Slashdot Mirror
Five PC Innovations the Industry Should Get To
An anonymous reader writes "Flexbeta.net has an article which describes 5 great technological advancements in computing that just about every PC user wants." From the article: "Why has there been such a sudden lack in innovation as of late? Are we in a technological drought? I like to stick to my own diagnosis of the industry as being too concerned with keeping a steady cash flow over social experimentation with new products but then again that's just an opinion from a little guy."
1. Better fans. Fast fans are going to make noise. There are quieter fans, and newer technologies like tip magnetic driven fans.
2. Better Cases. A BOTTLE OPENER?! What the hell? I stopped reading there.
3. Wireless everything. Sounds great until you realize wireless everything will probably conflict with your neighbor's wireless everything and the fact that encryption to keep your wireless everything will be another burden most users won't bother with. And of course, you still need power, so you're either back to wires or you have a lot of batteries.
4. More USB storage key uses. Already on the way via some new portable application standard. And, no, game keys won't work because you can still copy the files to other USB keys and thus the game's copy protection is worthless. They want you have to the actual CD (with their patented copy protection) because it makes piracy more difficult.
5. Store re-haul. Your hard drive is the same physical size because you probably want a lot of capacity that's really fast. If you could be happy with 5 gigs of storage that's pretty slow, you could have a smaller drive. And, yes, they're working on bootable flash drives.
I can't believe this is on Slashdot.
Slashdotted before I could get to the second page. Crap.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
Before you seek inspiration, lets see what you'll get:
1) Quiet case fans
2) Cool cases
3) Wireless
4 & 5) Slashdotted by the time I got to them... but my guess is that they're equally... innovative and astounding... I guess.
Does anyone have a mirror? I think it's important to first make the existing problems go away rather than jump head-first into groundbreaking technology without considering potential problems, though that's how it has always been. I'm referring to spyware, viruses, and general malware. Of course, fixing the operators will most likely do it! ;)
A blog like any other.
Servers that survive /.ing...
say anything about a non-Microsoft OS that we can use to do everything we can do on Windows?
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Patents, and Lawyers.
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Okay, some things like the USB key to function as a verifier (to avoid needing to plug a disc in for games) are a good idea, but I really think that he's asking a bit too much, too fast. I'm not fully versed in the development of today's hardware, but I do know for a fact that miniaturization costs money. That's the big reason why laptops still cost much more than desktops. Additionally, the wireless data transfer standards are still not sufficiently fast to support purely wireless connections. Sure, there are certain examples, but these are specific (like building 802.11b/g cards into printers?), but in general, stuff like Bluetooth can't handle the kind of speeds that consumers demand these days. And wireless monitors for near-consumer prices? Forget it!
I don't fault this guy for dreaming -- that's the stuff innovation is made of -- but I do fault him for thinking that companies seem to owe him this technology for some reason...
(Note: Slashdotted already?)
to a mirror showing the next generation computer.
That's amazing. I wasn't sure if it was really going to happen. I hope a new Hot Coffee mod is realized where you can be Karl Rove. What would the character do ?
Aw, somebody already did get to that.
Someone will soon offer an operating system for free. Not Linux, but something like the Mac. Most likely, Google is going to release their own operating system. It won't have more features than Microsoft Windows. It will however, be more stable, and similiar to the Mac which is based on a UNIX core.
Since it is free, Google won't need to protect a monopoly unlike some other companies. That will encourage further innovation
I've used Windows, Solaris, and Linux. But if google made an os, I would switch to that pretty quickly.
"Why has there been such a sudden lack in innovation as of late? Are we in a technological drought?"
They are 100% right. I have a new dual core processor, with two 7800 GTX's running in SLI, 4 10,000 RPM Raptor Hard Drives in a RAID array running Windows x64 edition.
But the the real innovation these days is in quieter fans.
The key with innovation is that it usually doesn't come directly from companies, but rather academic and research based groups. Large companies merely buy and build upon interesting research work in order to create large profits.
Voice your opinion!
1. permanent read/write random-access storage that doesn't spin
2. ubiquitous ten-megabit wireless networking coast to coast
3. direct computer to brain link
4. batteries with 10 times existing capacity, or fuel cell that runs on common cheap organic liquid such as wood alchohol.
5. common-sense AI knowledgebase/engine to check spreadsheets, documents, databases for obvious errors.
get the feeling this guy smoked a little too much dope during a Jetsons marathon?
FLR
" but then again that's just an opinion from a little guy.".
;)
no one's going to listen to you if you're a dick
my blog
1. Large-capacity, solid-state hard drives
2. What about those HDDs that were being developed where the bits were "standing on end"?
3. Biometrics instead of passwords
4. Improvements in voice-recognition software
5. DECREASED prices on things that shouldn't be as expensive as they are. For example, why do floppy disks often cost ten times as much as CD-Rs?
6. Large-scale ad-hoc networking. It'd be really nice if you could create a mobile hotspot with a range that increases with every computer that connects. I suppose this would mean that we'd have to make wireless adapters that can operate in ad-hoc and client mode at the same time.
7. Quantum computers, dammit!
I am scientifically inaccurate.
I want faster load ups. I want a machine that turns on and boots instantaneously. I want games to start running the moment I double-click on them. I want my 2 GHz chip with its generation of software to perform quicker than my 400 MHz chip did with its generation of software.
Ok, I understand we can't all get what we want, so I want to know why what I want isn't happening.
How about websites posted in slashdot that would not get slashdotted? Now that would be innovative.
If I was motivated, I'd patent this and make something of it, but too lazy. the Power and maybe data cables of computer cases should be integrated into the case. This is mostly due to my like of windows (The physical, not binary type. Linux all the way) and modding a case, and that too many wires uglify the inside of my case. I think it's a good idea. Just have contacts somehow built into the drive bays so that you can just plug a drive in, and it'll run without having to fiddle with wires.
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
1= flash start up ie no booting at all 2) Superior power access ratio compared to size of task ie start photoshop in a flash 3 more of the same
It's slashdotted, but here's my top three wishes:
1. PCs that finally boot from USB and FireWire.
2. PCs that can boot into target disk mode.
3. PCs that go to sleep and wake up instantly.
My Mac laptops have had this for many years -- a decade already? -- but I still can't find any PCs that have this standard. This is brain dead stuff that should be there but isn't. Come on PC manufacturers, catch up before you try and "innovate".
obviously no deficiencies vs. no obvious deficiencies
Hey all, I'm the writer of the article and I just want to make a few things clear:
This list is just mainly things I personally have gripes with in the industry, not so much a "What's most important to do in the next 5 years" article.
I agree with you guys on the fact that there are many leaps and advancements in a lot of the technology sectors but I must say that in many ways, innovation and new ideas are not coming out like they used to.
It's great that they are building on the present technology but how many years do we expect them to re-tool the "same" thing over and over again until we demand something better and completely new?
Call my article bad or the "worst article ever" but again, this is just a playful list of things I personally would like to happen in the next 5 years and I would of included at least 10 more things but I'm a lazy bastard and I wrote the thing at nearly 3 A.M. before passing out on my desk.
Just...take it [the article] for what it is and try to honestly and truthfully discuss your ideas and wants for the future, because if no one talks about this sort of thing then things will just keep looking the same for the next decade without any real considerable change.
A better mouse trap.
(For the mice with legs, and teath)
Where's my desktop batteries? It'd be really nice to be able to count on my machine not droping because of a momentary power interruption. This is one reason I find myself using my laptop more and more.
My username does not make me Apathetic. It's irony, get it?
So if you take money from someone else to pay off a person's debt and steal money from other people to pay for the guy's health care, THAT is what freedom is? Were you a consultant for Orwell with that Newspeak thing? :-)
Ok, what is an RM?
HD-3D porn.
1. Way faster bootup, application startup, shutdown
2. Better security, like a smart card, but better
3. Slashdot archives the web sites in the stories, ala the Wayback archive, geee, was that a smart idea or what?
4. Add on stuff that works like legos. Plug in a faster processor, or plug on another processor when you need more speed. Want more graphics capablilty? Plug on a graphics accelerator. None of this open the case and limited PCI slots, just keep plugging more on. Go buy a 40 Gig addon and plug it in, then go get another 100 Gig drive and add it on, just keep going. Soon we would see "I plugged in 3 Terabytes using extra support and SuperGlue"
5. An Internet that allowed segmentation. If I didn't care for porn, and didn't want my little kids exposed, set a flag in the firewall and everything classed porn can't get in. But if my kids wanted to browse the barney web site......
But I don't think so... Things are much better on the hardware front than they use to be. Forget the OS. The hardware alone is head and shoulders from where is was when I pieced together my first 286.
First off - No more bloody jumpers. Most of the current motherboards set the voltages, frequencies, and all the other stuff that use to require careful jumpering all over now is done via the BIOS. Way cool.
Secondly, the processors are stupendously faster than what they use to be. Just rebuilt a Sun 420 with 4x450mhz CPU, 4G of RAM, and some old 18G SCSI HHD. This thing went for stupid money a few years ago (like over 50k USD). Built a home system for me with 4G of RAM, RAID 0 SATA drives, and a 3800+ CPU for under a grand which runs circles around the Sun box. Getting ready to build a dual core Photoshop box for my bride in a couple months for under 2K.
Back in the day I use to take a razor to my IDE and SCSI cables to get better airflow. Now we have SATA ribbons that are fast enough to walk away from SCSI in a workstation config. Hey, they are hot swappable too! Did I mention cheap?
Onboard equipment is pretty nice these days. Dual gigabit Ethernet ports, sound, firewire, a mess of USB ports, 4-8 SATA ports with RAID 0,1, or 5... Getting hard to find an excuss to use the PCI/PCIe ports. (nature abhors a vacuum, however)
+++ UGUCAUCGUAUUUCU
How can others innovate while Amazon has a patent on "Innovation" itself?!
About 40/129 USD, apparently.
"I'd love to have an external LCD display showing the time,"
Is that like a PIN number, being built on NT technology, or one of them ATM machines?
--
Internet Explorer (n): Another bug -- that is, a feature that can't be turned off -- in Windows.
There is a long list of PC features that you may want, but are you willing to pay for them?
How do you expect to see innovation in products which are commodities engaged in a race to the minimum price?
If Slashdot were chemistry it would look like this:Cadaverine
I don't think just about everybody wants those things. I think, for the most part, "just about everybody" don't realize options in computers.
The average user doesn't realize that fans can be quieter, or that a computer even needs to run cooler.
The average user just says, "That's the computer." when looking at the case. They don't think of a way that it could be better in any way. Sure, slashdotters do, but "just about everybody" isn't one of us.
The average user doesn't know how to plug things in (I just tell people plug things into the hole that it fits in and then plug the speaker in the hole with a picture of a speaker next to it and then they get it on their own), but they don't think of wireless everything. I tell (middle age adult) coworkers that my computer has a wireless mouse and keyboard and they're very impressed. They don't think of extrapolating like that.
The average user doesn't know what a USB key is.
The average user doesn't know much about hardware inside the computer at all (my website, ChristianNerds.com has a question and answer section, where they email me questions about computers and I try to answer them, and I get at least one person every week asking what a printer is... A Printer! "Um, it's the thing that prints out your stuff onto paper."). The average user doesn't know enough to know what else to want. They like faster and they like flashier graphics. That's about it. Oh, and music.
Luke
before innovation can make a comback and we begin to see this slowdown end.
How much more 'good' and spectaculare things would we have, if it wasn't for the Evil DragGoon the last 20 years?
And now with this big push by gates to totaly control our computers, intelectual property, software and thought of expression,.. I think many people and companies are just plain afraid to invest or let ideas out-of-the-bag, for fear that m$ and their henchman will swoop down to ruin it.
Linux is having serious problems, which seem to be mounting lately...and it should be VERY obvious as to the reasons and causes behind it..
However hope is NOWHERE near lost!!
gates may have alot of money and 'key' people behind him, and what.. 50,000 employees?
But we, 'the community', represent not only the Linux freaks, but quit a few on 'this-side' of the 'culture war' which is well under way around the whole earth.
