous if MS is running the show. It's going to be more about restrictions than enabling.

Actually, I do

[WindBourne]

And after you have dropped a large stack of punch cards, you will realize that the good old days SUCKed. In addition, the card reader was monster. ppl like to remenese about the GOOD OLD DAYS, with out realizing that it is all relative. I like today. Just because MS and other companies are issues, does not mean that things are that bad.

Sure, Mepis on the Go is from 2005

[twitter]

Mepis used flash for your home directory, with optional encryption, in 2005. Here's the announcement. You booted off the CD and logged in as the "onthego" user. This is not as quick sounding as yours, but it's easy.

I'm not sure if they had it set up to install applications to the flash drive, but that should not be hard. It would also not be hard to make a custom boot CD with Debian.

Re:Sure, Mepis on the Go is from 2005

[spotter]

true, but think about a laptop, do you really want to shutdown every time you move somewhere? You want to be able to hibernate/suspend and then resume when you get to the new location. You don't want to worry about saving all your applications (if you were looking at cnn.com, you won't be able to get the same view when you return).

the idea of this project was to put the laptop metaphor into something you could store in your pocket.

think about it

[llamaxing]

Seriously though, why aren't most modern desktop applications portable by design?

Because your Desktop PC is not portable.

On a second thought, it's probably a more profitable situation not being portable by design. Take, for example, MS Office. Take my hypothetic situation:

I am busy working on Presentation X in my little cubicle. I decide to take my work back to the house. I did the project on MS PowerPoint and don't have a copy at home. Oh, no! Granted, the typical Slashdot user knows there are open source alternatives available to help with the problem, but computer-illiterate Joe does not. To him, the only way of getting a PowerPoint presentation running on his computer at home is to actually buy a copy of PowerPoint/Office. Joe has become another potential customer and, therefore, more money for the parent company can flow in -- in this case, it's Microsoft. And if he enjoys his Microsoft product, he might buy more products from the company leading to bigger profits.

Embrace and...

[Bearhouse]

"As part of the plan, SanDisk will phase out its U3 technology, which adds some smart features to USB devices."

Translation.
'Our U3 technology was crap, especially when compared to what was already out there' (see the other posts on this topic).

"Independent software developers that have created U3-compatible applications will be offered help migrating their products to the new technology, which has yet to be named..."

Translation.
'We're getting into bed with MS, who have a solid history of fucking-over third-party sw developers, and end-users, (the Zune episode springs to mind). So, eh, kiss your investment goodbye, suckers!

Meanwhile, go download the stand-alone versions of Firefox and Thunderbird if you want portability.

But if you're serious about your data, DO NOT mix the OS & application environment with user data on that key. My main PC has a separate partition for data on the disk. If the OS, (any one of them), gets screwed, no problem - reinstall. Data not affected...

Re:Embrace and...

[LarsG]

Our U3 technology was crap

What I don't get is why they thought enabling autorun on USB sticks was a good idea. Makes me remember the good old days of boot block viruses.

Re:Embrace and...

[Bearhouse]

Yup. What goes around...
Mind you, if it's your stick, hopefully you'll ensure it's not compromised...especially if you're booting your entire working environment from it.
Hopefully...

Re:U3

[Kenshin]

PNY?

You paid DOUBLE for something from PNY?

PNY is the cheapest crap that you can buy at TigerDirect. I've had a few experiences with their stuff and it failed every time.

Yay..more work for me!

[huckda]

and all of the other IT guys out there trying to secure workstations and networks...

Thanks SanDisk and Microsoft!

Re:portable apps anybody ?

[huckda]

Bueller...? Bueller....??? Bueller...?

Re:portable apps anybody ?

[etnoy]

Well, I have tried U3 and hated it, which is a shame on the otherwise very well crafted hardware. I got a 1gb SanDisk memory stick for my graduation, and it still is the best stick I have ever had (hardware-wise). The USB plug retracts nicely into the frame, making it smaller and more durable than most other sticks.

U3, though is (was) crap. Every time you inserted the stick into a Windows box things started to pop up on the screen, applications wanted to get installed etc. even if the device itself was empty. Every time I asked a colleague or friend to give me that 500Mb-file of his I gave him the stick, only discovering that he needed to fight dialog boxes first instead of getting down to business.

The only way to remove it was to run the U3 uninstaller which apparently only was released after a lot of pressure on SanDisk. The uninstaller removed all U3 garbage, the fact that the removal process is irreversible is nothing I care about.

