I am always thinking. I don't know if it is a good thing or not, but it is something I cannot stop, and frankly why should I? After I am gone it will stop forever so I might as well let it go while it wants to. So I have decided to write about some of my crazy ideas once a month. Here is my first ever monthly vision thing.
I think the time has come for what I refer to as "Flash as a Computer" or FaaC. I must admit it is not entirely a new concept, but my twist to it might be somewhat different, or at least it is not based on what I have read or seen anywhere else.
We ha
ve all seen the flash memory cards, right? Those little memory modules that we use in cameras and increasingly in camcorders. Their capacity is getting large enough (I have seen 64GB in stores) that they are now comparable in size to the disk drives in some laptops. And that comparison triggers the thought that maybe the entire computer environment can be saved in one. In other words one way or the other one might be able to hold most if not all of the setups and unique data that is ordinarily on disk in a laptop in a large capacity flash memory card. Then why can't we have a new generations of computers and laptops that can read the settings and data off these flash memory cards and make the computer act as if it were our own computer. If instead of carrying my own laptop I have a flash card that I can take with me and stick into any avail
able computer in a hotel, in the office, airport, or wherever, and if that computer could act just like my own computer, it would be very convenient, don't you think? Probably one would have one FaaC for home computer and one for the office, and maybe for practical reasons, these FaaCs could be made the size of credit cards. I found the idea intriguing.
But is this practical? One potential approach would be to replace the boot disk of one's computer with a portable flash memory card. Since there are many different chipsets out there and such disk would not necessarily work everywhere, however. So what if we can create a virtual system on the flash and that way it would work on any computer that can load that virtual system. And if the ability to load a virtual machine is built into the hardware (it is technologically doable today) then we have a solution. And there can be a few enhancements too. For example there could be a storage hierarchy. Sensitive or archived data can be stored on a secure local disks. These storage devices would be accessible only locally, some at home, some at work, etc. Once disconnected they would not be available which is desirable. At the same time it would reduce the required store space on the flash memory card. Some other data, the ones that are not very sensitive and also not necessarily needed all the time can be stored remotely via internet (also known as "in the cloud"). These are internet based storage spaces like "SkyDrive" offered by Microsoft. An example of files that could be stored in the cloud is the old multimedia files that we no longer listen to or watch on a regular basis, but we don't want to throw them away either. They would be available only when online, and that could be a reasonable tradeoff to further reduce the need for larger flash memory cards. The files that are used frequent enough can be stored on FaaC and they would remain available all the time. A clever piece of software could monitor the file usage and make sure the most recently used one (the last 30 days?) are moved to FaaC (actually copied and kept synchronized with the original files). In addition, before getting on the road one could manually "take" additional files and data that might be needed while offline, on FaaC.
Software licensing would be the next issue. Currently when there are two computers at home and five users, there are only two licenses (of Microsoft office, for example), one on each computer. Would they need 5 copies with FaaC? The cost could be a problem. There needs to be some way of associating all those FaaC with the available licenses (two) and be able to have only two of them authorized at any given time. This is possible, using some sort of internet based authorization, but what happens when the machines are offline? May be they can check out a license before going offline? No matter what, the software vendors need to embrace the concept and come up with workable options and solutions.
So what does it take for this to become real? The hardware vendors need to agree on and implement a hardware based virtualization, software application vendors need to sort out the licensing options, the operating system vendors (Windows, OS X, Linux, as a minimum) need to make the FaaC concept and the overall storage hierarchy work seamlessly and transparent to the users, and the businesses, hotels, airport lounges, etc need to all buy into this concept and deploy the base hardware and software. Somebody needs to pull the trigger and make others follow their lead. Somebody, please? To start with, maybe the Linux community could create a stripped down kernel that in essence would turn an existing hardware into a system that does nothing other waiting for a flash memory to be inserted into at which time it would look for and run any virtual machine it could find on it. This is not fancy, but is enough to allow people to take an image of their systems with them and run on other hardware. If the concept proves itself, I am sure money will follow.
And that is how I see it ...
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