We CAN make up for what we lack in money, with fortitude, wisdom, and above allll.. patience :)
-- The InterNet is a terrible things to waste.. Arrest Bill Gates and close down Microsoft immediately.
I will gladly loose all of life's battles.. in order to win the war..
If you look at the rate of progress throughout the '70s and '80's and the first half of the '90's in the personal computing industry, it seemed as if there was a new miracle on sale every month.
This is because there was intense competition between a number of personal computer and workstation and server vendors using an array of technologies and platforms.
Then, as smaller companies died off, instead of being replaced, thay were smothered outright by platforms seeking "world domination" - Linux is partly to blame, killoing the market for specialized server and workstation hardware, but really, most of the problem was and is Microsoft and Intel.
For a while, the Gaming industry bouyed the rate of innovation, but the game consoles are getting better and better, and the market for spiffy new peripherals for spiffy new games is slowly shrinking.
This isn't to say that there's nothing new under the sun. The computer industry outside the PC/Server market is berzerk with innovation at the moment: the next gen consoles, FPGA SOC's, 24 megapixel DSLRs and cheap 5mp digicams, HDTV solid-state digital camcorders, amazing new mobile phone technologies being rolled into smaller and sexier phones on almost a daily basis, PMP systems ranging from the simple and stylish iPod to HDTV DVR's.
It's just that the personal computing field and the server/workstation field has collapsed into singularity. You got your choice of Unix-derived OS's running GUI environments on top, running on the latest version of the bog-standard IBM PC Clone. Everything else has died off. No wonder it feels as if no more innovation is possible... of course new innovations are possible. It's just that the barrier to entry is now insurmountable.
So microprocessors to make cars and pacemakers go will be getting hot new tech, and cell phones will get smaller and easier to use and last hundreds of hours on a single charge, but your Linux workstation or iMac or Windows tablet, 5 years from now, will be featured and equipped exaclty as it is now. It might be marginally faster at doing what it already does... but it won't be doing anything new.
World Domination is never a good thing.
SoupIsGood Food
I want a real 3D display with a real 3D input device!
... :}
Of course I have no idea how the latter would have to look like or I'd have already patented it
Andreas
"Google is going to release their own operating system."
Why would they do that?
When you write software that runs on any operating system like Google does, you don't care about operating systems.
As applications become more abstracted from the OS by implementations of standards, operating systems matter less and less. Why do you think MS is so big on "embrace and extend"? They have to control the standards so they can funnel people into Windows.
Google is aimed squarely at the next chunk of value in computing: abstracted functionality. Let Apple and MS squabble over desktop searching. I can already search my Gmail from any of my several PCs. The remaining relevant applications won't be *too* far behind.
All your fancy-smancy gismos. Why don't you overclock my abacus!
Quack, quack.
silent no moving parts machine that boots into emailclient in 5 seconds or less.
... if they made a ... might be feasible .. or will be soon enough
my cellphone actually fits that
dockingstation for that with keyboard/mouse/display
connectors
Actualy, using a key for a game would be a lot better then using a CD. A CD can be copied very easily, alternatively, you could put some kind of real authentification on a key.
autopr0n is like, down and stuff.
The advances in PCs over the last ten years has been nothing short of amazing. I'm not one to balk at the latest developments, but every industry goes through lulls. Considering that I was using a 486DX2 w/ 8MB of memory back in '95, I have trouble sympathizing with people that whine about the current state of advancement.
Of course, I'm sure things like HP laying off 15,000 technical employees and then hiring more management have nothing to do with it.
On laptops, put the g.d. processor behind the screen. I don't want to burn my lap. Put it on the part that DOESN'T GO ON THE LAP. That also means that my lap isn't keeping the processor air intake from taking in air. Duh!
How about a wallpaper that doesn't have me itching to change it all the time? I'm tired of this endless searching through sites like deviantart and pixelgirlpresents. I want one wallpaper,forever. Or at least one that keeps me happy 6 months out of the year.
We need laptop batteries to last DAYS, not mere hours. And charge in minutes.
Batteries should not simply 'wear out' from charge/discharge and normal use as well.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Quieter fans are out there. A couple years ago I kinda hit a wall with my case, I'd had the same case for like 6 years, and it just couldn't do the kind of cooling I needed without some fast fans. So I got a new case, figured while I was at it since the noise annoyed me I'd get some silent fans. I went from having 1 case fan to having 4 case fans, and the overall system noise dropped to less tahn half of what it was previously.
SilenX and Papst both make some excellently quiet fans that aren't too exspensive. They don't move quite as much air as some others, but still plenty to keep your shit cool if you properly plan airflow (good cooling comes from good airflow, not just sticking fans in randomly).
The site appears to be down...
s how&id=99">MirrorDot
:(
MirrorDot URL:
/ /www.flexbeta.net/main/articles.php?action=show&id =99 )
Coral
http://www.flexbeta.net/main/articles.php?action=
(OK, there is NOTHING wrong with that link code
http://www.mirrordot.com/find-mirror.html?http:
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
You insensitive clod.
1. GPS built-in to laptops. So you can use mapping software more easily on the go.
Although this isn't a laptop, my Garmin iQue 3600 is a Palm PDA outfitted with a GPS and fantastic mapping software. They also have a newer model.
I swear that this should be possible:
How about an OS that can identify conflicts and tell you which program is messing up which other program?
Instead of installing and uninstalling software or shutting down things at random via start up groups, why can't the OS - I am thinking Windows of course - be designed to monitor what each app is doing and track when two programs conflict.
Or how about that holy grail that every new and improved OS promises: that a bad app will be contained and will not crash the whole machine?
In more general terms these days I look at Picassa as an example of a program that does something that I didn't know I needed, does it really, really well, and was easy to learn and easier to install.
MS Office should be so easy to use.
Three Squirrels
I can't read your article, so apparantly #6 should be "A server that doesn't suck" but from the mirrors of the first page I've seen and the /. comments, most of what you want is already out there.
Fans are easy, go buy quiet fans. There are plenty of companies out there perfectly willing to sell you quiet fans for your system. Mine is totally outfitted with them.
IF you want shit on your case, put it on then. Yuo can glue a bottle opener on, or add a tape deck, and so on. Some of your ideas aren't possible, like a soda dispenser (soda dispensers require large tanks of syurp, CO2, and a water hookup) but if you want your case to do more, make it do more.
Wireless everything, well go for it. You can get all your controllers wireless, and your speakers too. Your monitor, well sorry, but we don't have the technology to do 3+ gigabits over the air yet. PEopel keep working on faster wireless, but it's not at the level for monitors. Of course, even if ou do go wireless to the tower, you still have to have wires for power, or battries. You can't transmit enough power through the air to power a device efficiently, and physics is the problem there, no amount of innovation will solve it.
As for USB key uses, agan call it done. Many dongles for pro software are USB. Not done on consumer software because it would be more expensive than it's worth.
I don't know what your fifth was, and can't glean it from comments.
At any rate, it sounds like most of your personal beefs can either be solved now, or are things to which there are real, physical limits that prevent it from happening.
I hadn't even heard of target disk mode until I got my powerbook, and now I frequently come across instances where I wish I had it for my PC's.
As for booting from USB and FiriWire, I know the new Dells have USB as an option on their F12 boot menu, and they'll show USB key drives as regular drives even when booting to older DOS prompts, like the Win98 CD.
1. Longer lasting batteries for portable uses (laptops, PDA's, cell phones, etc)
2. Advancement in monitor technology, I'm sick of LCD and CRT being the only options, considering all the articles slashdot published on new advancement that havent emerged to the public.
3. Better data storage, no more spinning parts. Affordable solid state technology to replace RAM would be nice too.
4. Ditch the async Internet connections and go with sync. Running personal servers from home and slim clients elsewhere is the future!
5. This is a personal want: IE7 to fully support CSS2! IE is a dinosaur that is doing nothing but holding back web advancement.
Given that those things are what you want, and Macs do that, you want a Mac, right?
Seems pretty simple to me.
Start Running Better Polls
Since I tech computers, I have this dream about the future all the time.
Imagine if every computer had easily removable storage components in the front of one standard size. Only two are required - one storage device for the operating system, and one for your data. Optionally, you could add another storage device for a RAID type system, optical drives, whatever. On the computer is a basic kernel that can only be accessed by someone with an administrator key that NEVER GETS TOUCHED, unless it's by someone who knows what they're doing. It provides basic functionality as well as network support. End users have a lockable key that holds the authorizations to applications they've purchased, as well as application preferences if they go on the road.
Now, for people who don't know computers, this is how their day goes - the computer boots up and requires that they backup, which involves either syncing over the network, or walking over to the fire safe and plugging in the data drive. This should take a trival amount of time if it's done every time they use the computer. If they think something is screwed up, they have the option of syncing with the OS vendor over a network, or simply popping out the OS drive and going to the local grocery store and exchanging it out of a kiosk. Walk over and plug in your application key and drop in your OS drive - it either reformats or in case of failure simply spits out a new one.
Computers right now are amazingly close. You could even mod existing machines with drop-in 5.25 hotswap bays that provide everything above. However, with Geeksquad charging $90 just to look at your machine, I don't think it will happen any time soon.
Let's face it, people... no computer is a real computer without a cigarette lighter in a drive bay.
P -BAY
http://www.geeks.com/details.asp?invtid=SIL-CIGCU
Don't set your case alight!
Why do we still have these big hulking ATX cases? I'm ready for an iMac-esque power rig.
The only successful PC vendor these days is Dell.
Dell is a manufacturer, not a technology company... they assemble boxes cheap. Companies like Compaq, HP & IBM used to actually create new technologies that would either catch on or inspire Taiwanese boardmakers to clone similar features cheap.
The last real PC vendor that actually included new or unique technology into their products was IBM... but of course they're gone now.
Conformity is the jailer of freedom and enemy of growth. -JFK
I want a USB/Firewire Holodeck to really experience porn sites with.
Anything else is just fluff.
I'd like to see affordable keyboards for RSI and a banishment of mice from the planet. Lousy addictive FPS games. I use the Quill Mouse to slow down my RSI. It's great, but I still have use the GUI to debug effectively in Visual Studio.
More than enough BS
1. A real GUI shell. One where you can build your shell pipelines graphically, give the punters an idea of why the whole idea of pipes and filters is really cool.
2. Windows system based on passing OpenGL scripts around. Postscript with enhancements or Javascript, I don't care, so long as I can run inherently safe applets in the GPU, over a network.
3. A 3d GUI that pays attention to the fact that easy games don't throw you into a "free-flight" mode. I don't want to cruise around a first-person-shooter, that's too bloody hard... figure out something the 3rd dimension can MEAN (I like the idea of making it 'attention'... Windows you're not using automatically drift off into the distance and turn into 3d icons when they get far enough away).
4. You shouldn't need to use a different API to run applications locally, on a server, or anywhere else. X11 kind of hides that by making everything remote, but Plan 9 and 8½ did it better. Ideally, you should be able to use the same API even from user or kernel mode.
5. A common programming language that doesn't suck fossilized maggots from a jurassic midden.
Seems like you could get a battery operated atomic clock and stick it on your computer now with some double sided foam or velcro or something like that. It would be nifty if it synced with your clock in the machine somehow (bluetooth?).
Keyboard-cpu. Yes, that would be a nice form factor. It's a laptop basically if you think about it, sans screen. So if you could get a laptop form factor generic box (with the retractable mouse, that's good too) and pay much less by NOT having an integral LCD screen and use your existing monitor it might be neat as a low watt space saver desktop. Aren't the screens still a big part of laptop costs now?
...I mean how many of you have or use the phone near your computer? Well, why not combine the two!?... It's called a modem, you idiot.
They do not invest in R&D (>1%) and competes on price. This forces everyone else to pretty much follow (except Apple) as there is only so much delta price people is willing to pay for innovations.
With Dell being the low-cost producer mainly due to Intel's discount this effectively means that the Innovations is being priced out of the industry.
Innovations is left to the componets suppliers and they pretty much only knows how to make things faster and smaller.
Help fight continental drift.
