Cheesy Quintessence

I now have a 2 GB Kingston DataTraveler USB flash drive with something interesting I’d never heard of before: U3. U3 is an interface for portable applications, allowing developers to write programs that are effortlessly carried from computer to computer. Amazingly, it’s actually agreed upon and used by multiple manufacturers, such as Kingston, SanDisk, and Memorex, and is openly available for more manufacturers to use. The drive contains a ROM portion with Windows autorun information to get the U3 tray icon menu going.

This is a pretty interesting concept, I’d say, and the developers think it could evolve the way we compute. I like the idea of being able to store all my favorite programs and data in one spot and take it with me everywhere. With the absence of a registry, it would make archival extremely simple–I could just make a copy of the flash drive. However, I see one major problem: constantly rewriting to the device is bad for its health, so how will we truly be able to use any sort of program on a flash drive?