Quantum crawls

Last month`s news headlines, usually alive with evidence of the ingenuity in our industry, made for less than electrifying reading.

We read about handtops (as opposed to palmtops), which pack more computing power than PDAs possess into devices slightly larger than PDAs. We were reminded of PC pioneer Bob Bemer`s groundbreaking work which led to the escape key on PC keyboards, and we drummed our fingers reading about Amazon`s supply of Portable Media Centres - on which you can play music and watch videos.

Is this what our industry has come to? I already have a PC on which to play DVDs and listen to music. What`s Microsoft saying - PCs aren`t good enough for this anymore? And no offence to the dead, but does remembrance of the genius that facilitated the escape key really rate alongside reports of cross-border application assurance? And if I really wanted a big bloody PDA, I`d have stuck with the really early ones, which, if I`m not mistaken, had docking stations the size of Star Trek landing bays.

I have a friend who once told me that people shouldn`t make so much of quantum leaps, because they really don`t cover much distance at all. To demonstrate that I was really listening to him, even though I had the Mozambican ocean to look at while he was ranting (incidentally, it was a press junket with hard drive maker, Quantum), I`ve decided to call these inventions quantum crawls.

And I`ve also decided to offer suggestions of more inventions that cover very little ground really slowly, in the hope of making really large amounts of money.

Having had the rewarding opportunity to work on a Mac this week, and witnessing the workings of its version of the mouse, I`ve come up with a whole different idea for these little clickers. The Mac mouse features clickable parts in places you wouldn`t expect (the bottom part of the device sort of fractionally dips into the top shell) and this, by the way, works really well, so here`s my idea:

I`ve decided to offer suggestions of more inventions that cover very little ground really slowly, in the hope of making really large amounts of money.

Carel Alberts, special editions editor, ITWeb Brainstorm

Instead of selling mice alongside PCs, what say we embed them in desks, so that if the mouse breaks, you can send out a service engineer to replace the whole desk. Everybody knows that desks cost a lot more than little peripherals the size of matchboxes, and that built-in obsolescence creates jobs. This is a no-brainer.

Internal phone calls are really painful things in an office staffed with salespeople and journalists who spend time away. You have to wait a little bit to figure out whether it`s a legitimate outside call or whether it`s the lazy bastard next door who can`t be bothered to come across and ask the guy next to you to join him for a cigarette, and in the process witness for himself that he`s not there.

Plus, you have to memorise the ringtones of all the phones around you, so you know which ones are your friends` and which ones belong to people whose phone you wouldn`t pick up even if you knew they had won the lottery.

But the absolute worst is actually picking up someone`s phone in a weak moment, even though you know it`s internal and it`s probably the same guy who always phones when his friend is out, just to have someone put the phone down in your ear.

The main reason for this happening is misdialling. So what I`m trying to say in a really roundabout way is that it would be really cool if, like cellphones, more ordinary phones had a little console display which clearly shows the three- or four-digit extension you just misdialled, as well as the ability to backspace.

The other reason is, I think, bad blood in the office. So to save someone having to put the phone down in your ear because he hates you, caller-ID on all phones would help a lot.

I did a poll. Somebody here wants a keyboard with the Caps Lock and Insert keys WAY far away from anything else, in places you wouldn`t ordinarily type. Like near the escape key. I agree.

USB 2.0 is a wonderful thing. It`s as good as FTP and better than one of its own best applications - the flash drive. But in my tablet PC, generally also a good thing, the two USB connectors are placed closely together. One is needed for the display, the other for things like the CD-ROM drive and the USB hub Targus sent here the other day.

But even though you can also rotate the tablet`s display physically and electronically, there`s no point, because you still need to connect the rotated display to the keyboard, and the USB-cable extending from the keyboard is very short. All of which means I have to perch the display half out of its cradle if I want to connect other USB devices, all of which is giving me a crick in the neck.

All of which means, in turn, that someone should probably tell Motion Computing to lengthen its cables or split its ports. It`ll make a lot of money.