Δαφνη Ευτυχια Αρθουρος

It's handy to get some magazines in dead-tree format, especially free ones (which reminds me, I need to renew my free subscriptions). I keep one of the two most recent issues of InfoWorld on the kitchen table to read at breakfast, and the other next to the toilet. It makes it harder to copy/paste quotes that I find interesting (uh, okay, it makes it easier to cut and paste literally, but harder to cross between the physical-literal and the online-metaphorical, okay?), but it means having reading material away from my desk and my bed without having to first outload it to my PDA. (The aesthetic pleasures of reading a physical book aren't a big deal to me in this case, though they do come up when I think about novels instead of trade magazines. OTOH, the observations that I seem to use my eyes differently (or at least strain them differently) and that for some reason some things seem easier to read-and-absorb on paper than on the screen do pertain -- they're just not smartass enough.)

I was just skimming an article about 3G mobile networks, and the bit about 400Kbps at $80/month caught my attention. Yeah, that's not super-fast compared to what a lot of my friends are getting, but it beats my 56K modem which seems to vary between 40Kbps and 59Kbps depending on whether Mercury is in trine with Jupiter or something. My first thought was, "Instead of replacing my POTS landline and modem with broadband (dry DSL if I can find it cheaply enough, or cable if Comcast ever provides data service within the city), I could replace my POTS landline and my cellular service with 3G mobile. (I've not yet gotten around to building a parabolic antenna to see whether I can pick up a reflection of the free Wi-Fi signal at the Inner Harbor. That's a project for Real Soon Now, maybe next week if next week doesn't feel like most of this week has.) It reminds me a bit of ex-housemates who set up the house Internet connection over a Ricochet frob (IIRC, we switched off between Ricochet and dialup depending on how much speed we needed at the moment), which I would have done myself when I moved to Baltimore, except that Ricochet didn't cover Baltimore at that time. (It did shortly thereafter, but seems to have vanished entirely since. (Or did it just change its name and business model?))

Switching to cellular for my main Internet connection would mean making some changes to the way I approach my computer setup. It would mean carrying my Internet connection with me, which would mean carrying my "main computer" with me so that it didn't wind up being unreachable whenever I left the house. Basically, it would mean replacing my home computers with a truly personal computer, making any left-at-home machines more peripherals than infrastructure. (I'm assuming, for the moment, that I could carry on a voice conversation at the same time as I was using a data connection, using that $80/month service. That's something I'd have to check if I were to take this beyond the thought-experiment level.)

Currently, I'm using a bunch of computers on a house LAN. Speeds range from 66 MHz to... uh, somewhere in the 350 MHz range, if I remember right -- I have to go check my notes on the most recent gifts I added to the network. I've got some cron jobs that assume the Internet is always nearby, including the one that keeps my disk quota at my ISP from overflowing with mail, and I count on being able to fetch files (or even make use of tools) on my home machines from anyplace where I can run telnet (and occasionally a web browser if I need to run a Windows program over VNC). The largest disk drive I own is 40 GB and is, of course, in my file server, which runs NFS, Appletalk, and Samba. (Actually the drive isn't even mine, it's very-long-term borrowed from a friend.) To reasonably carry my Internet connection with me instead of leaving it at home, I would have to carry my file server and most of the functionality I'd want to access as well.

The thing is, that might be possible. Maybe not within my budget, but as long as I'm conducting thought experiments ...

Larger disk drives have gotten smaller. The last time I was in a computer store, I peered at the disk drives (I was looking into the feasibility of buying more drives the same size as the one on my file server to make a RAID system) and it took me a while to find one as small as my "big drive" -- there were a lot of 80G and 160G, but just one 40G tucked in a corner. IIRC, there are laptops with 80G drives these days, n'est-ce pas?

One of the reasons I've got so many computers is so that I can split up the work among a bunch of slowish (by today's standards) boxes -- dividing a bunch of tasks which, all taken together, would bog down any of the boxes I had when I started setting up my LAN. Other reasons are so that I can have workstations in various rooms, and so that I can run multiple operating systems. There's also a security motivation, and a "place to tinker, experiment, and learn about networking stuff" aspect. Well what if I managed to get my hands on a top of the line, extremely fast laptop with a largeish screen, tons of RAM, and a nice big disk? It might or might not be as fast as all of my current machines combined, but it ought to be fast enough to keep up with everything I'm trying to do interactively at once plus all the little infrastructure tasks (such as name service). I'd lose the safety of having a physically separate machine act as the firewall, which scares me a little, but other than that I could have my multiple operating systems running on virtual machines, though having at least one architecture run as an emulator instead of native would cost me a bit of performance.