I still recommend the SanDisk Cruzer Micro:s to my friends, but I always tell them to uninstall U3.

Thinstaller?

[Anonymous Coward]

A package called Portable Office 2007 showed up recently on Usenet. Used some product called "thinstaller" that wrappered/VMed an Office 2007 install into some standalone exes. The archive was 200 meg. It extracted to 520 Meg. It offered word, excel, access, and powerpoint. Access didn't run in my brief testing and it wasn't integrated into explorer, but it required no registry access and I suspect it wouldn't be exploitable like a fully-integrated install would be. All other elements seemed to work fine for my office needs sans outlook which is perfectly fine in it's 2003 edition.

MS should buy thinstaller or put office inside wow instances or something similar. I love the idea of single exe standalone apps that install with simple directory copies. I've taken to installing some app sets into VMware as many installs (MS is the worse) dump tons of crap/startups into my nice clean systems. A thinstaller type approach would make things easier.

Re:Thinstaller?

[Ciaran_H]

Looking at a quick Google search, Thinstaller appears to be adware.

Re:Let me guess

[ATMD]

Heh, I'm only 19 and my first computer had both an excellent GUI and a mere 20mb hard drive.

(Mac SE :)

Nothing New

[i_wanna_be_a_scienti]

This isn't anything new. I've been able to do it for linux since i've started. Heck, i carry two around - one with DSL installed, and another with all of my pref/files for ubuntu

Mandriva

[laddiebuck]

Mandriva (then Mandrake) did this years ago, teaming up with LaCie to provide 40GB USB desktops, complete with boot CDs for systems that couldn't boot from USB.

U3 Uninstaller

[localroger]

I did not know what U3 was when I got my 512 MB SanDisk, which I got simply because it was the cheapest per MB available at the time. When I plugged it in I noticed that it wanted to install a bunch of garbage. So I unplugged it, held shift down, plugged it back in, and watched it install itself as a normal flash drive. I deleted all the pre-existing crap on the drive, and never had another problem with it.

Re:U3 Uninstaller

[Vexorian]

It is not the case for all of them, my Kingston drive kept the U3 stuff in the firmware and I had to download http://www.u3.com/uninstall/ to get rid of it.

mount

[normuser]

Um, mounting a portable drive over a default home directory is nothing new.

Games?

[dedazo]

M$ has played the same sorts of games with BIOS

Really? Has the BIOS spec changed at all since the mid-90s? Because you can still download the APM BIOS spec from them, among other things.

Or are you referring to EFI? AFAIK Phoenix was offering a DRM BIOS as early as 2004-2005 but apparently no one bought into it, or at least I've yet to see a standard white box PC with a BIOS like that.

So what "games" are you referring to? And what does "M$ damaged hardware" mean?

you are hard pressed to make the average PC boot off anything but a CD or hard drive.

I wouldn't go as far as comparing them to the power of a Linux Live CD, but there are certainly ways to create stripped-down but usable bootable Windows XP images with lots of tools and whatnot. For example, BartPE. Even Microsoft will give you one, though I think you need to be an OEM for that one, which obviously makes it far less useful.

but it's still easier to sftp to your home box.

I'll be sure to ask my employer to open up the firewall to I can "sftp" into my home box. That sounds a lot easier than an automated ~/ mount from a four-inch thumbdrive I can carry around in my pocket.

Lets get honest here....

[3seas]

... MS with is proprietary mindset and evidence of consumer abuse via countless anti-trust cases can't possibly do better than what open source can do here. And lets not forget that USB ram sticks are getting cheaper and larger in storage ability.. and faster access.

With the ability of hardware today to boot from a USB, what is the point of doing only half the job (what MS is proposing) when you can have the the whole system on the stick, OS included.

MS is so far behind on this that their ball and chain methodologies won't very well move forward anywhere near as fast as open source already has.

So what is the point of taking your desktop with you when you can take your whole software system with you on a stick?

Excellent news ! Huge thumb drives at last !!!

[TractorBarry]

Well my current "Desktops" worth of data is (approx) 170 Gb (lots of audio files in "full fat" WAV format)

So if they can provide a USB drive of that size for a few (UK) pounds then I'm all in favour (obviously I'll reformat the fecker first ;)

Perspectives

[Comatose51]

Guys... we need some perspectives here. Forget Microsoft and VMware. The important thing here, that most of us missed, is that Jesus Christ is back and submitting articles to Slashdot.

