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I’ve Been Waiting for this Technology

By Montag | Related entries in Technology

From New Scientist:

Researchers at IBM in New York, US, have developed a way to carry a powerful, personalised virtual computer from one PC to the next, without losing the user’s work.

The trick is to store the virtual computer on a USB key, or any portable device with substantial storage space, like an MP3 player.

New Scientist: Pocket-sized computer ‘soul’ developed

They sure came up with a creepy name for it. They call it “The SoulPad system” where the stored information is the virtual computer’s “soul.” Creepy moniker aside, I can’t wait until I can afford one.


This entry was posted on Thursday, August 11th, 2005 and is filed under Technology. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “I’ve Been Waiting for this Technology”

  1. jaed Says:
    August 11th, 2005 at 1:58 pm

    Hmmm. I’m not so sure what’s totally new about this; people have been copying their Home folders to thumb drives and iPods for a while now. You plug the drive into another computer and make a new user with its Home folder set to the one on the drive.

  2. jaed Says:
    August 11th, 2005 at 1:59 pm

    (Agree about the creepiness factor, though. ;-) Soulpad? Ack.)

  3. Joshua Says:
    August 12th, 2005 at 8:56 am

    A few idle, silly thoughts:

    1) If the data stored on a SoulPad includes a bunch of MP3s, regardless of their musical genres, do they qualify as “soul music”?

    2) Does a computer’s soul still weigh 21 grams (the supposed “weight” of a human soul)? I’m just talking about the soul here, not the SoulPad itself, which I imagine would weigh a bit more.

    3) When artificial intelligence advances to the point that computers become aware that they have a soul, will they develop their own religions around it? (And in the meantime, will followers of certain human religions begin proselytizing to computers to save their souls?)

  4. Tom Grey - Liberty Dad Says:
    August 12th, 2005 at 2:01 pm

    I think it’s mostly relevant for highly integrated voice-recognition software & aux. databases. When you really talk to your HAL quality computer, even if other folk can’t.

    The MyDocuments folder copy is nice, but actually doesn’t quite work — there’s lots of other settings to duplicate desktop behavior. (Silly MS) But if this means the OS, too, like all Win98 or all WinXP, that’s better — but seems like almost a waste of memory for copying the OS.

    “Soul” is a bit lousy; though “Soul of a New Machine” was a great book.

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