The Soul of a New Machine

http://www.reason.com/hitandrun/2005/08/the_soul_of_a_n.shtml

Catch the hotlinks in the actual article for a video demonstration.

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The Soul of a New Machine

Twenty-five years on, Data General is long gone, and yet here we have IBM researchers developing a "soul" for computers. The salvation accrues to users looking to move key PC essentials from machine to machine without a ton of work. The "soul" resides on a portable USB drive or mp3 player like an iPod -- basically anything with storage and a USB connection, hence the name SoulPad.

Amazingly, the SoulPad creates a virtual machine environment on target machines without regard to installed operating systems or applications. All that SoulPad needs is a fast enough USB connection to emulate those functions. In other words, your computer's "soul" can go anywhere you do, which is pretty damn neat.

Bonus geek info: Yes, Linux is involved.
Posted by Jeff A. Taylor at 10:05 PM | Comments (8)

The potential for accidently spreading viruses/spyware unknown to the carrier seems kind of high. Great idea though.

Maybe, but as a test bed idea it's pretty neat, and not too new.

Making it that flexible and actually having an OS is the new part. You can boot to a pen drive already, but at best you get a non-GUI OS and only rudimentary tools.

Great for troubleshooting and anti-virus work though.

I think this will be the way we go in the future. But with some sort of twist. A TB embedded in your thumb that transmits wirelessly to boot the OS. Plus fingerprint authentication.
Plus cut off thumbs, incidentally. ?
Maybe not. :)