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GEARHEAD INSIDE THE NETWORK MACHINE
Last week we began a discussion of U3, an emerging standard for controlling and managing applications stored on a USB, flash or thumb drive.
This is a very cool idea that creates portable programs - in the sense that they can be carried on physical media from one machine to another and be run with or without being installed. When they exit, they leave no data behind.
As cool as U3 is, a serious issue is that it is very narrowly focused,applying only to Windows 2000, XP and 2003. That leaves all those Windows 95,98 and ME systems out in the cold (and rightly so) along with Macs and Linux.
Programs engineered to be US-compatible are different from regular Windows programs because U3 applications are not hard-wired to the directory structure or any operating system components on the host computer and are independent of the Windows Registry
There are three types of U3 applications: U3 LaunchPad (U3LP),U3 LaunchPad+ (U3LP+) and U3 Aware...