1. No case, or a small one. Kind of like the mac mini, but with even fewer cables.
2. Blessed silence.
3. A little LCD on the keyboard which shows what the function keys do. Also, the power/reset/DVD-eject buttons should be moved from the case to the keyboard... or the LCD monitor. And for heavens sake get rid of the useless keys (PrintScr, Scroll lock, Pause/Break).
4. Solid state disks.
5. Get the industry to agree on a standard universal docking station for mobile phones, PDAs and digital cameras, and mould it into the keyboard or computer case.
6. Permanent suspend mode, with instant re-start.
i'm developing a theory:
that Zonk is a fictional editor - created by the real editors so that they don't look as bad by comparison.
nice try guys, but we're on to you.
K.
That already exists, its called an UPS. I have a 1000VA UPS, and I survive all but a substaintial power outage. Voltage regulation is cool too.
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
CLUSTERING
By now, you'd figure the Linux would might have gotten this down and perfected or at least out of the distro useable. We need mirroring failover, load-balancing, load-distributing, and task-distributing clustering all in one package. Some machines become on boot failover mirrors opertaing in synch with the others. Some machines on boot become drones for the first group balancing out loads without mirroring everything. Some more will become auxillary drones for overall load spreading to keep the core stable. And the last group will take various code to execute as needed by the first three layers.
THIN CLIENTS
There's no reason to stick insanely powered PCs in every corner of my house and inside every piece of audio-visual equipment, complicating heat disposal, electricity distribution, and network connectivity. Still all the guts in one place and put interfaces elsewhere. The Enterprise didn't run on thick clients with computers everywhere, it had a giant multiprocessing core and every lesser powered computational device around the ship was essentially an interface and some sensors and tools. We'll never see this future if we doggedly insist on sticking something comparable to a Cray of ten years ago in every little box. Our houses will go into electrical meltdown and our electric bills will become comparable to mortgages.
ENERGY EFFICIENCY
Sometimes around the end of the 1982 recession the world seems to have forgotten the lessons of the nonexistant phony baloney energy crisis: it is possible to do things that we need and like with less energy and without inane politically motivated changes in our lifestyle. It would be far better to have lower power processors and support chips, with multiple cores and each core hyperthreading on board and the chips working together if we needed the horsepower and the ability to turn those processors down when we weren't using them. We could also use lower powered graphics processors. We could use more efficient power supplies. The list goes on. With true hot plugging, we could in the OS software tell the mobo to turn down slots that had cards without any task at the time like a dial up modem only being used as an occasional fax. Tell the USB or Firewire drives to turn off until needed. As opposed to the current power saving systems that don't actually tend to work consistantly and without farking hard drives and the data stored there.
MODULARITY I don't call USB and Firewire everything modularity. I still have most everything jammed onto a single mobo and whatever isn't gets stuck in a PCI slot or one of the above mentioned busses. I would like to be able to power down, pull something like an Atari 2600 cartdrige out, and pop in another with a different processor. I'd like to be able to pop in more boards with no excess things I don't need. Like, say... a blade server. But it shouldn't cost fifty thousand dollars. We've had modularity, slots, etc. for a very long time now. Why is it that it costs insane amounts and is positioned in a way that discourages its use? Why must we be so monolithic? If my car was made that way, I'd not be able to stick a different air filter in without buying a new engine.
INTERFACE
How hard is it to understand that only somewhat accurate voice recognition, crappy voice synthesis, 3D and multi-monitor displays only for the well-heeled isn't cutting it? Instead we get convoluted eye candy keyboards, shiny mice and trackballs, we get geek candy. I want a speech recognition system that is speaker independent and given the Internet and sheer numbers of users, a wide range data base synthesizing the results together of millions of users should have by now come about. Nope. I was doing software based speech synthesis on a frigging 6502 with 64K RAM more than twenty years ago. Best we get is that voice of the MS Office assistants. Big deal we've had multi-monitor displays for years. No sign of them becoming the standard. So much
If my grammar and spelling are off, I am [distracted/tired/careless] (take your pick)
You do realise that if you put all the parts that heat up (CPU, Vid Card, HDD) on the top part that you'll have to add a weight to the bottom part to keep it on your lap instead of tipping over?
CitrusTV (http://www.citrustv.net): the Nation's Oldest & Largest Entirely Student-Run Television Station
Why has there been such a sudden lack in innovation as of late?
There hasn't been much innovation in the last 10-20 years. Windows NT is, at best, a rewrite of 1980's technology. Macintosh is actually shipping nearly the same system that NeXT came up with in the mid-1980's. Linux is a reimplementation of 1980's UNIX, and BSD is largely based on 1980's UNIX (with some tweaks). The Internet has been around since the 1960's, and people were using it for pretty much the same things they are using it for today 20 years ago (discussion groups, pr0n, news, even some on-line shopping).
What has happened is that existing technologies have become popularized. That's not "innovation", it's business.
Here is a project I've been wanting to start for some time. There are two components: 1. A program that changes your wall paper every 1min, 10min, 1hr, etc... 2. A database of time-lapse outdoor scenes from around the world. Each scene is 24hrs in length with images captured at intervals of 10-30min. So that sitting in your office (with no windows) you can see what it is like to spend a day out side the taj mahal, or out in the american south west. This is done in pseudo real-time. I.E. if it's 10AM where you are, you see 10AM in the time-lapse. If you stay up all night, you can see what night time in the desert is like. There should be a community site with software and instructions so that users all around the world can take their regular digital cameras and a tripod + software and create their own time-scape scenes of the areas in which they live. These user scenes can be put on the web site for all to enjoy. Anyway, the real genius of this idea is that if it's done by a commercial company rather than open-source, some guy gets paid to travel around the world and spend 24hrs an all the places which are nice to look at. If anyone wants to start a company to do this, I'll volunteer for this job :)
- Wallscreens (cf. Tad Williams' Otherland novels) Wall-sized ultra-flatscreen net connected hardware-complete televisions/consoles/workstations - my pitch to kill Fox cable like the evil slug it is
- Look-to-click. I've gotten carpal tunnel from the stupid mouse because I have to chase what I'm looking at all the time. cut out the middle man!
- speak/think/twitch -to-type. The typewriter keyboard has been around since what, 18-hundred-and-something? I do love the new LCD board, but a better mousetrap is still a mousetrap. Hows about a virtual keyboard linked up to wireless fingertip-pads - tip-twitching _must_ be quicker than whole-hand-typing
- Visual overlay. Why have a desktop background at all? Why can't I have glasses/implants constantly streaming data/commands as requested while I go about my day? Left-eye Slashdot summary while walking between greens? sure. Instant bring up of gas prices down the road while pulling up at the gas station? great. And why do I have to crick my neck reading goddamn tree-killing novels again? Get me away from these noisy boxes and crotch-burning fliptops and oopsy-dropsy input-contortion-inducing PDAs. Stop making my monkey eyes look at psychosis-inducing backlights and radiation blasters. Bring the screen to my retinas where the rest of my incoming video is.
- Self-storage. Where do I need my data? Wherever I am. Do I want to have to remember a sodding device everytime I go anywhere, or chain myself to a fixed conduit device? no. Insert a terabyte of wireless flash in my appendix or something and have every device I walk up to sync to it. This is the 'Electronic Workspace'/'Digital Presence' requirement. why the hell do I have to spend so much time shifting bits about the place? they're _my_ bits for chrissakes - give 'em back you stinking non-interoperable discrete-storage non-propagating storage media of death. Unify all my boxen via _me_.
- Universal wireless net coverage. WiMax, 3G whatever. And do it global. Net access is as much a right for every child as is clean air and water.
- Brain overclocking. If I'm only seeing what's on the net, and interacting with it virtually, my defunct body is just a supporting fluid sac right? Why can't my brain start viewing content as fast as it possibly can? Why can't I leave monkey-pace viewing behind and go to dream speed? Don't we REM for only minutes, but have hours of experience in the dreamscape? Why can't I asccelerate my daily read of BBC/Slashdot/TheRegister/Kottke/Waxy/Digg/Del.ici
o .us by upping my brainwave refresh rate?
And after that? Bring on the Singularity! http://www.ugcs.caltech.edu/~phoenix/vinge/vinge-1. Better color fidelity in laptop screens. I want to see _all_ 16M colors, no clipping in the skies.
2. Lighter laptop batteries with 5-10x the capacity.
3. High DPI laptop monitors and OS that natively supports scalable output (Longhorn is supposed to take care of that, if that's not yet been cut, too).
Well since no mirrors are up, here is the entire article:
The Top 5 Things I want to see In the Next 5 Years
By Clarence Ladson
Let's face it, we all love technology. We surround ourselves the the latest and greatest and consume nothing but the best of the best when it comes to gadgetry and technological extravagances, yet in the past few years the only thing to advance in an incredible degree would be video cards and CPUs. Why has there been such a sudden lack in innovation as of late? Are we in a technological drought? I like to stick to my own diagnosis of the industry as being too concerned with keeping a steady cash flow over social experimentation with new products but then again that's just an opinion from a little guy.
Well, I know what I want to see happen in the next years and I'm there are at least 1 million blogs about this very subject but I have a very convincing statement which should make you read and backup my list and It's quite simple really: I'm right and all 1 million blogs are wrong. There. I said it. I'm sure that after reading the list that you'll also come to this conclusion, at least that's what I'm banking on.
1.) Better Designed fans -- RAWR! That's the sound of my system all 24 hours of the day. Although I have fairly new Thermaltake fans for both my CPU and system, the thing sounds as if it had wings and wheels that it would take off into the sky. Now, I'm sure many of you will say "Oh stop whining, there's liquid cooling and fan-less solutions, yackity smackity" but I say nay onto those because 1.) Liquid cooling is more expensive than a fan based setup and 2.) Have you seen an AMD 64 being ran with a fan-less solution? They melt like marshmallows on a campfire.
Seeing how there are is a nearly frictionless lubricant in Japan, I'm sure that some engineers from these fan manufacturers can conjure up the nerve to walk into the sex shops selling the stuff and just buy a few bottles. In the name of advancement and science of course. I mean, haven't they heard of Teflon!? Why not even use a little Wesson on the things, I'm sure they'd sound a lot quieter then apposed to the sand and glass I suspect they use currently for lubrication.
2.) Cases with more functionality -- Haven't you even dreamt of having your case double as a food/drink dispenser as well? Of course you have! Wouldn't it just be oh-so cool to have a bottle opener or a soda dispenser built into the case without having to do tedious and sometimes ridiculous amounts of modifications? I mean, the possibilities are quite endless really when it comes to being a dispenser and it wouldn't necessarily be all that hard.
It doesn't have to stop at food either, I mean how many of you have or use the phone near your computer? Well, why not combine the two!? Wouldn't it just be so cool to have a fully functional phone right there on your case? There would be no need to get up ever again except for bathroom breaks but they have bags and jugs for that anyways, right?
3.) Wireless everything -- That's right baby, no more wire hang- err, wires. I want to be able to buy something, set it on my desk and it automagically work. This rule applies for everything from mice and keyboards to monitors and various displays. We are in a word where being connected is required but I don't necessarily see why we need to be connected with a huge cable or dare I say, dozens of cables! It isn't as if it would be hard, it would just take a standardization of a short range communications standard and some willingness from a few manufacturers.
If it's once thing that amazes people still in this day and age, it's things that can send and receive data wirelessly. Even people with a complete understanding of the technology stare in bewilderment at their cutesy, wireless mouse. Come on industry, cut the cords and go truly wireless already!
4.) More use of the USB storage keys -- If you're like me, then you game on your PC. A lot. And also like me, you must absolut
I think this is the most asinine "article" I've ever read...
On the one hand the author states that they want cases to be more functional (and provide beverage serving capabilites). On the other, they want hard drives to be smaller because they want to "...own a PC that is as thin as a light-weight laptop and with the length and width of a Mac Mini."
Brilliant!
Am I open minded towards open source, or closed minded towards closed source?
I am not always a huge fan of Apple's hardware design; my dual G4 tower was the loudest desktop personal computer ever.
But Apple has done the fans for a while, and the cases for a long time.
My G5 is quieter than my laptop P4 system. Dual 2.0Ghz processors, and you can't even hear it under reasonable load. My P4 is loud and annoying.
