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.'"

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?

Damn Small Windows?

[Anonymous Coward]

Or is that oxymoronic?

Or just moronic?

I give up.

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: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".

Licensing

[NoMoreFood]

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

Ripping off MojoPac.

[PxM]

So, they're pretty much trying to create a copy of MojoPac [mojopac.com] (wikipedia entry [wikipedia.org]) 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.

linux

[crAckZ]

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

Re:Let me guess

[toleraen]

64GB [cdw.com] should be close enough

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 [wikipedia.org], 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!

Everything needs a name!

[frank_adrian314159]

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

How about "Virus in a Box"?

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: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 [wikipedia.org]):

"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.