Havoc's Blog

I don’t think John Markoff at the New York Times knows about the GNOME Online Desktop effort,
but Owen noticed this
blog post where Markoff works around a hard drive crash with a
Linux LiveCD and web-based apps, just as we’ve proposed. He calls it
Computing
in the Cloud.

What I discovered was that – with the caveat of a necessary network
connection – life is just fine without a disk. Between the Firefox Web
browser, Google’s Gmail and and the search engine company’s Docs
Web-based word processor, it was possible to carry on quite nicely
without local data during my trip.

I had already stashed my almost 4,000 sources and phone numbers on
a handy web site which I had access to, and so I found the only things
I was missing were the passwords to online databases and my files of
past reporting notes and articles which I occasionally refer to.

Bouncing between hotel rooms to Wi-Fi-enabled lobbies and
conference rooms, I was easily able to stay online and file my stories
without incident.

Afterwards it made me wonder why there aren’t more wireless,
Web-connected ultralight portables for business travelers. Somebody,
it would appear, is missing an obvious market opportunity.

– John
Markoff

I posted
to desktop-devel-list about the current password-storage problems
in GNOME.

(This post was originally found at http://log.ometer.com/2007-08.html#28)