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I have prayed to Google for guidance, but in Her wisdom She has chosen to reply in an information-sparse fashion.  I therefore call upon the assembled disembodied heads of my loyal reader base to help me.


I suspect many of these don't have answers, but I'm asking anyway.  Feel free to speculate; I welcome guesses from geeks with better-informed intuition.

In 1992, jeff_duntemann first wrote about Jiminy, his idea for the computer of the future. Basically it was a memory-packed, multi-processing AI pinned to his lapel, with infrared linkage to a separate "dumb terminal" Palm-like workpad or a keyboard and screen or whatever other peripherals you needed. Mostly you communicate with your Jiminy by voice, and it communicates with other Jiminies by short-range jiggery-pokery of unspecified sort.

More recently, Eric "erbo" Bowersox (what`a name!) gave his updated vision of Jiminy, called Rogue. Same idea, noughties technology.

Both of these miss one important point that I think is essential, and critically makes Jiminy technology possible now, if only someone will implement it. It's what I call the multifunction fallacy.

Ever see one of those all-in-one printer/scanner/fax/copier/modem/coffeemaker machines? They sound like a good idea -- everything your home office needs, all on one desk with one power cable and no waiting. And they certainly are, right up until a fuse goes or the cat lands on the platen, and suddenly you've lost your access to every important piece of machinery in your office. There's also, as a side effect, the Strip Club Beer problem: you don't expect the best quality beer at a strip club (even if you live in a non-prohibition country where beer and naked women are legally on offer in the same place) because the beer just isn't the point. You're there for the girly bits; the beer is incidental, and therefore not guaranteed to be much good. It's the same with all-in-one machines: it will not be a super-duper fax and a blindingly fast and reliable copier and a Porsche-standard nose-hair trimmer and all the rest. It will be an adequate fax and an acceptable printer and a good-enough modem and so on, but no more. Convenience costs. That's why a laptop costs $1000 more than a desktop machine of equivalent power. It's also why Jeff and erbo have the wrong idea about Jiminy.

Here's my ideal design. I'll call it Orac just to differentiate.

Orac is a box, a tasteful dark blue because Apple proved that you need to stake out a particular colour and make it your own, but they've got dibs on white already. It's about an inch and a half square and half an inch thick, with a funny ripple along each edge that does double duty as a distinctive trademarky sort of flavour and a good asymmetrical guide to stop you plugging bits in backwards. It contains a good fast multi-processor and some radio-frequency communications hardware, and a good-enough but not exceptional battery and memory supply. It can talk to its peripherals either by radio or by its edge connectors.

If you need more battery power, you stick it on the face: another inch-and-a-half-square box in blue with red edges. If you need more memory, it can go on the opposite face. Only batteries and memory packs go on the face; everything else goes on the edge if it needs to connect physically at all. As a bonus, batteries and memory packs include extra edge connectors -- they are, in current parlance, the Orac equivalent of USB hubs. These are the only components that do more than one job. That's the solution to the multi-function problem, right there.

To talk to the mobile phone network, plug in a phone edge connector -- sold separately, powered by Orac's internal battery or a battery pack. The phone connector only does that one thing. No address book, no games, no pretty graphics display. It's a peripheral, with no life outside the gestalt that is Orac. That's how it likes it. If it breaks down, you can get it fixed because it's simple.

To talk to networks, plug in an ethernet or wifi connector, with cables as required. To talk to other Oracs, you can get a radio boost connector, or just rely on the short-range built-in one. If you need more communications, more memory, more batteries, just plug them all in. It's like Lego.

To communicate with Orac itself, you'll need some kind of input and output. Your graphics tablet will talk by wireless to your Orac, as will your foldable portable keyboard. On your desk at home or work will be an ordinary keyboard, mouse and screen, plugged into an Orac Dock that talks by wireless or can be plugged straight in. Mostly you'll wear Orac and the most speed-intensive connectors on your belt, so whatever desk you sit down at will tune in as soon as you get close.

Orac knows about the internet. It can talk to the phone network. It speaks -- via connectors -- with GPS satellites and infra-red barcode scanners and laser printers and whatever else you want. Connectors are simple: little blue boxes with a traditional port on one face and the ubiquitous edge connectors on each edge.

Orac runs Linux, Windows or MacOS, according to the external processor you plug in. From the point of view of those operating systems, it's just another USB wifi widget. They don't notice or care that they live inside a tiny box instead of a laptop, or that all the bits and pieces that break down in ordinary hardware -- the power supply, the video card, the monitor, the disk drive -- all live in other little boxes that talk to each other by whatever means you happen to choose.

