"Peeling the years away and we can't relive it"

Had to include a tribute to REO Speedwagon as my title, from my favorite song of theirs no less. I saw the live on Thursday night and it was a fantastic concert. Even if you don't respect their music, you have to give props to them for having played and toured continuously for close to 30 years. No breakups, reunions, changed band members, just the original lineup consistently playing tunes.

Now to the good stuff. I have discussed the idea of software updating with others on numerous occasions. I know Ryan, for one, is very dissapointed with the current trend of almost all applications suddenly having their own method of checking for and installing updated versions. He would like to see one standard mechanism available in the OS for all to use, and I agree.

I was thinking of that a bit tonight, and came up with another idea. Not only would like I like to see this added as a common feature in the OS utilized by all (or most), but I think it could be used to improve software backup/restore as well. One of the things I love about having almost eliminated pay software from my computer is the reduced number of backups and copies of programs I have to keep around. I have switched to almost entirely open source, freeware, or stuff I have written myself. The beauty of the open source and freeware stuff is that it is generally widely available and archived via the Internet. Rather than keeping copies of everything, I can just go download them all if I was forced to reinstall.

Now, here's where I came up with my idea. If this centralized software update facility existed, it would be cool if it could essentially keep an up-to-date restore image for your PC at all times as well. You could periodically burn off a CD with all OS, driver, and software updates in use on the PC. A cool option would be to choose between full downloads or simply a list. In my case, I would be perfectly happy with a list of software. If I wanted to restore, I could simply pop in this CD and it would use the software update mechanism to grab and install all of the packages. The other option would be to maintain a full copy of the most recent version of everything. This would be useful if you had a slow connection, wanted to be more mobile with the installation, or simply wanted it to be quicker -- none of these really matter to me.

This whole process could be extended to include configuration for all apps as well. That could all but eliminate any bring up time when installing on a new PC.

An additional piece that would improve all of this would be a modified installer for the OS (are you listening Microsoft?). The installer should install enough basics of the system to enable network connectivity, limited to some approved locations, and the software update mechanism. This shell OS could then grab any critical OS updates before finishing the OS install. This would eliminate the problem of unpatched machines being infected with malware almost instantly upon connection to the network.

Some of this is a ways off yet, although none is technically all that challenging. Most of it could actually be pulled off very quickly today. I would love to give it a try if I had the free time -- I will hopefully leave that to someone out there who finds this interesting and does have the time.