End of U3?

[Richard Gaskin]

Judy Perry wrote:
> So, U3 drives so that I can have students d/o demo's/shareware software
> not officially honkey-dorey by our IT folks (which is basically
> everything that is NOT MS Office...).
> 
> Am I mistaken?  Isn't that THE BIG THING about the U3 drives?  That you
> can run apps off them?

For as long as I've been working with Rev, it's been doing a great job 
of enabling delivery of portable apps on any drive.

U3 is just a clever way of using a Windows feature to launch a 
proprietary launcher.  When a locked volume is mounted on Windows, the 
OS will look for an autorun.inf file, and if present will look for the 
path to an app specified in that file and launch it if found.

U3 drives use this by being partitioned, with one partition being 
flagged as "read only" so the OS will look for the autorun.inf file, 
which on U3 drives points to the proprietary launcher.

Because it's dependent on a feature found only in Windows, the benefits 
of U3's dual-partitioned drives are only available on one OS -- Mac and 
Linux don't support anything like autorun (the last time Apple 
experimented with anything like it was more than a decade ago, and it 
was found to be a popular way to spread viruses so they discontinued the 
practice and aren't likely to resume it).

So while U3 is Windows-only, all flash drives can be used on all OSes, 
and Rev can deliver portable apps to run on any of 'em.

While we've heard about the large numbers of U3-compliant drives, 
remember that those still represent a minority of all flash drives -- 
your choice for non-U3 drives is vast, and generally cheaper than U3 
drives because they're cheaper to manufacture.

So if portability is your goal, as a Rev developer you can use any flash 
drive on the market.

-- 
  Richard Gaskin
  Managing Editor, revJournal
  _______________________________________________________
  Rev tips, tutorials and more: http://www.revJournal.com