Thoughts from ILTACON – Intel Compute Stick

 One of the other sessions I was able to drop in on was conducted by Patrick DiDomenico from the LawyerKM blog. Patrick’s session was all about new tech gadgets, and it was pretty interesting. One thing that I had not heard of prior to the session, was the Intel Compute Stick.

Basically, it a computer the size of a typical thumb drive. You just plug it in to an HDMI port and there’s your PC. Right now, it’s specs are a little limited, but it got me thinking about traveling and training.

You can learn more from this review.

Here’s a typical training scenario that we run in to all the time. When going to teach a class we really have two options:

1. Rent the equipment and install the software needed during class
2. Ship laptops with the proper environment already set up on them

Or, you could go the third option and use cloud based virtual machines, but that introduces a requirement of fast, reliable internet access, which is just another point of failure I’d rather not have.

Both of these have some drawbacks. But, how cool would it be if we could have the site supply the monitors, keyboards and mice, and bring the PC environment in a backpack? As I said, for what I teach right now, I don’t think the Compute stick has enough power, but I will be keeping an eye on it. For some other training situations though, it could be just the right thing.

Or, for traveling, it could be pretty nice to have the Compute Stick and the hotel television. Seems like that would be a lot easier on my back than carrying a laptop around would be, but that would create an issue with a lack of input devices unless I brought those too somehow.

Would you try the Compute Stick? What would your use case look like?

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