Always-on-you computing
I'm glad to see that Wade Roush's Continuous Computing blog is back, jump-started in part by his recent article, "Your World on a Flash Drive:"
Programmers are creating versions of the free Linux operating system small enough to fit on -- and boot directly from -- a USB flash drive. And now several companies are marketing and developing ways to use these ultra-portable storage devices to carry all of one's data and applications -- including personalized desktop environments resembling mini-operating systems. In this way, you can have all your data with you at all times -- ready to plug into any computer you happen to be near.
I've been wearing a 1 GB keychain drive around my next for over a year now, on which I keep pretty much everything I've written in the last five years. It's more a totemic object than anything-- keeping my digital life close to my heart, as it were-- but it also comes in handy for swapping files and moving things around more often than I expect.
On his blog, Wade adds a postscript that points to a nice phrase.
One person I interviewed for the story, but wasn't able to quote, was Liam Breck, director of a Boston software lab called Network Improv. Breck is working on a fascinating Wiki-based personal information management and file-sharing system that fits on a flash drive; he calls it a "mobile webspace." Liam has a great name for this whole phenomenon of portable computing environments: always-on-you computing.
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