Yes, I could theoretically track down quieter fans, and a power supply with quieter fans, and so on... But Apple built the machine to be quiet out of the box, and I love it love it love it.
Cases? Since the days of the G3 tower, Apple cases have opened with a simple latch. No screws, no hassle, everything nice and reachable.
The objection I have to the article isn't that these two ideas are bad ideas in some way. It's that they're not in the slightest bit innovative.
My blog: http://www.seebs.net/log/ --- My iPhone/iPad app: http://www.seebs.net/seebsfrac/
Let's face it, we all love technology. We surround ourselves with the latest and greatest and consume nothing but the best of the best when it comes to gadgetry and technological extravagances, yet in the past few years the only thing to advance in an incredible degree would be video cards and CPUs. Why has there been such a sudden lack in innovation as of late? Are we in a technological drought? I like to stick to my own diagnosis of the industry as being too concerned with keeping a steady cash flow over social experimentation with new products but then again that's just an opinion from a little guy.
Well, I know what I want to see happen in the next years and I'm there are at least 1 million blogs about this very subject but I have a very convincing statement which should make you read and backup my list and It's quite simple really: I'm right and all 1 million blogs are wrong. There. I said it. I'm sure that after reading the list that you'll also come to this conclusion, at least that's what I'm banking on.
1) Better Designed fans -- RAWR! That's the sound of my system all 24 hours of the day. Although I have fairly new Thermaltake fans for both my CPU and system, the thing sounds as if it had wings and wheels that it would take off into the sky. Now, I'm sure many of you will say "Oh stop whining, there's liquid cooling and fan-less solutions, yackity smackity" but I say nay onto those because 1.) Liquid cooling is more expensive than a fan based setup and 2.) Have you seen an AMD 64 being ran with a fan-less solution? They melt like marshmallows on a campfire.
Seeing how there are is a nearly frictionless lubricant in Japan, I'm sure that some engineers from these fan manufacturers can conjure up the nerve to walk into the sex shops selling the stuff and just buy a few bottles (in the name of advancement and science of course). I mean, haven't they heard of Teflon!? Why not even use a little Wesson on the things, I'm sure they'd sound a lot quieter then apposed to the sand and glass I suspect they use currently for lubrication.
2) Cases with more functionality -- Haven't you even dreamt of having your case double as a food/drink dispenser as well? Of course you have! Wouldn't it just be oh-so cool to have a bottle opener or a soda dispenser built into the case without having to do tedious and sometimes ridiculous amounts of modifications? I mean, the possibilities are quite endless really when it comes to being a dispenser and it wouldn't necessarily be all that hard.
It doesn't have to stop at food either, I mean how many of you have or use the phone near your computer? Well, why not combine the two!? Wouldn't it just be so cool to have a fully functional phone right there on your case? There would be no need to get up ever again except for bathroom breaks but they have bags and jugs for that anyways, right?
3) Wireless everything -- That's right baby, no more wire hang- err, wires. I want to be able to buy something, set it on my desk and it automatically work. This rule applies for everything from mice and keyboards to monitors and various displays. We are in a world where being connected is required but I don't necessarily see why we need to be connected with a huge cable or dare I say dozens of cables! It isn't as if it would be hard, it would just take a standardization of a short range communications standard and some willingness from a few manufacturers.
If it's once thing that amazes people still in this day and age, its things that can send and receive data wirelessly. Even people with a complete understanding of the technology stare in bewilderment at their cutesy, wireless mouse. Come on industry, cut the cords and go truly wireless already!
4) More use of the USB storage keys -- If you're like me, then you game on your PC. And also like me, you must absolutely despise having to keep the damn game disk within the drive all day long. Well, grief no more because I have a handy dandy solution that would not only please you and me but also the
Again with the sexual innuendo about the near-frictionless lubricant.
Come on, people, think about this some, do you *really* want near-frictionless lubricant for sex? You can already simulate that now. Just drop your pants and wave your dick in the air.
As for the rest of the article, laughable. The next step in innovation is *quieter fans*??? Why not just *cooler CPUs*?
Those who sacrifice security to condemn liberty deserve to repeat history or something. - Benjamin Santayana
but it seems that many here are mistaking improvement for innovation. Innovation is doing that which has not been done, nor was expected via the conduits of common sense.
... well, that is what I want. I'm not holding my breath.
Innovation in computing will take some doing. There are plenty of companies that are trying to find and accept new business models and methods, trying to adapt to new threats, both malicious and competition based, but there is no innovation per se'. Unless you want to count multicore processors, low voltage processors, battery and power technologies that are leaps and bounds above previous. These are arguably derivitive works, but they build cornerstones for true innovation.
Innovation in computing, by definition, must change how we use them in some way. The spreadsheet was an innovation. The DOS was an innovation. GUI OS was an innovation. What do we need now?
We need more human like interaction with computers. Grandma doesn't need to know what icon to click if the computer asks her what she wants to do? Little sheila doesn't have to know the innards of Google if all she has to do is ask what is the three main properties of an isotope?
There is an entire new (as yet unexplored) world of computing that is a huge layer between the user and the actual workings of a computer. All the recent 'innovations' in computing and technology bring us that little bit closer to the world of Star Trek computers. The people that help bridge what we have today over to what Star Trek and other futuristic folks have promised are the people that will bring innovation.
The computer is a tool. We use it in different ways, but it is a tool. It really doesn't matter what OS you use, it is still a tool. I envision robots interacting with humans, and in the background use the computer/Internet to help or assist humans. How many times have you asked somebody who that movie actor was? or what is the word that means so and so? or asked people around you what is a word that means blah blah blah? We are born, and grow up, and by accident of birth, we learn and experience what it is that makes us much of what we are (so psychiatrists say) but with the computer and Internet, that can change. When you can ask your robot or PDA what is the identity of the bird that I just heard, then you have innovation. When you can be shopping and ask your robot or pda if this camelback couch is a good deal or not, that is innovation.
When you can type out a shopping list for the grocery store, and a kid shows up when you get home with the items you wanted... that is innovation.
The point is that technology isn't innovation. Innovation is how we use the technology. You can surf progressively faster and faster, but if you continue to surf the same way, there is no innovation.
Perhaps some will argue with me (and TFA is unavailable) but innovation is not new batteries or a different design of laptop. Innovation is how we use the technology and information (that wants to be free by the way).
Innovation is how software makes the information more useful. Right now we still pay lawyers to do patent searches... computers should tell us if there is prior art or patents without paying a lawyer. Information is just information. Sure there are those that want you to pay for it, but any free information should be available in ways that is just not possible now... that is innovation. When your child can ask the computer how many bones are in the human hand, and be shown a picture of them on the 'face' of their personal robot, that is innovation.
Information doesn't want to just be free, it wants to be freely integrated into all of our lives. When there is even just one place in a rural 3rd world country where information like this is available, it doesn't take much to imagine that even the uneducated can ask for help finding a new way to solve a problem and finding how it was solved in all of history in other places. Say a third world company wants to build cars... and they ask the computer for cross reference of their design against all of the worlds minimum requirements for safety? If they got the answer, that is innovation.
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
I for one welcome our new DVR controlling female overlords..
.. my wife made me do it.
Well I don't have a choice in the matter
Sorry to disagree. I'm no bug friend of DELL but if you had taken the time to actually look inside some of their PC and servers, you'd see some very ingeniously designed systems - both operationally, as well as functionally. Sure, they are still PCs, but I don't see any innovative airflow designs, interactive sensors (for fan control), intelligently laid out motherboards, etc... from any other cheap PC manufacturer.
Oh yeah, and they are extremely inexpensive. Yeah, they most likely outsource the engineering and design, but who cares -- the stuff is extremely well priced (read: cheap), and quite intelligently designed (more so than some of the crap hp/compaq churns out).
Because it slows downa bit every month and you need to correct it after a year or so. Now what would be great would be an LCD watch panel that hooks directly into your motherboard. That way, when you browse the net, your OS would automatically time-sync your BIOS clock over the net and you would always have good accuracy.
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
http://www.networkmirror.com/nNGlOJLHQQQL6PP9/www. flexbeta.net/main/articles.php%3Faction%3Dshow%26i d%3D99.html
My Linux - (L)ove (I)s (N)ever (U)tterly eXPensive
Why arent companies spending more effort to make desktop computers use less electricity?
If someone like Dell (with a new CPU and motherboard and graphics from Intel and other components from wherever) came out with a lower-power desktop machine, it would sell like hotcakes (especially to e.g. corperations who would see it as a way to save on their energy bills)
1)How about DRM free hardware?
2)Industries that sticks to open standards?
3)How about choosing standards and future technology without politics and format battles?
4)How about all Linux distros conforming to the LSB?
Find a job you like and you will never work a day in your life.
1. Impenetrable Security that is resistant to password theft, biometric theft, and even people trying to trick me into doing bad things.
2. Perfect AI to detect and discard my stupid mistakes (=dwim).
3. Simple Interface, yet flexible, so everyone from Aunt Tillie to the Cyborgs can use a single standard.
4. Perpetual Motion CPUs that power themselves so we don't have to worry power consumption or an energy crisis.
5. Eric Raymond's Head On A Pike because he's so out of touch that it would be funny if his well-publicized rants weren't harmful to the community (not to mention human intelligence in general).
Why do I have to worry about my laptop being yanked to the floor by someone tripping on the power cable? I know wireless power isn't practical for a laptop, but there has got to be some relatively simple solution (other than using up the limited # of recharges in the batteries life).
IIRC, the Xbox controllers do something along these lines - though, there probably isn't as much current or voltage on that cable.
but I have a cell phone and most of the time I use it to see what time it is.
I like microcars
I'm thinking desktop computers here, as I don't have a laptop.
1. A rechargeable 5-minute battery so that in case there's a blackout, you have a chance to save your documents, grab a flashlight or candles without fumbling in the dark, then properly shut down the computer.
Picture a miniature version of a laptop battery and forget about buying a twenty-pound power backup that costs a bundle.
2. RCA jacks on the back of a desktop should be standard, to hook up to the TV with no hassle. They're probably out there, but mine doesn't have them, and I haven't seen one that does.
3. Monitors should have touch-screen input, too. To scroll Google Maps with a finger, for example.
4. Integration with programmable, universal remote controls for a few basic functions (Shut Down, Volume Up, Volume Down, you get the idea).
5. Integrated Bose speakers, baby! Yeah! Okay, so what the hell, a little kick-ass luxury would be nice, too.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
It's the AIR the fan is pushing that makes the noise. So I guess he wants quiet air..
Pull the fins off your fan and see how much noise it makes. It won't make much. Unless it's old and shitty, but that's not a valid arguement.
So, the "innovation" won't be in making quiet fans, it will be in making top of the line FAST chips that don't require them.
- It's not the Macs I hate. It's Digg users. -
What would be more useful would be to have a display, a set of 5 LEDs would be enough, giving the status of the current Wifi signal strength on the outside of the case. If I were going to choose the location, I'd put it on the rear "spine" of the laptop, because it's what normally shows up when you have it in a bag.
Yes, I know there are little keychain dongles you can get which do this, I even own one, but that's just another thing to carry around / lose / need batteries for / etc. It would be a lot nicer if they just built that little circuit into the case and attached it to the regular antenna.
The GPS would be another nice feature. I've toyed with the idea of attaching a GPS unit to my laptop, but it would require a rats nest of adaptors, since I don't have a serial port, and I'd probably have to velcro the receiver to the top of the screen. Not very elegant. Even if I bundled everything up nice and tightly, it would just be another thing to get caught when I'm hauling it in and out of the bag...it really needs to be built in.
"Ladies and gentlemen, my killbot features Lotus Notes and a machine gun. It is the finest available."
The method I am looking to implement involves distributing the OS and apps on a CD or DVD rom, then letting the user create an encrypted copy of either :
a. CD/DVD RW with their favorite apps, preferences and documents. or
b. usb drive with favorite apps, preferences and documents. or
c. distribute the preferences and documents on the p2p network.
This effectively lets the user keep a stable copy of the system and a working copy of what I call the user profile, the data they use daily.
