Soulpad or Blackdog
August 10th, 2005 | Filed under: Products, Programming, Technology | 1 Comment »
IBM’s Soulpad system provides a mobile personalized virtual computer so users can move from one computer to the next while maintaining settings, open programs, etc. It is essentially a PC in a usb key or portable hard drive. Sounds a lot like Blackdog and Globetrotter.
via NS
I just saw these Blackdog’s today at Linuxworld in San Francisco. Pretty cool little boxes. They’re more like USB powered GumStix computers + a biometric thumbprint reader, from what I could tell.
There are less expensive ways to run a hosted OS on someone elses computer, too. Damn Small Linux and Puppy linux can both be installed to a thumbdrive, then booted on a host computer. You can get most of the functionality of the Blackdog on a $30 thumbdrive. They both fit on a business card CD-R, making them easy to play with, without much commitment.
I find DSL to be a quite capable OS. It jumps on the internet without configuration (dhcp), and can mount windows drives on the host computer, making it great for disaster recovery.
http://www.gumstix.com/index.html
http://damnsmalllinux.org/
http://www.goosee.com/puppy/
Fun stuff!