Re:Let me guess

[WED Fan]

Needless to say, GNU/Linux, etc has ran beautifully on removable media for years.

Needless to say, if anyone really used it, that would be a meaningful statement. Now, Joe User will think MS/SD is the ideal solution.

If Linux users want to be relevant, they need to court Joe User and not try to alienate him. They need to provide stuff he wants, like a huge ready to go software base he can get on his next trip to Costco/Best Buy/WalMart. Careful now, you scoff, and you'll be engaging in the exact behavior that turns Joe User off.

You want to take on MS, then take Joe User away from him. Apple was successful in pulling Artsy Fartsy Franky from MS, Linux needs Joe User.

But, if all this doesn't matter to you, then don't complain when MS does something and people like me let you know you had your chance. Win the war, adopt a strategy that will beat MS.

My bet

[Vexorian]

U3+DRM = Apocallypse! seriously, I wouldn't expect such horrible thing to happen but MS (not surprised) just did. We are going to have them combined and the worst is that almost every flash disk will come with it and most users won't get to be able to remove it. This is terrible news.

Re:My bet

[topham]

Thankfully I bought a 2Gig USB key the other day. It had U3 on it, but I used their utility to remove it.

(I don't need, or want U3, and my primary client at this time won't allow it.).

Exactly HOW?

[Master of Transhuman]

"The companies plan to add a security layer to the offering using SanDisk's TrustedFlash security and digital rights management technology. The effort will elevate "simple flash storage to a whole new level of customer benefit"

The first thing Microsoft cares about in this endeaver is DRM?

And this is going to provide "a whole new level of customer benefit"?

I don't think so.

If Microsoft wants to make USB useful, let Windows XP and Vista be booted off it...(Yes, I know somebody has finally made this possible but success seems to be limited.)

You're loving it.

[Erris]

I'll be sure to ask my employer to open up the firewall to I can "sftp" into my home box. That sounds a lot easier than an automated ~/ mount from a four-inch thumbdrive I can carry around in my pocket.

You can run sftp on any port you want, so you don't have to ask anyone for anything.

If your boss shares the extreme ignorance and paranoia expressed in the first sentence, nothing you want will work. Your employer epoxied the USB ports years ago and will never purchase or turn on whatever will allow your marvelous automounting security hole.

it's about fucking time

[steve426f]

I'm not sure why it has taken this long, since we've had roaming profile support for awhile. Add a quick option at the login or welcome screen to load your profile from external storage (allow/disallow if using Vista). On the Mac, application portability should be even easier since applications are typically enclosed completely in a single file.

Now if only...

[SilentUrbanFox]

... linux could do th- oh wait.

Echos of the past.

[Erris]

I wonder what nick names will be found for this product?

Plain "M$tick", pronounced "shit stick" springs to mind. Let's parse out some M$ suggestions and tortured language to see what we can do with what we know:

• Zune has "squirting" for involuntary and DRM encumbered "sharing" by billboards and coffee shop patrons. - Gross.
• "Wince" for portable computing. - Uncomfortable.
• "Origami" as a device name. - Tedious manual manipulation.

What will they wow us with now that can possibly match and combine all of the above?

Re:Let me guess

[etheranger]

I'm only 20 and my first computer had a sort of ascii gui, and a whopping 16KB hard drive.
I still have it sitting in a cupboard :D

Now I'm upset that I can fit so little on my 120GB one.

Re:Let me guess

[Anarchysoft]

But, if all this doesn't matter to you, then don't complain when MS does something and people like me let you know you had your chance. Win the war, adopt a strategy that will beat MS.

I didn't mean to disparage what Microsoft is doing and I don't see it as a conflict. More power to Microsoft for doing this; I was noting that it was not unique or original, even in (what I, at least, would consider) a fairly large scale way.

GNU/Linux and its BSD cousins are fantastic accomplishments right now and I personally don't think they 'need' any particular change. It brings me great joy to think of so many people contributing to and using free software and I think the free software culture does not need to change, even if it may be unfamiliar to Joe User. Hopefully, Joe User will become more familiar with free software as time goes on, as has happened with many 'Artsy Fartsy Frankies' (love those names) in Appleland.

Cool, I'm starting to like this.

[twitter]

the idea of this project was to put the laptop metaphor into something you could store in your pocket.

Hmmm, I really love my laptop's power management and having everything I want where I left it as I walk around .... and it's only got some 4 GB of system files and swap to make it happen ....

