Slashdot Mirror
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.'"
Funny, nowadays anything that has "trusted" in it seems to me like something I have to distrust...
Hax-fu?
...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?
Read my Very Short "Stories"
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.
http://alternatives.rzero.com/
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.
It will only run on Vista.
I didn't realize that there was an 80G thumb drive
It'll be interesting to see how application licensing works for something like this...
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.
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.
/dev/sdg1 or /dev/hda1). This goes a long way to making it easy to install Linux distros on portable drives.
/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!
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.
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
My bicyles
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.
Brackets contain world's first nanosig, highly magnified:[.]