If you have a desktop computer with multiple components (tower, printer, monitor, speakers, etc.), everything has two sets of wires, one going to an outlet and one going to the tower.
It would be neater, nicer, and less tangled if one cord formed a backbone of twined USB and power cables; one end is a plug for the outlet (and CAT-5), and the other a USB hub for the tower. Strung along the cable are places to plug into the power and information cords.
The main benefit of this comes from always leaving the cord(s) in place, rather than adding and removing cords every time you mess about with your hardware.
The main downside is making sure you buy a vine with enough plugin the first time around.-- Tem42, Oct 03 2010 USB? How slow is this computer going to be?-- infidel, Oct 03 2010 well it could be a faster standard than USB. An optical one perhaps.-- WcW, Oct 03 2010 That might be better. Internal data transfer speeds are usually order/s of magnitude faster than Gb LAN, as I understand it.-- infidel, Oct 03 2010 The new USB 3.0 data transfer rate is 4.8 GBPS... that ain't bad. This idea is not far from bakeable, and very soon, methinks. Bun. [+]-- Grogster, Oct 03 2010 I would like "vine" to be less metaphorical. Ideally, this would incorporate real foliage, for esthetics' sake. [+]-- mouseposture, Oct 03 2010 4.8 Gb/s is still a bit short of if you want to support big/multiple monitors. It'll need a redesign anyway, because the reason for all these power leads is that USB only gives you a trickle of power.
We could ignore the monitor though and just make a cable that carryies a couple of kilowatts and has a data rate as good as USB 2. It's only the monitor that needs an absurdly high data rate.-- Bad Jim, Oct 03 2010 That and high resolution graphics transfers. I've just ditched three NAS devices becasue their transfer speed is limited to 5 Gbps, which creates a coffee break every time you call up a 400MB file, which I do quite a lot with high res satellite mapping images.-- infidel, Oct 03 2010 I'd say there was some other bottleneck in the system. 5Gb/s works out as 625 Megabytes a second. Unless you are a real caffeine fiend you should not be having a coffee break during a 400MB transfer. Possibly you need a faster processor or more RAM to decode it.
I've got computer games like Starcraft 2 installed on my external USB 2 hard drive and I don't feel the need for a coffee break when I start them up.-- Bad Jim, Oct 03 2010 random, halfbakery