More proof of our impending liberation from the OS
I just found a soon to be released piece of hardware that supports my hypothesis that Operating Systems will be irrelevant in a few more years. Lexar is coming out with a new USB drive that will let you install and run your software directly from it using some custom software of its own.
The software, PowerToGo, lets most existing Windows applications run unmodified from the flash drives, Lexar said. The goal is to let users carry their PC environments, including browser settings and instant-messenger clients, in a tiny thumb drive.
…The software will be developed as an open standard, and the Lexar products will be compatible with “most consumer and electronic mobile devices,” according to a company statement.
It will be nice not to worry about being treated as a criminal by having to call tech support and provide 20 pieces of proof that you are the registered owner when you forgot to “deactivate” that software you spent a ton of money on before you wiped your harddrive and tried to re-install it. I know that companies need to protect their software from piracy in some shape or form, but most activation schemes punish the people who paid for the software with too much inconvenience. If this USB drive and others like it become ubiquitous it won’t be a problem anymore.
Think how nice it will be to carry around your favorite software with you and use it at home, work, your buddy’s house and your parent’s place. That’s almost as cool as virtualization. Of course, currently the software will have to run on the same OS that it was originally written for, but if the concept takes off, someone will develop simple emulators that will let you run it on whatever computer you happen to be near.
In my other post about the OS, I said that the future was in webware but some things will be difficult to port to the web. I think this technology is the is the perfect compliment to webware by enabling you to keep those non-web applications as accessible in any location as web-based apps.
Now we just need a good way to bind the two so you can keep your data online but your software in your pocket. Something like Openomy would be a good candidate… if software can be written to use it as the datastore. Hmmm… Some very interesting possibilities here! Time to go brainstorm…
January 20th, 2006 at 2:10 pm
Or you can shift a little bit more power on the USB stick side and run the whole computer from there. The computer it’s plugged in becomes just a terminal, and everything else (CPU/RAM/Storage) runs off the USB stick.
These people do that:
http://www.projectblackdog.com/
I did not buy one of those, so I can’t tell how good it actually works. Obviously too, it’s running Linux, but it should work on (almost?) any host
…
January 20th, 2006 at 10:12 pm
Fabian,
Thanks for the link, that’s a pretty cool device.
Yeah, I agree with you that that’s definitely an option on the way things will go. Eventually, once flash memory gets to the point of still being stamp sized but holding hundreds of gigabytes then we’ll all just plug in to some CPU somewhere when we want to use our “computer”. It may not make much of a difference where the OS actually is, and part of my point is that it definitely won’t make a difference WHICH OS it is.
The next few years are going to be pretty interesting to watch as these trends develop, I think.