So how does it actually work? What do you have to run on each machine to have it work? From your paper I get the hazy idea that some kind of virtual machine software is running and loads an image off the USB stick. The closest thing I can think of is qemu with a saved state that loads up and fullscreens on login.

If the host is using it, Onthego does not require you to boot the machine and KDE's session management should bring up everything where you left it. That's not as nifty as what I'm starting to see in your project.

In any scheme, all the other applications have to be installed somewhere too and this is where M$'s little project will fall on it's face. They are way too paranoid to just let you walk around with precious "IP" like Word on a stick that could be shared.

Can anyone say "roaming profile"?

[alshithead]

The article is lacking important details. I can't see this as anything other than a roaming profile despite the claim to have apps be portable as well as windows settings and user data.

From TFA: "Under the plan, Microsoft will develop software that will let users store their applications and data on small, Flash memory-based devices that connect to their computers' Universal Serial Bus."

C'mon...you're going to fit the MS Office suite and maybe Visio, Acrobat, QuickTime, iTunes, and Firefox, just to name a few of the obvious, as well as your favorite/current files and the custom settings that are used in those apps on a thumb drive? I call bullshit. This is a pipe dream at this point. Show me a thumb drive with a couple of hundred gigs and I might...might, see this as being possible in the near future.

Sockpuppet

[dedazo]

twitter, just so you know, you replied to this using your sockpuppet account. Does it get hard to keep them straight?

You can run sftp on any port

Irrelevant to my question, unless you're pretending you're not twitter and just want to avoid my points.

Your employer epoxied the USB ports years ago

I'm sorry you were abused by a corporation when you got out of highschool. Most companies aren't nearly as bad as you like to preach.

Re:Let me guess

[Machtyn]

I'm not sure how much the DSL takes up when used with a USB drive, except that they will gladly sell you a 128MB USB drive with its 50MB image on it. I've currently got the 50MB DSL image running in VMWare on a work computer (keeps from having to bug the boss who's not totally convinced on OSS, but gives me, as QA, the leeway to use whatever I need.) Anyway, if you haven't guessed, DSL's image, fully running, is 50MB.

Problem, meet Solution

[PavementPizza]

Problem: USB drives are widespread, standardized, and allow users of many competing platforms such as Mac and Linux to exchange data freely with Windows boxes.

Solution: this thing.

I call it QEMU-Puppy...

[Rob Simpson]

QEMU-Puppy

A bootable USB memory stick has some disadvantages as well. First of all, not every PC is able to boot from USB. Second, if the machine does boot from USB, not all hardware is detected or configured properly, since the hardware "changes" every day. Third, booting from USB "locks" the machine: It's either the already installed OS or your OS, not both at the same time.

To get rid of these disadvantages, you can carry your own machine as well, not just your OS and your applications and your settings and your user data. You can do this by buying a laptop. But it's expensive, a physical burden and risky. The USB memory stick is cheap, light and easier to protect. A virtual machine , like QEMU, is cheap, light and easy to protect as well. With such a virtual machine, we are able to boot our OS on top of the already installed OS. Now we have two OS's running concurrently on one machine! ALT-TAB is enough to hide your machine and get back to work...

The tricky part is trying to have the OS on your USB memory stick to be able to boot both natively and in a virtual machine. But it can be done. And that's what makes QEMU-Puppy unique.

MS...back to stealing again

[Anonymous Coward]

I wonder if portableapps or one of the other groups could sue them for patent or copyright infringement...probably not but it's a nice thought.

Since portableapps was previously mentioned, I won't go into more detail. I didn't see a link in the above posts so here it is: http://portableapps.com/

Install this on your USB key drive and you will have an on the go system that has email, browser, word processor, etc.
It will work in linux as well.

Re:Let me guess

[VariableGHz]

In Soviet Russia, Vista runs you.

Another Windows license?

[Sodki]

Just don't forget to buy another Windows license, if you plan to use this on another computer.

How is this different than Knoppix on a USB key?

[raphae]

What I'm trying to figure out: how the hell is this different than say putting Knoppix on a USB and having a large persistent home directory for all your data? If you really want to get fancy (putting standard Knoppix on the USB key is itself fairly easy) you can remaster Knoppix and add/remove applications at will. In fact, does not this solution completely blow the proposed MS/Sandisk one away?

It seems again that there is a huge hype storm because of neophytes being amazed at a nominal use of some standard functionalities.

