karl:
Over the last few years I use my PC for less of little numerous tasks, like time scheduling, playing music, playing DVDs etc. All the items to perform these tasks are so incredibly cheap now rather than years ago. I have a pocket organiser (cost me about £80). I paid £269 for a DVD player when I decided to dip my toes into the new technology, and I thought it was a bargain compared with others paying £600+). Now I can walk into a store and buy a reasonable DVD player for under £50. I plug it into my television sit down on my sofa, crack open a can of beer and sit in comfort watching my favorite movie or something I recorded from the TV some days before. Why do I want to have a noisy computer and an office chair to watch my film with.

Okay, so now rather than having a £2000 computer and make it do all the clever stuff, playing multiple music from CD tracks, movies etc, I have a piece of dedicated equipment does exactly that task and that one only. I can take comfort that 99% of the time I can put the media (or whatever) into it and it will do what I need in the right amount of time without (Execution of bad instruction or the PC configuration has changed) and get on with using the product not configuring or messing with it just to perform a menial task.

Okay, I have a portable MP3 player with loads of my own CD tracks on. I get home, and plug the output into my mixer and it comes out of my amplifier like a home stereo. The gadget cost me £70 and it will last several years. I use a nimh AA battery (new type of rechargeable batteries - greater charge/discharge and less memory affect) and I get 500+ recharges out of them. I could get a mains powered MP3 player and do it all properly with say a 2gb drive but they're not cheap enough for my budget yet. But when they are I'll be buying one.

So if we extrapolate that over the next few years, we would have an array of pluggable gadgets that we mix together only when we need to have some central processing or doing something that computers do better than us. i.e a PC. Then when the task is finished, separate the gadgets and get them back to doing what they do best on their own. And the PC is left doing anything but each of these individual task performed by the gadgets. My CPU drop to an all time low and I get the best power/£ ratio from my PC.

As an example, I have a usb hard drive with my music on it. I have my portable MP3 player. I have a program I wrote in VB6 which chooses a random selection of music I like, downloads it onto my MP3 player. Once the task is complete I unplug both the gadgets from the PC and they both go their own way. The PC is released from it core central process task to be used for some other task, like fraggin' some other people's butts in Unreal Tournament Deathmatch (internet gameplay) , sending emails of maybe messing about creating the odd cartoon. The days of cellullose and a light box for me are over. A decent graphics tablet and photoshop and you can do some really clever things in a resonable amount of time and hey there's a worldwide audience for your work if you feel brave enough to let them see what you're capable of. I enter my appointments and reminders into my pocket organiser with my touchscreen buttons and plastic stylo. Each night when I get home, I drop my organiser into the cradle attached to the PC and all my important information is automatically backed up to the PC. Each morming I remove it from the cradle and the PC is no longer in the loop.

Okay, occasionally I get caught out because I lose the information and have to wait until the end of the day until I can recover it. But hey, it only happens when I forget to keep the batteries at a reasonable level. So the PC will be less and less of a central processor for all things, maybe more of a connection point, a bit like your idea of a cable less keyboard. =[8-)

jimbo:
My own (not yet implemented) set up would be a 100% quiet Linux box, maybe a laptop, sitting beneath a massive flat panel screen, good for both web/TV/DVD's/games. Then this Linux box connects to my cable TV box and can record shit for me that I'll never watch. This box can also run my music studio, (once Linux works better with sound) feed into an amp/big speakers and everything else. Because I can download all the music I want - btw see http://catalog.allofmp3.com - it is rather excelent - then my laptop is superior to my stereo. No need to copy shit to and from other shit. Mabye I'll have a wireless network anyway, to some linux desktop somewhere upstairs, that acts as my development box. But that's the solution - laptop downstairs for entertainment and desktop upstairs for power user stuff. Oh and I have a CD walkman type thing that I can jog with and it never skips :) And, to finish off the kit bill of materials: a bluetooth-controlled electric "peripherals" for the chicks >grin<
Jim

MadPole:
Well, maybe Paul's discovery is worth investigating then? I am talking about Linux TV box which, in theory, could eradicate the need to have a PC at all - just a quiet laptop to communicate with the box and watch movies in the toilet hehehehehe....

But this is exactly what I was talking about Karl - I entirely agree! The hardware is becoming a "networking journey" when it won't be just a hardware connected via network... it WILL BE NETWORK... bits and pieces of equipment here and there sharing themselves - not just the data. I know, I know, everything is data at the end of the day, but at the moment hardware really is very separate and there is a lot of data which only travels within hardware/computer. Wouldn't it be great to be able to connect (even for money) to some super duper hunderds of thousands pounds worth of 3D graphic card to play some amazing game or watch some amazing 3D movie? At the moment hardware is very teritorial, very enclosed, very black boxy... I guess the main reason for this is a commercial one. But with prices coming down silly this commercial reason becomes irrelevant. Manufactures know they can't get away with selling expensive hardware - so they have to focus on marketing "products".