(I'm thinking that it's easier to emulate an Intel VM under Mac OS X than it is to emulate Mac hardware on an Intel box, right? So the question would be whether I can run VMware (or something similar) using OS X as the base OS and then run Intel emulators for the Windows and Linux virtual machines within VMware, or whether I'd run a Windows emulator under OS X, run VMware within that, and then have my virtual Windows and Linux machines inside that copy of VMware. (Not that I'd need to use Linux for as many things as I currently do, if I had OS X sitting there, but I'd probably want access to my existing tools and environment at least at first; I'm not sure whether I'd set up virtual machines for BSD and Sunos or not.))

So I would consolidate most of my personal computing environment into one box and carry it with me all the time. Instead of borrowing someone else's machine and firing up telnet to access "home" files, they'd be right on the box in my hand. All the machines at home would be optional extensions to my Main Machine, and be effectively dormant (maybe even switched off! *gasp*) when I wasn't at home -- when I used them, it would be to make a workstation available to a guest, or for experimenting with stuff that I didn't want to put on the main box without tinkering first, or for managing devices too bulky to carry with me all the time, such as a laser printer and a flatbed scanner, or for when I wanted to spread things out over more screens. Maybe I'd make one of the home machines into a PVR. The home machines would either not rely on the file server or would only do things when I was home, 'cause I'd be carrying all the file-server files with me.

I guess the PDA would still be useful for taking notes when I'm standing or walking or don't have room to set the laptop down and open it up, but it would no longer be my main means of carrying data with me.

Handling phone calls would be a little less convenient, since the connection would be on the laptop, not on my wee little Motorola handset, but I figure I could plug a handsfree headset into the laptop. (Come to think of it, if I went with VOIP, it wouldn't matter whether the G3 service handled simultaneous voice and data use. Or is VOIP another monthly bill added on? I've never really looked closely at how VOIP works.)

Hmm. I'd have to give up my plans to eventually set up one of my home machines to monitor the burglar alarm sensors (when the house was burgled, they stole the burglar alarm's central unit but didn't bother to take the door, window, and motion sensors) and email my phone if it detected something amiss. And I'd have to worry about battery life and keeping things charged (oh my ... Pennsic ...). I've already mentioned that a "soft" firewall makes me a bit nervous. And the initial hardware cost would be pretty damned high (and I'd no longer be able to upgrade by simply plugging in another hand-me-down box). OTOH, it'd be a significantly faster connection for a monthly cost comparable to what I'm currently paying for the POTS line and cellular service combined, and I'd always have my tools at my fingertips.

Note that I don't actually see myself doing this (largely because of that huge initial hardware (and VMware license) cost (but I wonder how it would compare to the cost buying an UPS for each of my existing machines...)), but it's interesting to consider how my approach to using my computer would change, as well as how my approach to configuring my machine(s) would have to change, as a result of shifting from a "this is the computer system in my house" paradigm to "this is the computer on my person". I've been thinking in the "build out my spiffy home computing environment and then see what access to it I can have when I'm away" model for a very long time now. Switching to "this is my one computer" would be a dramatic change. If nothing else, thinking about this has suddenly driven home to me the difference between thinking about a computer as a "home computer" and thinking about it as a "personal computer".

Hmm. 'Nuther thought. What about a backpack containing a handful of Mac Minis and some batteries, plus a keyboard and an LCD monitor? Those things are tiny and don't weigh much. (I mean really, I held one and it felt like a doggone toy. Reading the specs didn't quite register, but picking one up was startling: "There is HOW MUCH computing power in this ... this ... this plastic doodad that looks like like a Tupperware sandwich-holder and feels like it doesn't even have the sandwich in it?" Batteries would add a lot to the weight of the system, of course.) I could dedicate one to being a firewall, and if the performance cost of running an Intel emulator were too high, then I could still take the "just throw another box in the backpack" upgrade path and give each Windows or Linux host its own CPU. The PDA would get more use, 'cause using the backpack network would involve pulling out the keyboard and monitor and finding someplace to put them, instead of just opening a clamshell, but a backpack netowork of Minis would be a conversation-starter ...

Now if only I could afford to drop a bunch of cash on hardware.