Iomega Active Disk: take your software to go

Those of us who work on multiple computers frequently will appreciate the idea behind Iomega's Active Disk technology, which allows you to run applications directly from portable media devices without having to install them on the host machine. A number of apps have been written or modified to launch from Active Disk compatible devices, which include ye olde Zip drives, Iomega Rev drives (not terribly convenient to be carting around your Rev drive while you're at it, though, is it), external Iomega FireWire and USB drives, and Iomega Mini flash drives. All the software as well as files you create live on the portable device before and after a work session. All well and good, but seeing as how we long ago jettisoned our Zip disks, no one we know has a Rev drive, and most external hard drives will run software out of the box already, this leaves the USB thumb drive to be of any interest with this software. And even then, we'd really rather just use the growing number of applications designed to work on any USB drive instead of being forced into adopting yet another proprietary standard.