- Kaos games and encryption systems developer
First of all make those things cheaper. Most people don't need expensive computers with expensive processors which only can stay on the market because of the numbers of them produced. Why not build desktop or portable PCs with embedded chips. Word processing or web-browsing can be done with far less power. And computers would work for decades, not months.
Then there's another question. Why distinguish between laptops and desktop PCs. Most of those are severely crippled anyhow (because of bad OSes which don't include simple ways to develop applications, yes I include most Linux distributions here, too). Why not build a little Keyboard/Computer unit which can have a display attached to it via some cable or perhaps even mounted to it. So when you need mobility (one thing that laptops more and more fail to offer), you mount your display to the box, but if you want to work at home, you take the display, put it on a stand, and connect it via a cable to the main laptop.
Then again, the industry should make a _really_ portable device again. The ZipIt shown here recently is already a step into the right direction. It's _really_ portable, it doesn't need to be connected to a PC, it has WLAN, and it's affordable. If one could install perhaps a way to download and execute as well as develop applications on that thing (it must be possible, I've developed Windows applications on devices with less RAM and less CPU) it could be the PC-Killer. A home-variant with larger keyboard and connections for TVs or VGA-Monitors, as well as normal Ethernet would wipe the PC out of homes and offices.
There is also one thing, OS-Manufacturers don't understand. And that's that devices must be simple to develop for. I don't want to have to search for weeks for the development tools, then code my codes in C, compile them in long compile runs to upload them to the device just to find out to have made a little error and have to do it all over again. I want to have a keyboard, type 'call char (32,"AA55AA55AA55AA55")' and watch all spaces go to a checkerflag pattern.
Of course, if you want to have "all wireless", you'd need to integrate 2 things, IPv6 and OLSR as well as open standards like the IPP. That way you could really make working wireless networks, just put your device somewhere in your house and it'll not only work immediately, it will also relay everything to other devices which aren't in range. Sharing data with your neighbourhood gets trivial, each one only needs to have 1 or 2 other computers in range and be connected. And security would then be made on a sane layer, not the hardware layer.
my list:
- affordable solid state drives that are at least 10Gb.
- ipv6
- a solution to SPAM
- 1 plug for every thing. keyboard, mouse, joystick, printer, &c should all use USB. no motherboards should come with serial/parallel ports or ps/2 mouse and keyboard ports.
- innovative games. it is time to put the FPS to rest.
- build the metaverse.
Two reasons:
1. If I use the mouse for a long time, or forget to recharge it (bound to happen to most of us at one point or another), I'm stuck with a handicapped interface until the bloody rodent gets juiced up again.
2. If there's a loose mouse lying around, it's bound to crawl under the couch at one point or another.
Granted, wireless mice can be very useful for a lot of people in many situations (conferences with laptops and projectors come to mind), but in a domestic environment, I'd rather keep my mouse on a leash.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
I give a lot of money to charitable causes that help other people, but it's because I CHOOSE to. I volunteer time at a homeless shelter and at a prison ministry that helps convicts to learn life skills they'll need once they're out, but it's because I CHOOSE to. Anybody who claims that he or she is OWED my money or my time is claiming the right to enslave me against my will. I don't accept that anyone has the right to make me his slave without my consent. Of course, governments take my money against my will now, but it's only because they're able to back up their claims with the threat of force -- just as any street thug might.
The Enterprise didn't run on thick clients with computers everywhere, it had a giant multiprocessing core and every lesser powered computational device around the ship was essentially an interface and some sensors and tools.
Are you sitting down? I have something to tell you. Try not to get upset, now: It was a movie.
Cooling fans could come with an active noise control system to help. You know what RPM they operate at, you know what sound they make, so you can help cancel it out.
I want to be able to turn my box off with a friggin' power switch without having software that I paid for punish me like a 3 year old by telling me to sit in the corner and take a 5 minute "time out" watching scandisk.
The potential for delivering applications is enormous, from web-based accounting systems running over SSL to the ability to output preflighted data straight to a commercial printer chosen for convenience, along with the Google map of the route for when the job is collected.
Panurge has posted for the last time. Thanks for the positive moderations.
So what you're saying is that the Iraqis are not going to be very innovative at the moment?
nope. anonymity is important. static IPs for everyone that wants one. anonymity for anyone who needs it
Deliriant isti Americani.
You might have said that today "the wake up from sleep on Macs is essentially instantaneous."
It didn't always use to be that way, here's my personal experience (mind you this is the same hardware we're talking about, an iBook/600 from early 2002):
Wake-up-time:
Mac OS 9.2.2.: 20 to 40 seconds
Mac OS X 10.1: (not tested)
Mac OS X 10.2: 4-5 seconds, some parts not responding up to 10 seconds after wake.
Mac OS X 10.3: 4-5 seconds, very slight delay (another 5 seconds) for some parts (WLAN would usually be up faster than clock updated (i.e.: clock still showing time of sleep for abot 4-5 second after wake))
Mac OS X 10.4: hardly any noticeable delay. Clock-display fixed, so now at lest it looks and feels like "instant-wake".
sig? Oh, that sig...
Innovation is move from horse transportation to automobiles. It is not having better saddles or adding lights to the horse's head...
Today is innovation almost everything...even adding ribbons to the horse's tail would be called innovation.
First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win.
If Dell actually manufactured all their own components from scratch, you might have a point, but then people would just start buying from vendors who researched better equipment.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
I don't want to sound like an elitist mac owner... but omg omg omg any mac you choose solved every one of those problems with eligance left over. The world is not made up of PC's! Buy a mac, you won't be disapointed.
Implementing 2) would automatically obsolete 1) and solve 3).
Making RAM in way bigger capacities - and "nonvolatile" versions (battery backup - 10 year recharge interval - so far 2MB are the biggest dice awailable), then just store all data in huge RAMdisks.
4) will just come. And 5) is already there, just don't expect them to get anywhere near the break-even point ($100 printer capable of printing $100 bills).
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
Anyone else a bit disturbed by the clipart on the "Corporate" page?
Why not build desktop or portable PCs with embedded chips. (...) computers would work for decades, not months.
That's why. Decades instead of months between they get any money from you.
Why distinguish between laptops and desktop PCs.
Extensiblity. You can add a lot to a desktop PC, fill it up with hardware making it a power monster. Water cooling a laptop anyone? Adding 1TB harddrive array?
By keeping these two separate you can keep both cheaper and better. And you can already do what you want, but not by detaching a screen (not by detaching keyboard which in laptops is horribly uncomfortable because of limited space, but replacing it with external - wireless one.)
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
1) The 5-minute ones are 4 pounds.
2) Yes, and expensive too.
3) First design anti-smudge surface.
4) Google it. It's there.
5) WTF is that?
Anagram("United States of America") == "Dine out, taste a Mac, fries"
I can buy two cheap quartz watches, leave them running for a year, and expect to find no more than a couple of seconds' drift. Yet I can't do this with PCs, which is really irritating for things like NFS that expect synchronised time. Sure, NTP, but that's unreliable software compared to my reliable cheap quartz watch.
My laptop is even worse: It seems to lose several seconds every time it suspends.
As for innovative peripherals, people are suddenly doing a lot with accelerometers as tilt sensors, producing a surprisingly intuitive scrolling system for small devices.
I'd like another laptop like the Toshiba libretto which had a mouse nipple that was on the side of the screen and used with the thumb. It's the only laptop that never gave me RSI, despite the tiny keyboard.
Everything said there is totally available today, its just costs more money. If people are prepared to spend more money (which they are not) then they can get what they want.
This comment does not represent the views or opinions of the user.
linux may be a democratic/anarchistic pile of crap, but windows is a totalitarian nightmare. whether i am looking at it from purely practical POV or ideological POV, i choose that democratic crap. it works and doesnt take away my freedom
Deliriant isti Americani.
1) Adaptible, generalized A.I. for interface...especially for truly effective voice recognition and application problem solving, and finally solving the "dumb and/or unwilling to learn" users issues.
2) 3-dimensional displays with peripheral vision. Holographics.
3) Huge, near-instant performing and affordable solid state HDs for 100% data stability.
4) 10-100 Mbit wireless worldwide.
5) Open standards digital interface for everything worth controlling by a computer, from garage openers to toasters. Allow manufacturers to cheaply and efficiently provide "digital home" ready products.
P.S. UBER ITEM: Sentient AI (probably century++ away...)
All this and we will basically have Star Trek without the transporters and warp drive.
(Oh, and the cool jumpsuits and the utopian government...)
I've used lots of software in my time that used hardware dongles and the only word I can think of to describe it was EXTREMELY annoying.
This USB key idea is pretty much exactly the same as the old parallel port dongle idea people once used.
I'm sure he would realize what I meant the day he had to start looking for that USB key about the size of a quarter he left on his desk somewhere... or the day he had to juggle what devices he had plugged into his computer.. after all, not everyone has 10 USB ports available to them.
Having one company in charge of the whole thing sounds like a disaster too... lets add a whole new layer of licensing fees to the mix...
"Yeah, so that won't deter pirates. So what? Nothing else does either."
Well, bingo. You've summarized there the _whole_ problem with this whole anti-piracy idiocy: it inconveniences everyone _except_ the pirates. It inconveniences _only_ the honest paying customers.
Now I _am_ firmly against piracy, and I'm proud to say that I legally own a copy (well, a license in software lingo) for every single piece of software on my computer. If something could actually deter pirates, I'd be for it.
But that's the whole point: it doesn't. Not only you can always find a no-CD crack or a warezed version, in most cases it's available actually _before_ the game hits the stores. Even the few people who still are too clueless to google for a download, will get the no-CD crack from a friend who knows how to.
And in the meantime it's people like me, people who actually paid for the game, who get to put up with hassles like:
- being locked out of a game I've paid for, because the CD got scratched.
- having my game screwed up without even telling me why, because some broken retarded piece of copy-protection was buggy and thought a legit copy was pirated. (E.g., Gangsters. Before the patch, if you had more than one CD drive, or had the game CD anywhere but in "D:", the retarded copy protection would think you're a pirate and throw all your gang members in jail. Repeatedly. No, I'm not kidding. It's too retarded to make up.)
- having a game crash to desktop periodically without any explanation, and after a month or so the devs come and say something like "uh, it's supposed to crash if it detects <insert brand of CD copying software> on your machine." Which I didn't, but apparently the copy protection was retarded enough to think so anyway. (Plus, let's get for a moment into the whole issue of them deciding for me which software I'm allowed to run on _my_ machine. How about they piss off and mind their own business?)
- being locked out of playing a game I've paid for in, say, Wine, because it comes with a retarded copy protection that wants to be loaded as a Windows driver or such.
Etc.
So now you propose, what? That for the few hundreds of games I legally own (yeah, literally. So I don't have a life), I should also dig through a big box of code-wheels and other retarded gizmos to be allowed to play? I hope you'll have some understanding if I'm a lot less than thrilled by that idea.
I wish they just stopped this idiocy completely already. It has one single job to do: deter pirates. If it doesn't do that, why keep such an annoyance around?
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
So you can run software like this without needing a peripheral.
..
I would kill for a Powerbook with knobs on it.
As it is I don't mind using a few of these, but you know, it seems logical to me that small well-engineered knobs are an obvious addition to the Powerbook cult
; -- the corruption of government starts with its secrets. a truly free people keep no secrets. --
When I am king, you will be first against the wall.
All you need to do is stash enough frosty-cold beers inside the case and the fans become redundant. 'Course you have to drink the beers pretty quick if you want to consume them cold, but hey...
New mod option wanted: -1 DrunkenRambling
Yes. One word: patents.
Try something new in the states, get sued into the ground.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
Clarence Ladson is currently a college student in Tocoma
Cheers. I wanted to punch you back at point 1 when I saw "being ran," FYI. Congratulations on winning the contest, because no "real considerable change" is going to happen while these contests sponsor R&D suggestions from people who can't be bothered to put any thought whatsoever into them.
you can have my violent video games when you pry them from my cold, dead hands.
Prime UID Club
Yes. Mine.
I use cooling towers for the water (no, really - sorry, can't think of the name right now).
It's perfectly noiseless.
