Dangerous Ideas

I generally don’t pay this much attention to DEMO, but shortly after I read Christine’s blog entry, my friend Shireen asked me a question yesterday about which is better, MojoPac or moka5. Both of these are being introduced at the DEMOfall conference.

About MojoPac or moka5 …A couple of years ago, I went with Val to a talk at Stanford about women and engineering. The professor who spoke there talked about portable computing – she talked about an idea where you could be working at the office, then you could save your entire environment, go home, and bring up that same environment there. She was very passionate, and I thought it was a neat idea and also an instance of how the stuff they were doing in the sixties is still being rediscovered today. Smalltalk could do something like that, although it wasn’t as generally useful unless your Smalltalk environment was your primary OS (which, for some programmers, it is). Like a lot of great ideas that come from academia, I thought that professor’s project would result in something theoretical. Then I took a look at moka5’s Web site. I don’t remember the professor’s name, but after seeing moka5’s site, I’m pretty sure it was Monica Lam. And the project looks a lot more solid than mere theory. And it’s much cooler than I originally thought.

Both MojoPac and moka5 are currently pitched as being able to take your PC with you on a USB drive anywhere you go. This sounds a lot to me like having your own copy of VMware or Parallels on a USB drive that you can run without needing to install it on the host PC. Pretty cool and a really great twist on virtualization, but doesn’t sound too different than the technology in other virtualization products. And, indeed, that seems to be exactly what MojoPac is (although I’m judging this from their Web site; there could be more under the hood). moka5, on the other hand, is pretty different from other virtualization technologies (in fact, it’s built on top of VMWare, so it’s an enhancement to a popular virtualization technology). They even have a page talking about the differences between LivePCs (i.e. moka5) and traditional virtualization technology in the über virbu (technical background) section of their Web site. The most obvious difference is that they’ve managed to separate system state and user state in LivePCs. This means that the producer of a LivePC can make changes to the system and have them appear to all of the users – the same benefits achieved through terminal services and other thin client technology (e.g., apply security patches to one source, have them work for everyone). In fact, you can stream LivePCs over the Internet and use your USB drive as a cache … pretty fantastic. And, of course, you can work offline, too. Oh, and they have file sharing (between host and LivePC, and between different LivePCs).

So what am I going to tell Shireen? I’ll take a look at their products when I have time (hah! that’ll be soon), but judging from their Web sites, moka5 is a lot more interesting and the fact that it’s based on VMware – a solid virtualization product – I’m inclined to think it’s probably the better choice. Plus, it’s founded by a woman computer science professor, which counts for a lot with me, too. Of course, I didn’t see pricing information on their site anywhere, and VMware is kind of pricey. Plus, a lot of the features I like are great for organizations but might matter less for individuals, at with regard to the aspect of moka5 that does what MojoPac does (a PC to go).

Of course, both MojoPac and moka5 require Windows. at Colorful Expressions, we have a lot of sysadmin clients with Windows, and I can already see how moka5 could make a big difference to at least one large organization. But for programming and personal stuff I much prefer working in Mac OS X or Linux. Of course, since moka5 is based on VMware, and since VMware currently supports Linux and will soon support Mac OS X, maybe there’s hope …