In spite of all sorts of efforts, I remain amazed at how many cables still go in and out of my PC. My home theatre PC, which I recently wanted to take somewhere, had me unplugging power, ether, audio, digital audio/SPDIF, keyboard, mouse, cable in, video out and a serial cable providing PPP to the old Tivo. It could easily have had another video, USB devices like a printer and more.

How about 2 wires into the next generation PC, or failing that 3. Power (no way around that yet) and 10 gigabit optical fiber. Ok, so we're not quite ready to run our HDTV video display (which needs over 3 gigabits for 2MP) on the ethernet, though we could quite often get away with it for everything but gaming if the display device had an X server with video decoders in it. So let's accept the 3rd cable as the video cable.

We made a mistake going to dedicated protocol wires like usb and firewire. Hard to say it's a mistake since it's so much better than what we had before, but I think IP is better. Instead, we could have built small hub boxes that have the power and the ethernet (gigabit now), into which small peripherals that need power like keyboards, mice and such would be plugged. Of course printers and other devices that already have their own external power would just need the ethernet.

Or, to extend an idea I pushed last year in the blog, a universal DC power system would be developed where data was exchanged (on minimal 5v power) to tell the power supply what to provide before the full power came on. Then you would buy blocks with the data and more sophisticated and powerful switching supplies which could run the devices we currently have 20 bricks and wallwarts to power -- routers, scanners, phones, external drives etc.

Of course, where it made sense we could even drop the ether part and have wireless, though we still need the power of course except for the lowest power intermittent devices that can have batteries.

It's amazing how many wires snake out of my desk, and even more out the back of my audio/video shelf. Sure would be nice if it could be a lot fewer.