End of U3?

[Judy Perry]

Richard,

Even though I am largely a Mac user, my students and my labs are largely
PC and hence I need ways to get around being locked out of allowing
downloads and installations of demos etc.

U3 *should* let me do that, right?

Judy

On Mon, 14 May 2007, Richard Gaskin wrote:

> 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
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