Your computer on a thumbdrive

Can you really put the important functionality of your computer on a USB thumbdrive? Technology pundit Tim Bajaran writes, "By the beginning of 2007, over 50 percent of all USB thumbdrives and USB one-inch hard drives will have software on them that helps differentiate them from plain USB drives."

He continues with a glance at a product he says could be the harbinger of this new world, saying a company called U3 has married "the concept of Outlook e-mail and folder synchronization to the notion of running applications themselves from the USB thumbdrive so that, in essence, your entire computer productivity can be handled strictly from the thumbdrive itself."