A team at IBM Research has developed a way to carry a personal computing environment so that it can be booted and used on any standard PC, without regard to the specifics of the host computer. The SoulPad concept uses a USB 2.0 ‘thumb drive’ and a three-layer software stack that allows a user’s computing environment (favorite programs, configurations, current documents, etc.) to boot up on any PC; Strong security is built in, since some of us are prone to losing small peripherals.
A summary of the research, with a link to video showing a SoulPad device in use, is at the IBM Research Pervasive, Mobile Wearable Computing site.
--RSN