Free PC version of ChipWits at http://www.breueronline.de/klaus/chipwits/
I don't give a damn what "innovation(s)" on what you'll have in the next 5 years, or 5 best what.
Just make my BF2 rounds load faster and you am teh win !!!!on11111one!11@#!
What matters is the software, not the hardware. Where are the Software innovations? Every new programming language manages to fix the faults of the previous one, but also introduces new faults that make software development as slow and as error prone as the previous iteration.
So here's me being mad at 'Joe I'm an Idiot' computer user. Almost mad enough to actually register...almost.
1. Maybe someone hasn't checked out Intel processors.
2. IDIOT. People don't even know how to check their god damn email without thinking messages with titles like "Hey" are from people they might know, and you expect them to have storage space for liquids attached to their computers? If that were the case, Microsoft's new biggest enemy would be dumbasses who fry their systems by spilling all over it. And for a phone near your computer? VOIP!
3. Someone needs to tell me where this dumbass lives so that I can crack his WEP in about 15 minutes and show him how awesome wireless is. Not to mention all the inteference from THAT many wireless signals will ruin so very much. The last thing the world needs is more wireless. Just look at how bad of a rim job Bluetooth has been taking from petty types of attacks. Sure, new phones assess and fix some of the vulnerabilities, but most people won't go spend another few hundred dollars to fix problems that most of them don't even know exist.
4. No, shithead, it means that once they crack your magical key that all game verifications on that are OUT. Now every game made by your beloved Sierra will be pirated, and it will be amazingly easy to spread "simply keys" all around the net.
5. Why is it the same size? Because you are a dumbass who hasn't upgraded it would be my first guess. Not the mention the fact that you are probably using Windows, which consistently (for whatever reason...coughintelcough) requires that for every new version of their OS that you need a machine that is about twice as powerful than the last OS's requirements. Not to mention that "why doesn't Microsoft"...stop right there. MicroSOFT(WARE). Idiot. Sure they have expanded into other areas, but they wouldn't just go, "Hey, you know what? I think we should start designing tiny ass memory modules so that idiots can have tiny computers." "Great idea, Jim! And hey, why don't we have USB drives on all of them to lead the way for our brand new data verification system!!!"
Stick with your Windows based Internet Explorer running Couterstrike playing Good Charlotte loving pile of shit you call a hardware. Be happy that they even sell dipshits like you computers in the first place.
We won't even get into the cost element of all these asenine ideas.
You know what we SHOULD be focusing on? Creating secure and reliable operating systems. Granted, I do believe in the concept of "Nothing is secure." but we should at least be giving a shit. Improving the quality of our security standards. Almost all of the standards in use today are shit, whether it be wireless or wired. So much of the computing world is left with encryption schemes that can be fucked over in mere hours, software holes that are plastered all over every application and operating system, and dumbshit computer users who help the spread of massive worms and viruses.
The solution should not just be to throw more shit on the pile and hope everything works out in the end.
I can't wait until my prototype machine for flaying people alive over TCP/IP based connections is completed.
Asswipe.
Stability, PC's should be absolutely stable, they should be as reliable as televisions, telephones or cars.
Security, PC's should be secure, they should be as secure as your car, or your house your wallet.
Universalality, PC's (& Software) should be as consistent to use as cars or televisions, if you learn how to drive one car you can drive all cars.
Transparency, Software should not form a barrier to the task at hand, you should watching/editing video/music or playing games or music, not operating a PC.
Portability, you should be able to transfer your software and data between platform easily and simply.
A PC is now a consumer device, it should just work, like other consumer devices.
There's nothing wrong per se with your piece and you shouldn't necessarily read too much personally into stuff like "Worst. Article. Ever." You're just a victim of an editor blowing the lede again. The reaction would probably have been less negative if he had ended by writing, "Some very different ideas on how to make your computing experience, if not your computer, better. What are your top five ideas?" But he didn't. He quoted the poster verbatim and left it at that, and left you to the pikes, halberts and pitchforks of the Slashdot community.
So now you're pig on a spit. Um... welcome to Slashdot. We hope you'll enjoy your stay.
Anyone remember the prospect of quantum computing becoming commercial? they said that it would be ready for a public debut 5 years ago, yet you hardly hear of any news of it today. Code would be smaller and more efficient in the longrun but the steep learning curve and expense of developing for a quantum processer would be emmense. PS. Spelling nazis: Please die.
I was hoping to see something like better OSes, ordvd burners all doing the same thing, instead i want none of these things! 1) better designed fans- i have these things, thier called speakers, and they came with my pc, guess what, they are louder than my damn casefans, and if my fans made no noise? id still be playing music 2) cases with more functionality- Oh yes im sure weve all dreamed of a food/drink dispenser on our computer, but what happens when you go to a party? "dude you brought your computer? no no, its my computer SLASH kegerator, feel free to puke on it." 3) wireless everything No matter how wireless you get, you still need a power cord ( and a cord for all the chargers your going to need) and guess what! thats a wire! compters are not laptops! 4) More use of the USB storage keys alchol 120% does all this for one, for two how about you dont need the cd to play at all? what does this even have to do with usb keys? one more thing to lose? 5) A Complete Storage re-haul mind you, the motherboard is ALOT larger than the hard drives, come to think about it, laptop harddrives arent all THAT much smaller.
Like the saying goes, never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes. -Pyrotic
As people have said, quiet fans are available. But put a silent fan somewhere where it creates turbulent airflow and the effect will be noise. I recently took out one of the fans from my rather noisy power supply - outside the PSU, quiet fan. Inside, where it causes turbulent airflow over all the components, noisy. You can even get a considerable noise reduction just by removing the grille that goes over the fan to stop idiots poking their fingers into the PSU.
"'I pass the test,' she said. 'I will diminish, and go into the West, and remain Galadriel.'"
- JRR Tolkien.
My mum used to have a Toshiba (pre-Satellite era) laptop with an integral trackball mouse that clipped onto the side via a nifty flat-PS/2 pad connecter. This was waaayback in the nineties we're talking.
A/C
It doesn't have to stop at food either, I mean how many of you have or use the phone near your computer? Well, why not combine the two!?
Nah, lugging around a 3 kg mobile phone would be a pain in the ass. And the wires would slow me down.
Structured data for everything. Especially program code. I want to be able to transform the information I put in my computer in reliable, dependable ways, and I hate having to make hundreds of more or less arbitrary decisions every time I want to write a piece of code. Too often the computer just feels like a fancy filing cabinet.
1) Writers who know how to spell, or at the very least use a spellcheck program. 2) Articles that contain worthwhile ideas. Game "verification data" on a USB key? The reasons this will never exist are incredibly obvious to anybody with more than a handful of brain cells.
None of the other 4 suggestions were worth even a second glance, either.
Let's not forget Slashdot, either... Covering a lame article titled "The Top 5 Things I want to see In the Next 5 Years" and describing it as "5 great technological advancements in computing that just about every PC user wants"... Come on! Nobody wants these things. Quiet fans exist already. A built-in phone on the case is incredibly lame. Game ownership verification on easily copyable media negates the purpose of game verification data. We've got everything wireless that needs to be wireless... mice, keyboards, cameras. People don't want smaller hard drives, they want larger capacity hard drives.
If this is not the worst article ever, it's only because so much other crap gets published on the web.
Nothing to see here. Move along.
It's the stupid historical design that puts the CPU in the middle of the case, where it's the most difficult to cool. What I'd like is a CPU mounted on the 'wrong' side of the circuit board. Then you could use the entire case as your heatsink, and barely need a fan anymore.
I want big heatsinks with natural convection cooling. It's not impossible as it was done in the G4 cube at least. It wouldn't work for laptops so well though.
Coral cache of the printable article here: http://www.flexbeta.net.nyud.net:8090/main/printar ticle.php?id=99
Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
http://arstechnica.com/journals/microsoft.ars/2005 /6/3/447
that looks quite good to me
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
You're thinking too classically, like a C programmer. With a higher-level language, more design intent can be expressed directly by the programmer, and used by the compiler for safety and optimisation purposes.
Sure, you can't check all arrays access for bounds violations, but if you think about it with your human level of understanding, very few accesses can ever really be dangerous. The trick is to be able to convey that level of understanding to the compiler, so it can perform the necessary checks, and no more.
As for NULL pointers, there's really no need for them at all if you have a serious type system. Recursive data structures are trivially dealt with if you have concepts like disjunctive types and pattern matching.
In fact, as useful as they can be at lower levels, pointers generally are only useful as reassignable references to objects. There's no need to relate pointers and arrays, nor to provide arbitrary pointer arithmetic and the NULL concept, with a moderately powerful type system.
There is a reason that many languages make a point of saying they don't support pointers, even if they have a more limited variation of the concept, as with things like Java. The killer isn't the concept of indirection, or changing the target, it's the arithmetic, and assignment of arbitrary values. That leads to a world without proper type safety, and it leads to aliasing concerns that have horribly negative effects on optimisation.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
GPS in laptops might not work so well.
I prefer to use my laptop indoors due to LCD display contrast issues in direct sunlight. A GPS receiver, on the other hand, is designed for outdoors use.
It requires a straight signal path between the satellite and the receiver. For exact positioning you even need a straigth signal path to 3 GPS satellites.
Here in Europe you may get positioning services based on GSM phone signal triangulation principles. It works well for devices located indoors, but the positioning is provided as a service through the mobile network and is not performed by calculations in your mobile phone PCMCIA card.
Why are there still so many cables? Cables for keyboard, mouse, monitor, speakers, LAN, power for 2 or 3 of those.
They were also running on hardware literally thousands of times slower than today's, so none of the above is really any excuse.
I wrote software with GUIs that were instantly responsive back in MS-DOS and 12MHz 80286 days. I now specialise in writing scientific instrument control and mathematical software, so I'm somewhat familiar with how fast modern computers can really go, and the effects of having numerous custom drivers running under a multitasking OS. I really don't see any technical reason today's software can't be vastly faster than most of it is, but then technical reasons are rarely the limiting factor in software development.
We'd do a lot better if the software development community collectively learned a lot more about good design, dropped its lazy attitudes ("Of course $LANGUAGE_X is fast enough"), stopped relying on faster hardware as a crutch for slower code, learned to profile, and was given chance to do it by management rather than pushing the product out to market two days earlier.
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
I hope he made a bach up.
Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
Now, I'll say it so that no one else has to: "Language changes, it's all about effective communication, yadda yadda." Now STFU.
I want a Microsoft OS that crashes as much as my toaster. oh, and liberation from virus/spyware/etc for all! That will be the day that I die.
No, it wouldn't. The contribution to the TCO (warning: PHB-speak, but its useful here) is so minor. I live in Japan, land of the ungodly terrible energy prices, and was here for two months without a computer before it arrived. At relatively constant electricity usage otherwise (lights, refigerator, 2 hours of TV a night), the computer being on or on power-save pretty much constantly when I'm home and off when I'm at work, my electricity bill increased by $3 a month. Thats $36 a year, or approximately $120 over the useable lifetime of the computer. Try justifying that to a PHB when someone else says "Power-saving will cost, on average, 1 hour work of avoidable headaches for your knowledge workers a year" (and, incidentally, if power-saving tech adds $100 to the cost of the computer you can kiss your rump goodbye).
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
Good: No wires.
Bad: Batteries. You have to buy them (and throw them away) or recharge them, and monitor when they need replacing/recharging. A wire is a much simpler solution.
Innovation requires research.
Research requires money.
Money comes from profit.
There is hardly any profit left in selling PCs.
Why? You spell the answer D E L L.
You're under 25 aren't you?
Nobody who actually used an Atari 2600 or Atari computer would ever want to go back to cartridges. The connectors get worn out after repeated use and you wind up playing 'wiggle the slot'. Sure, that sounds great to most Slashdotters, but it's not.
I know some of these exist in some form, but I'd like to see this on every machine.
1 - built-in mini-UPS. Something to even out the power and give the equipment a decent approximation of a sine wave and maybe 5 minutes spare power. It'll reduce crashes and dataloss a great deal.
