appleinsider.com — Apple has been granted a patent for a pretermitted feature of Mac OS X that would have allowed users to sync their home directories to an iPod and then use the data stored on the player to securely log into any supported Mac.
Oct 11, 2006 View in Crawl 4
skealoha86Oct 12, 2006
haha... good points... unfortunately i don't read, i just make snarky comments...
malkisdekOct 12, 2006
Prior Art Much? Windows has a thing called "Briefcase" that has done the same thing for years... Knoppix can just put the home folder on a flash drive up front. Cool feature yes, but no patent...
jsusankaOct 12, 2006
so does this mean I have to stop using my rsync scripts that I use to sync my usb drive to my home directory.
altotusOct 12, 2006
People have been doing this (at least I have) since hotplug for Linux came out. Not with iPods, mind you, but with stuff like USB sticks and USB hard drives. I had several guest accounts on my machine that you would login to by plugging in a USB drive (which would auto login the user and mount the USB stick under /home with their username based on the volume label of the USB stick).I don't use it that way anymore, but I do something very similar with my USB hard disks that I use for video editting.I can't see how this isn't obvious as it's pretty much implied by the Linux hotplug documentation as something you could do if you wanted to.
tigerdyrOct 12, 2006
You really don't get it? It doesn't matter if it is news or if it is not. Digg users will choose. That's the only real rule here.
geminitojanusOct 12, 2006
The patent covers wrapping up personal data and settings and storing them on a portable device. Random dongles included. It's more of the "roaming settings" idea, not "portable /user/~username/home", which would hopefully be unpatentable due to prior art and obviousness. (Think: CoreData application settings being stored on an SQL database on your iPod).
fishbertOct 12, 2006
Exactly my point...Were the patent limited to iPods, the potential "obviousness" invalidation argument would be less likely -- storing computer user roaming profiles on a music/video device is unique thinking; while storing computer user roaming profiles on a generic portable data storage device is inevitable engineering (i.e., obvious).