And this gave me an idea just this very moment: that perhaps one of the reasons why the hardware became cheap is because, maybe, it's manufacturing has been "softened up" and computerised already.
I am not talking about computers running production lines here. I am talking here about the whole process, from the beginning to the final product. Because most of the hardware is very, very tiny and delicate – its production has to be controlled very well by processes and cannot be left to human imperfections. It has to be exact, time after time, it should lack any human individualism or god forbid creativity as much as possible. I am talking about people who put hard drives or video cards together. This kind of environment just begs for computer-program-like, precise "yes" and "no" digital processes. Very few would appreciate the fact that certain video card varies in quality depending which person was on production line at the time. So, in other words, the processes governing hardware manufacturing are most likely very software-like. Just one big system with a lot of different programs. True, some of this software needs to incorporate physical objects as well as human people hehehe. But, overall, the hardware is produced by the software. The main advantage of this is that manufacturing can be "component" based – it might be very easy to produce new hardware by just taking bits and pieces of existing processes and just gluing them together conceptually – as software architect would do. And therefore it doesn't really matter to manufacturers that much if they sell their hardware cheap – because they softened it so such extent that they can produce all kind of varieties of it. In other words, like in software, the quanlity is being replaced by quantity in hardware – rather than having one main and expensive computer, one CPU, one sound card – we end up with all those gadgets which have bits and pieces of hardware duplicated all over the place but it doesn't really matter. Neither to us or to manufacturer.

But maybe, maybe, the main point here is that hardware is already being produced to large extent by the software. The cannibalistic loop has been closed.

And as far as my hardware preferences go: DECENT DESK is my main requirement, and then my own place. Without that I am not even in position to consider what my choices would be. This situation put me in a funny, "vagrant", minimalist position and that is why I go on and on and on about remote computing hehehehe...so all I need is access to Internet. I would also love to have my own dedicated box there, but we need faster Internet speeds for that. The temporary workaround while waiting for that to happen would be for me to burn my own, customised version of Knoppix. I could then work locally on any machine and just download / upload any data I need. And configure Knoppix to do most of those things automatically.

paul:
I agree with some of what you guys have been saying. Its true I have given lots of the traditional jobs that have been my PC reserve to smaller more portable units.

I dont have a PC at home, just my portable. I use my phone for communicating, storing contacts and calendar and sometimes as an actual phone ( and use the PC as just the backup of my contacts and calendar ). My IPOD as portable music player, backup device and contacts backup.

My Laptop PC is just becoming a backup device and web browser. Maybe I experiment with a few things ( which is VOIP at the moment ) and use something else to effect this new change.

I have been toying with buying a Shuttle PC with a TV card and DVB Satellite card and wireless keyb, mouse to act as a linux webserver and media centre.

However, have any of you guys played with

Windows XP Media Centre. Its looking good.

jimbo:
God yeah, I forgot to mention my mobile. In fact, I have two of them, it's actually cheaper, because they both come with 500 "free" minutes, which is cheaper than paying for calls, once the free runs out. Two phones cheaper than one, you have to love it. Anyway I love your diplomacy, paul "I agree with some of what you guys..." Nice way of telling us we are wrong lol.

Few thoughts: Scart leads on tv's are a nightmare, sooner they switch to gigabit ethernet or something the better. Finally, regarding windows media player: first of all, I do not trust MS with anything, so I do not want to invest my time into learning media player. Secondly, I don't run windows :)
Thirdly, now that I'm used to Linux, there is something horrible about windows software. The look and feel of windows is absolutely repugnant to me now. I just do not feel comfortable using it, in the same way I would feel vaguely ill at ease if a leather clad queer was offering me a slice of celery and winking. Or something. Windows makes my skin crawl, windows software is the same. I know I'm preaching to the choir, and it is not my intention to convert. It is more that I'm just self indulgently expressing this sentiment that is surprising to me, as I used to love Windows, back in circa 96-98. The exception is windows games, they are good, but then again, they bypass the OS and go straight to the video card.

paul:
No this time I was being serious, and not being american.

I cant be arsed anymore to spend ages configuring a linux box to do
stuff, when I can buy a box to do it for me.

I was excited about the DreamBox i spoke to Andrew about, but
unfortunately it doesnt have support for cracking NDS, which was the
whole purpose for me.

Thats why I harped on a lil about the shuttle.

Using linux and this box, with a few other bits and bobs ( DVD-RW, DVB,
TV-OUT ) I am sure one could get something miles better than Windows
Media Centre, TiVO, Dreambox, and it can be a web server too, and a
server for my VoIP PBX ( www.asterisk.org ).

Although I really cant get motivated to spend the cash and weeks it
takes to configure.


I want a linux media centre distro that does all this for me. Any
takers on that ?