2 - Expansion cards that can be added without opening the case. I want to be able to add or replace my NIC, Sound, Video in/out, hard disks, memory, etc by just plugging them into the case like a PCMCIA card. It doesn't have to be as small as that, but I'd love for the PC to act more or less like a blade where the average user can throw the components in as they please. Maybe even let me upgrade the processor that way too.
3 - reduce excess heat and power consumption. Yeah, yeah, I know. But today's machines are more than fast enough for the average user, so concentrate on making them *better*, not faster.
4 - decent/easy backup method. I haven't found an easy or reliable way to back up my data. Can't find a tape drive that's fast enough or with enough capacity, CDs/DVDs are not reliable enough, and hard drives are cumbersome to work with (most of the time). External USB hard drives are an improvement, but surely there must be a better way.
5 - 3D Scanning/Printing. I'd like to take an object, be able to take pictures of it from all angles, and easily model it. Then I'd love to be able to print one out of that weird epoxy stuff I keep hearing about. At home. This would be an excellent way for budding inventors to create molds quickly and easily (and hopefully cheaply).
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Two words: wrist watch.
What's this? The computer built for Homer?
1. More than one cupholder per machine.
2. "Any" key that's red so you can find it faster when something breaks
3. A walkthough for The Internet. I've been playing for years and I don't think I'm even close to the end. A little help here.
4. A printer that uses less paper. Talk about waste, Jeeze!
5. Linux that runs on Windows 95. I have an older computer, and want to play too.
From your (not unfounded stand) OS-X, which is widely regarded as the most inovative OS out there, is really a bit of a step backward. Why? because it goes back to POSIX and wrapers for many of its major OS level functions. I Love the flexability and power of OS-X, but from a "changing the paradigm" point of view Mac OS-9 was/is a far more dramitic step forward at the basic OS level.
Remember, OS-9's API structure is inherently secure. Many people moaned about how it limited remote administratability, hence it's failure as widely accepted corporate desktop and server platform, but I for one would have loved to see OS-9 taken farther. Truley a low-level OS
with a high-level interface and none of that "wrapers and scripts" crap that adds computaional and user-level complexity. OS-X is an elegant solution for the user interface, but it realy solves none of the problems that 7/8/9 already did!
I think Corporate IT departments are as much to blame for the OS and software stagnation as anyone. No one operating a big network or server farm wants to have to compleltly re-learn everything to administer their system. If you think OS-X was purely created because of innovation you've got only half the idea. The other half was "we need something to make the corporate world take us serriously as a server and corporate desktop provider". And the answer unfortuneatly was not to extend OS-9 (New) but to fall back to UNIX (Old).
I wish Apple had decided to take a real lead and extend OS-9 development instead of capitulating to the market, but remember, as others have said, it's economics now, not innovation that drives the computing world.
A Call For A New Slashdot Moderation Level!
Laptop list:
1. Digital camera standard (really, if cellphones, why not laptops?), with included software to read sign language, frustration and warn about bosses sneaking up behind you.
2. 'Game Mode' to maximize performance, minimize background apps and change the firewall to only let through the gaming data.
3. Remote control doubles as wireless mouse.
4. Detachable keyboard.
5. 6 hour battery life, at least.
6. Seamless cell network to Wi-Fi networking for broadband prices.
7. Secondary display for email status.
8. Every screen is a touch screen.
9. Waterproof.
10. 'Natural' split keyboard option.
Wish list (current solution):
1. Built-in Pez Dispenser. (Duct tape)
2. LCD screen washer and wiper. (Windex and squeegee)
3. Can stretch screen for desk or shrink for lap. (Stupid overpriced 'dock).
4. It knows when it's being stolen and cries like a baby until it's returned. (I know when it's been stolen and I cry like a baby).
5. Transforms into Toaster Oven, using Dual Core heating elements. (can flip laptop upside down for roadside cooking, nice and warm).
A single person or a small team design the best systems
Single people don't scale well.
...so amazingly primitive that they still think digital watches are a pretty neat idea.
"Give a man a fish and he will ask for tartar sauce and French fries!"
Simply put, not every single person that knows how to build a website is getting money thrown at them anymore. While many of these dot-bombs were hair-brained ideas, some came up with some really great stuff.
With less people getting the chance to try out their wacky ideas, you're getting less "innovation".
1) Well they shouldn't be. Four hour rechargeable batteries (laptop) are way less than a pound.
2) Shouldn't be. RCA jacks are an industry standard, why the crossover expense? It's nuts.
3) I guess this point is where true innovation would come into play
4) Will do.
5) Google it. It's there. Bose speakers are the size of a pack of cigarrettes, but emit the type of sound that would fill a dancehall.
My point is that items 1, 2 and 4 should be on every computer today. I know number 3 is not yet practical, and number 5 is prohibitively expensive.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
I'd _really_ like to see solid state drives come down in price and go up in size.
:P
I really hope you meant "storage capacity". I doubt I'd like carrying a 8 1/2 " flash drive PLUS my laptop
I don't have 5 ideas, but... - How about hard disks that read from their platters in parallel instead of one platter at a time? This seems like it could speed up access until solid state drives reach more thresholds of usability. - I'd also love to see a more intelligent Virus Scanning program, that didn't consume tons of memory and CPU cycles to constantly rescan the same files over and over. - This one is more specific to Windows, but I wish they would not make everything a service unless it absolutely needs to be always running. Otherwise that's what scheduled tasks and dynamic link libraries are for.
"22 astronauts were born in Ohio. What is it about your state that makes people want to flee the Earth?" Stephen Colbert
1. one of those new LCD screens that shows a spreadsheet to the people standing near your cube, but when viewed head-on has counterstrike
2. a theme for windows that looks like Gnome or KDE so the hard core penguin heads think you're cool
3. a wireless keyboard that has a wire which does nothing but send funny messages to the keystroke logger your boss installs.
4. a toaster that is the size of a DVD drive which cools your processor by making toast
5. a small sound proof compartment to keep your pager in.
"Computers" - I'm sick of them. People should start to accept that its their *life* that's computerised. While we continue to improve this "box in corner of the room" we'll all continue to live in frustration.
:)
1. Better Input. Typing and clicking the mouse is 'nice' but my computer is used for far more than that. The input devices are archaic and need to be redesigned while still allowing for traditional methods of input. These new inputs (speech recognition, Gloves with pressure/location feedback, track IR, Assignable macro keyboards and any more revolutionary inputs) need to be hardware driven rather than software driven. I can't rely on my speech recognition when the CPU gets loaded. I can't even rely on my macro's at 80% CPU load, while my trusty hardware keyboard and mouse still operate at 0 Latency.
2. Better Output. We all experience in analog, but I stare at a flickering series of still images aligned to a grid all day. I want points which appear at a slightly random spot at a slightly random time. I want resolution independence in images. I want frame rate independence in video. I want anything to connect to anything (basically I want Alias to design all software & hardware
And yes, give me my augmented reality glasses in the next decade so I can stop "using a computer" and start just living digitally (please?)
3. More realistic UI. Icons were developed to represent the real world, with the "desktop" being the analogy. Now we are nearing the ability to have a UI that more closely resembles the real world, not for art's sake, but for usability.
For example, my itunes music collection is on random, so I can get equally bored of all of it simultaneously, rather than my real collection which has some CDs closer to the top of the pile, some left to fall to the bottom of the drawer never to be played (but never thrown out)
It is allowed to dynamically change and evolve in the real world without a thought, unlike in the computer world where, because the computer wants organisation and categorisation, I too have to adhere to its 'logic'
I don't want to hit the edges of screens. I don't even want this "multiple desktop" thing. I just want an edgeless desktop. I want to pull back away from firefox and slide/look over at other software i'm using. I don't want my software forced to be stored in a locked box
I know they've experimented with UI's like this, but they were still just cute "swap between software in 3D" toys, not serious usable UIs.
Two dimensions and screen borders feels cramped in 2005.
4. No more "Male/Female" plugs and converters. Design one type of plug and make it a hermaphrodide.
5. No more propriety formats, patents, DRM etc. No more spoon feeding us "HD1024 projectors" and "revolutionary two wheeled mice" (give us another ball instead of the wheel. Its not that hard. We're not cash cows)
Stop trying to lock us into closed box "media systems" and "Phones", "PDAs" & "MP3 players". I want different things to my neighbor. Theres no way you could ever please us both.
(For example: Give us a completely open mobile/bluetooth PDA and allow us to VNC to our desktops from *anywhere*, streaming music or doing any processor intensive tasks from anywhere.)
Don't choke formats forcing you to use different formats (mp3/wav for example) for different software, or different software for closely related tasks just because you're all too proud to allow me to composite in your video editor, or have maya feed directly into a compositor. Enough bottlenecks. Take a leaf out of "Propellerhead's Rewire" software (for allowing audio softwares from any developer who wants the SDK, to talk to each other.)
Work *together*
Open up software. Let us inside. Let us plug anything into anything (Let alias design everything already!)
Innovation for the benefit of all users.
6. REDUNDANCY! Don't even sell me a single HD any more. You know i'm just going to go out and buy a second one to back it up onto. Don't give me "Fanta
Rich Gentlemen Hide - The Existential Comic
Found the remote control at http://www.griffintechnology.com/products/airclick /index.php, thanks for the tip.
However, the receiver is a cumbersome apparatus connected via USB. I'd like to see it integrated like an Airport or Bluetooth card.
Lil' Thindime, lilting a lacrimose lament, krashes the kwaint konfines of Kokonino Kounty
No, that's not at all what I meant.
Windows is not "totalitarian" as such. The design has had many hands involved and is just as messy as *ix. And I could have used any *ix, be it FreeBSD, Solaris, etc. Only Linux seems to have many more people involved than those.
All of those systems work, but none of them approach good. A good design will not take away from your freedom... that's just silly conspiracy theory talk. Check out things like Squeak, Genera/LispMs, PalmOS, Apple Newton, BeOS, NeXT for what systems can be. A few of those reach "good" and even surpass it.
Dijkstra Considered Dead
I grew up on MS-DOS and Apple II and only used the WIMP interface in college for homework. At work now I still primarily use the Linux console + emacs and just have X up for Mozilla. I've been thinking a bit recently that the entire WIMP paradigm is nearing a dead-end. Here's why.
...' Ok, pull that up so I can finish it myself. (Screen switches to AbiWord with letter on display. I use the mouse and keyboard to finish the text markup.) Ok print that."
Computers are no longer predictable. You start them up, they all boot to a desktop/login screen with programs you access by clicking on icons. They all have amazing abilities (WYSIWYG a document, then print it across the network, with pasted data from a web site included) but those capabilities are disjointed and the metaphors don't make much sense to me. Why do all these little taskbar applets in XP popup "notifications"? I'd rather have these messages in an event log somewhere, not popping up to interrupt a slideshow for instance. Getting online with IE, shit you can't go anywhere without getting all this unpredictable behavior (pop-up, pop-under, fake UI screens, etc.). I find in general that using the WIMP interface for too long takes my "energy" level down, and it's hard to be interested in what's going on. My PC behaves like someone else's idea of a tool that doesn't fit how I think.
So...what's next? I'd like a "computer" that has a screen, keyboard, and mouse, but upon boot doesn't bring up a login prompt. Instead it displays the current time and waits for me to speak to it. "Computer, look up movie times in Houston Texas. (see Google'd results) Show me number 4. (read the movie blurb) Buy me a ticket to that, charge it to AMEX. (Computer responds: 'Your American Express card denied the transaction.') Crap. Buy me a ticket, charge to Mastercard." Or "Computer, start a letter to my congressperson. Begin dictation: 'Dear Scumbag,
We can use verbal commands to get the "navigating the UI to load programs" crap done quickly, then when we need to sit down and do the detail work we've got the WIMP interface still around. Or a house control computer: "Computer, call mom and dad and put it in the bedroom."
That's what *I* want out of the next-generation computer. We've got plenty of CPU for it, and after a few software generations we'll get the voice UI worked out so that 90% of people can get it do *something* useful. "Help me with this thing! (Computer responds, 'I can look up things on the Internet for you. Say 'computer, look up and then a topic'. I can place videophone calls for you. Say 'computer, call so-and-so'. Would you like a more detailed list of my abilities?)"
