Shoutbox

If you managed to get your computer to accept the iPOD as a portable hard drive. In theory you could get it to install programs onto it. This would be a long farce to do properly, also it would be fairly slow using the program (since the computer would have to keep accsessing the  iPOD for any data). Also the iPOD would keep needing power.
This isn't really a practise many people do, it's just a long farce on. If you want more hard drive space, you could always shop around for a fairly cheap 20gb+ hard drive.

Again, any files you accsess on the iPOD would have to be loaded into your computers own RAM, so they would not actually be "running" off the iPOD.