Philip Greenspun on pairing a MobIle with a Network Computer/Home Server (which he refers to as "Appliance"). As far as the engineers building The Appliance are concerned, the phone is the key that identifies the user and the phone is a USB Flash Drive for storing a working subset of documents and information. The Appliance itself is mostly a standard PC running a standard operating system plus a thin layer of custom software... From an engineer's point of view, the Appliance is just a PC with built-in cable and DSL modems and a cartridge system for connecting disk drives. From a consumer's point of view, however, running software on top of an existing PC does not get them out of sysadmin and upgrade hell. The existing PC might not have mirrored disk drives. The existing PC might be infected with a virus. The existing PC might be running an older version of [XP]...

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