Apple makes an iPod connector for Orac. Microsoft makes a Windows box, sans peripherals, guaranteed to run Windows Vista at whatever speed BillG thinks is a fair thing. Dell makes Orac edge connectors that will burst into flames and burn down your house, because when you're on a trademarkable schtick you stick to it! The edge connector design and the protocols are open and freely copyable. No limits, no restrictions. Make peripherals and they'll work. Go wild, ye manufacturers of previously-grey boxes!

Orac should be doable with today's tech. There's no obvious reason not to do it: we already know the palmtop revolution is over; Palms and Windows Pocket PCs are an abomination, precisely because they try to do too many things. The solution is modularity, and Orac has that down cold. Now we just need a Michael Dell or (gods help us) a Steve Jobs to take the idea and run with it. I'll even give it away -- just send me a thank-you note and some free samples, and you can make all the millions you like, Steve!

Like Jeff, I expect to see this in my lifetime. I just wish it would hurry up.

Managed to leave my Palm Tungsten T3 next to a semi-frozen bottle of water last night, and the condensation dripped into its innards so it's now an ex-parrot. I could pay the $200-odd to replace it via Palm's no-questions-asked replacement system, but I'm thinking it's not worth it. This is my fourth T3 by that system, and I've had it less than a year. It's already had problems with battery life and the digitizer, that almost made it unusable anyway. And the newer models don't look like much: overpriced, underpowered and just as unreliable, to judge from what people are saying. I might even have to think about getting a (gasp!) Windows handheld! They at least haven't got stuck in the mid-1990s; Palm feels too much like Apple in the post-and-pre-Jobs days. It would be nice to be able to write and run software written in languages that aren't stagnant, poorly maintained and ugly, and to have it run for an hour or two without complaining about battery life. sigh What is a geek to do?

The Beloved's Macintosh iBook died just before Ecch!smas, so we brought it in to the Apple shop (sample [imagined] conversation: "I'll just type up your details on the computer." "Oh, you have computers here? I only saw Macintoshes."). The diagnosis was terminal: as well as the battery that won't hold a charge and the CD drive that won't stay closed, it was now equipped with a hard disk that won't do anything that might be mistaken for hard-disky behaviour. Projected cost to repair: approximately what it would cost to replace with a new model.

At first, we thought about buying a new laptop for her to use, but we figured it was probably smarter to spend a little extra and buy a new one for me, and give her my very reliable and error-free one-year-old BenQ laptop, Bonacon.

So began the search.

I started by going to OA Computers in Belconnen. Notice how I don't have a hyperlink on their name? It's because they don't have a website. That should have been A Clue, but then I've always had excellent service from them. I popped in on my way to work, Kenneth Horne-like ("Hello, I'm Julian and this is my friend Sandy!") to find that:

• Tim, the lovely and competent chap I usually deal with, was off sick;
• Andrew, the grumpy and competent owner, was due "any minute now";
• The two lads who were there were back-room geeks, and didn't know much about prices or availability;
• The BenQ on display certainly looked good, but there were no specs available;
• There were also no definite prices that the lads could find;
• They couldn't tell me the price of an extended warranty;
• Oh, and Andrew won't be in until 9:30;
• But they'd get back to me that morning with prices.

Dick Smith Electronics Powerhouse in Woden was able to sell me a lovely Toshiba Satellite (Intel Core Duo at 1.6GHz, 60Gb hard drive, 512Mb RAM, DVD±R/DVD-RAM drive, 4 USB ports, WiFi, Bluetooth, 1280x800 screen) for $992 drive away. For the $1500-odd I'd planned to spend, I got the extended warranty, an extra half-gig of RAM, a USB hub, a very pleasant Microsoft wireless keyboard & mouse, and $100-odd change.

The boys at OA still haven't called back.

I've been distracted with birthday dinners, Bowral movements and housecleaning, but I've mostly got things set up now. Its name is Manticore, in keeping with the house tradition of naming all computers after animals, real or imaginery. And tonight, purely because I could, I installed Ubuntu Linux 6.06 ("Dapper Drake") in a 12Gb partition. It's rather a tidy little OS nowadays - all the best stuff from Debian, with a nearly Microsoftian attention to detail. I won't be using it non-stop, but it's there if I want it, and I still have 48Gb left for my real work.

Now to install GNU Emacs and get Turbo Delphi bedded down, and see if I can compile and run Gratian. (I haven't forgotten, syridian!)