And I think an entire generation of people age 40-70 will understand and use this voice computer a lot better than a modern-day PC. It'll be somewhat like a scientific calculator, with gobs of function behind the scenes that you can ignore entirely when you just need to do basic addition.
I'd like an internal GPS, but I'm not sure I'd get all that much use out of it. It sure seems like the cell companies could pull their heads from their profit margins and share the GPS
What I would like to see on laptops is a KVM-type capability where the laptop could be used as a keyboard, mouse and display for an external PC. This would be done at a hardware level (no kludgy, slow, unreliable USB dongles digitizing the external system's video) to be useful.
I can't tell you the number of times I've been to a client location to fix something or other and had to fool around with displays, keyboards, etc, and usually they had no spare. Being able to pass a cable between the machine and my laptop would be much simpler.
I am not a doctor but if the RSI pain is due to squashed nerves you could try methylcobalamin (it's a more easily absorbed methyl form of vitamin B12).
;).
It doesn't fix whatever it is that causes your nerves to be squashed. But it keeps them alive whilst hopefully your body adapts
You should check with a decent doctor but usual starting dose is 1 x 500ug, three times a day after meals. You should notice within a week whether it helps or not. Side-effects and toxicity are quite low with vitamin B12.
there's usually a 2-3 hour gap in the tapes from 11am-3pm.
That's a 4 hour gap.
1) Power usage. Laptops are supposed to drain much less than desktops. But true, something more "inbetween" should be available. The problem with laptop batteries is that they are usually Li-Ion or at least NiMH, FAR more expensive than lead-acid used in UPS.
2) Completely different kind of signal I bet. The backstage tech costs.
3) Plus touchscreens are helluva expensive.
4) option a) IR plug on serial port, works with any remote. (cheap, cumbersome) b) IrDA, many computers (and most laptops) have it onboard, dedicated remote (expensive, neat).
5) I guess they aren't cheap...
ALL of them are quite expensive in the "quality" form. Definitely not desirable as "standard". Power supply - add 50% price. Network card - well, you see. Touchscreens - at least 3x the price. Remote with built-in IrDA - probably as much as any remote, which isn't quite SO cheap. Speakers - well, you know.
Sure they all should be available. As an expensive option.
45 5F E1 04 22 CA 29 C4 93 3F 95 05 2B 79 2A B2
Where are my mod points when I need them. Fantastic post.
Lots of petrified grits
I think you should wait until next year to tell him that the show wasn't real either.
Let's see:
1. "They" make quieter fans already, they're more expensive than noisy fans which is why most people don't use them. BTW most of the fan noise comes from the movement of the air not the bearings (unless your fan's broken) so greasing them isn't going to have any effect.
2. At first I thought this idea was really stupid (why would I want to reach under my desk to open a bottle when I can have a bottle opener right by the fridge. Then I read #5 and laughed at you. How do you propose to put a fridge (food/drink dispenser) in a computer the height of a laptop and the size of a Mac Mini?
3. Wireless everything? How do you propose to power this wireless monitor? If I have to plug it into the AC then also plugging it into the CPU isn't a big problem. And say I drop a new wireless monitor on my desk, how does it know which of the numerous computers near me to connect to?
We have wireless everything now, they are called laptops.
4. You can't use a USB storage drive as a copy protection device its too easy to duplicate their contents. There are already USB keys, they are used on some high end software packages. I'd rather see the end of copy protection that doesn't stop people pirating the software so I don't need the CD (or any other kind of) key. I would like to see games that let you put saved-games on USB keys (i.e. easily) like consoles do so I can take them with me easily.
5. Small computers are already here, the Mac Mini is only twice your desired volume now (laptops are about 1" think the Mac Mini is 2" tall).
5a. Macs have been booting of USB storage devices (flashcards) for years. Having the OS on a flash card doesn't eliminate the need for install disks unless they are write once (in which case how do you install patches?).
So basically three (plus the bonus wish) of the things you want are already here and the other two are moronic, good troll.
"Grab them by the pussy" -- President of the United States of America
Even though the Mac Mini has the power consumption as a P4 (yes, the computer and yes, the chip) companies still won't buy it. Because... they are stupid. Always. The Dells are the cheapest possible, and that is the final word. No matter if they cost 5x as much as the other computers to operate, that isn't in their budget. They just got their order of computers in on-budget... let someone else explain why heating isn't needed anymore and why the energy bill doubled.
The original Apple Mac Cube had no fan and clever use of storage, so maybe had 1 and a half of the 5 wish list items.
The current Apple iMac already has 3 of the 5 items -- specifically numbers 1, 3, and 5. The fan is variable speed and pretty quiet. The system can be purchased from the factory with wireless networking, wireless keyboard, wireless mouse, and the system-box is integrated with the display in a compact package.
The Apple Mini is quiet, uses tiny drives sensibly, and is almost without wires (only need a cable from display to the mini system unit; keyboard, mouse, and network can be purchased as wireless), so it maybe meets 1 and a half of the 5 wish list items.
I suppose the poster is not a MacOS X user.
Copy protection software for very expensive software that was purchased by my company and has been installed legitemately consumes a lot of support time and generally pisses everyone off. For example one of my current hassles is a roll out of an update to one piece of software to a cluster has been delayed three months while the vendor tries to work out why it takes over thirty seconds to get a licence before an operation can take place - which would leave each user looking at a frozen screen for thirty seconds around 96 times a day. Why so long? The vendor has to figure it out themselves without any help form the people they bought the licencing system from. Macrovision has the feild sewn up, the barrier to entry for anyone else is too high.
Another good reason for open software - licencing software is crap and cripples some closed software. The original article is talking about a way to stop people using their software as in improvement - which is something I disagree with.
Working on? You can boot off a USB key today.
What he wants is his OS on a PCI-E card. Great, if it's rewritable and a LOT of storage. I don't want to have to buy a new OS card just to get my security updates, and I want to still have somewhere to put my games and such -- not to mention my Linux.
Besides, hard drives CAN be made fast enough, especially if you hibernate/swsusp. Don't think Macs do that, but I think they have a VERY efficient standby.
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
Honestly, these schemes will never work without TCPA. Stop that at the gate, and we can have the GPS, and we fake the GPS, so our boss thinks we're connecting from our house (which is locked) when we are in fact in his house (which he forgot to lock)... or wherever.
It'd be even funnier to steal the boss' laptop, install your own spyware, and every time your boss connects, put him in an arbitrary place. "Sorry, you may not connect to the corporate LAN from Larry's Escort Service...
Don't thank God, thank a doctor!
I think the big opportunity is really in rackmounts, not desktops. The electricity cost of a typical desktop is really quite low, as mentioned below, and most consumers just don't care. But HVAC is quickly becoming a limiting factor in big server farms; look at Google's paper on their cluster architecture. Electricity may be cheap, but real estate is not, and anything that lets you pack machines more densely without having your server farm go up in flames is a big win for major web businesses.
As I've already mentioned, I know of several games already that intentionally crash or refuse to even start if they even think you _might_ have Daemon Tools or Alcohol installed.
A polar bear is a cartesian bear after a coordinate transform.
Sorry. The terms are common in the world of functional programming languages (Haskell, ML, etc.) but there's no reason someone who works with something like C would known them. You've already got a good reply, but at the risk of oversimplifying, I'll try to describe the concepts in more C-friendly terms.
A disjunctive type works a bit like a combination of a union (i.e., it can represent several kinds of data, but only one at once) and an enum that identifies which kind of data the current value is. A common example is making a "nullable" version of a type T, which might have two options:
which you'd define by simply listing the names of the possible options and the type each represents:
You can't access the value of an object with a disjunctive type directly, because you don't know which of the options is being used, and there needn't be any particular relationship between them. Instead, you use a technique called pattern matching, which is essentially a type check serving a similar purpose to C++'s dynamic_cast.
For example, to print an object obj of type Optional T, you can't write something structured like this:
because you don't know which of the two options obj is currently using, but you can write something structured like this instead:
to print "None" in the None case, or the value of the T object in the Some case.
(Obviously I'm making the syntax up here, although in fact what you write in many functional programming languages isn't far off this.)
In this way, you can define many useful types. Nullable variations are one example, but you can also extend that to data strucures like linked lists and trees, and much more.
With a type system like this, there is no built-in concept of NULL as there is with C's pointers. You just don't need it: if you want a nullable type, you create it explicitly (which usually requires a grand total of one extra word in the source code), but then the type system forces you to check for the null option properly when you access the data. There is no concept of dereferencing a null pointer or throwing a null reference exception, because you simply can't be in that position.
Wow, that was a truly awful post. Sorry. I'm writing this quickly at lunch and don't have time to edit it much. If you're interested in these concepts and their close relations -- and personally, I'd certainly rate them as one of my top five things the maintstream programming industry should get to! -- then you might like to search for:
There are some pretty good articles in various programming-related wikis that you'll probably find your way to via the above, although I give you fair warning that some of them get a bit deep, and the functional programming world does have its share of zealots and evangelists just like any other...
If you disagree, post your argument. (-1, Overrated) isn't your personal censorship tool for views you don't like.
Let's face it, we all love technology. We surround ourselves with the latest and greatest and consume nothing but the best of the best when it comes to gadgetry and technological extravagances, yet in the past few years the only thing to advance in an incredible degree would be video cards and CPUs. Why has there been such a sudden lack in innovation as of late? Are we in a technological drought? I like to stick to my own diagnosis of the industry as being too concerned with keeping a steady cash flow over social experimentation with new products but then again that's just an opinion from a little guy. Well, I know what I want to see happen in the next years and I'm there are at least 1 million blogs about this very subject but I have a very convincing statement which should make you read and backup my list and It's quite simple really: I'm right and all 1 million blogs are wrong. There. I said it. I'm sure that after reading the list that you'll also come to this conclusion, at least that's what I'm banking on. 1) Better Designed fans -- RAWR! That's the sound of my system all 24 hours of the day. Although I have fairly new Thermaltake fans for both my CPU and system, the thing sounds as if it had wings and wheels that it would take off into the sky. Now, I'm sure many of you will say "Oh stop whining, there's liquid cooling and fan-less solutions, yackity smackity" but I say nay onto those because 1.) Liquid cooling is more expensive than a fan based setup and 2.) Have you seen an AMD 64 being ran with a fan-less solution? They melt like marshmallows on a campfire. Seeing how there are is a nearly frictionless lubricant in Japan, I'm sure that some engineers from these fan manufacturers can conjure up the nerve to walk into the sex shops selling the stuff and just buy a few bottles (in the name of advancement and science of course). I mean, haven't they heard of Teflon!? Why not even use a little Wesson on the things, I'm sure they'd sound a lot quieter then apposed to the sand and glass I suspect they use currently for lubrication. 2) Cases with more functionality -- Haven't you even dreamt of having your case double as a food/drink dispenser as well? Of course you have! Wouldn't it just be oh-so cool to have a bottle opener or a soda dispenser built into the case without having to do tedious and sometimes ridiculous amounts of modifications? I mean, the possibilities are quite endless really when it comes to being a dispenser and it wouldn't necessarily be all that hard. It doesn't have to stop at food either, I mean how many of you have or use the phone near your computer? Well, why not combine the two!? Wouldn't it just be so cool to have a fully functional phone right there on your case? There would be no need to get up ever again except for bathroom breaks but they have bags and jugs for that anyways, right? 3) Wireless everything -- That's right baby, no more wire hang- err, wires. I want to be able to buy something, set it on my desk and it automatically work. This rule applies for everything from mice and keyboards to monitors and various displays. We are in a world where being connected is required but I don't necessarily see why we need to be connected with a huge cable or dare I say dozens of cables! It isn't as if it would be hard, it would just take a standardization of a short range communications standard and some willingness from a few manufacturers. If it's once thing that amazes people still in this day and age, its things that can send and receive data wirelessly. Even people with a complete understanding of the technology stare in bewilderment at their cutesy, wireless mouse. Come on industry, cut the cords and go truly wireless already!
Starting from a dumb article keeps the discussion from reaching the heights that Slashdot can reach. Nice try, guys.