Use "open" on the command line

[amake]

The easy way to use .app-bundled apps from the CLI is with Apple's open utility. Your Preview.app example would be:

open -a Preview [list of files]

If you don't specify an app via -a, the files' default "Open with" app will be used. /Applications doesn't need to be in your $PATH, and I believe it will intelligently find apps placed anywhere you have read access to in the filesystem.

Re:Let me guess

[Ravnen]

Needless to say, GNU/Linux, etc has ran beautifully on removable media for years. I'm surprised MS didn't go for a specialized Windows CE.

Is that really all they're talking about here? I would think it's more about carrying applications and data, and letting them run transparently on some other installation of Windows.

As an aside, when I was installing Windows XP on my laptop a few years ago, it listed a flash drive I had connected as a potential target drive. I didn't try it, but got the impression it could be installed on removable media.

Re:How is this different than Knoppix on a USB key

[Ravnen]

When Microsoft, or Apple for that matter, add new features to their systems, one of the main points is making them easy for the average user to use. Actual new ideas typically emerge in research environments, with the role of production systems being to make those ideas accessible generally.

The idea of roaming applications and user data is certainly not new, but it's not widely used, and nor is there an easy way for the average application developer to explicitly take advantage of it. If Microsoft manage to change those two things (they've tried previously in corporate environments with, for example, roaming user profiles), they'll have achieved something important.

Re:Let me guess

[Anarchysoft]

Is that really all they're talking about here? I would think it's more about carrying applications and data, and letting them run transparently on some other installation of Windows. Thanks for pointing that out. The key difference appears to be that the applications wouldn't have to be installed on the host computer. From the article:

The technologies will be designed to let mobile computer users carry a complete image of their desktops in their pockets, allowing them access not only to their data -- standard stuff for today's USB drives -- but also their applications and user interface setup while on the go. If this is the case, it sounds like it amounts to a pretty limited set of changes to Windows, especially since many of the changes necessary have already been available on network shared drives.

This sounds like a prediction I made 4 years ago.

[Kuvter]

I predicted that in the future we'd carry our OS, programs, and files all on a portable device (like a thumb drive or iPod). That way we could bring our 'identity' along with us where ever we go. The connection, between the computer to the device, would be standardized so we could just hook up to any computer and always have our familiar OS, desktop, setting, etc. This just brings us one step closer to my prediction.

OT: How does Mojo differ from PortableApps?

[swb]

I've used the latter; running Firefox and Thunderbird off of flash is usable, but kind of pokey so now I mostly just use PortaPutty to ssh to my home network and RDP to my actual desktop.

Re:Let me guess

[Ravnen]

If this is the case, it sounds like it amounts to a pretty limited set of changes to Windows, especially since many of the changes necessary have already been available on network shared drives.

From the standpoint of the OS itself, I think you're probably right. User settings should also be fairly easy to move, by copying the user's profile directory, which includes the per-user registry hive. It's basically analogous to copying the user's home directory on Unix, and Microsoft already allow Windows profiles to "roam" across machines in a Windows domain, including distinguishing between the parts of the profile that should roam, e.g. settings, and those that shouldn't, e.g. temporary files.

The difficulty, as I see it, is in making applications portable, without losing all the advantages of modularity, code sharing, separation of application code from machine-specific settings, etc. One option would be to provide a new framework which applications developers could take advantage of, but if Microsoft want to support all the existing applications, I suspect it would take a considerable effort to make it work.

Did someone mention thumbs?

[vorlich]

Wait 'til Uri Geller hears about this! http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BJSxsbToLeE&mode=re lated&search=

...doing this for years

[Natales]

First with VMware virtual machines encapsulated in a single VMDK file on my mobile 8 GB microdrive. You can run them anywhere with the free VMware Player (Windows or Linux).

As of last week, with the new Pocket ACE it gets even easier and I can add encryption, expiration time, etc. Awesome technology if you haven't tried it. http://www.vmware.com/products/ace/features.html

IMHO, unless you are a gamer or you need very specific hardware, there is no reason any more to run anything outside a VM.

"...which has yet to be named"

[iminplaya]

The Stones could probably dream up something

$5629 for 64GB?

[200_success]

$5629 for a 64GB thumb drive???

Re:U3

[mchale]

I've had no trouble with anything I've gotten from PNY. Though in this case, the reason I paid double for the PNY drive was that the U3 drive was on sale for ~50% off.