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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.
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! ;)
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Patents, and Lawyers.
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"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.
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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.
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.
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.
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
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.
If you really were the person that wrote the article, which I am not disputing, perhaps you should have been drinking Sparks instead of whatever it was you were getting inebriated with.
Secondly, you spelled satirical wrong. In fact, I don't honestly believe your article was "mainly satiracle (sic)." If it was satire, you probably at this point would know how to spell it and you could have used the space to make it humorous! It wasn't funny. Satire doesn't always have to be funny, but in a case like this, IMHO it should have been.
So that said, you should have been drinking SPARKS. Would have been a laugh.
On a more serious note, if you wanted honestly to spur discussion on innovation, you could have had us write the article for you. Try the "Ask Slashdot" feature. Out of the 400 troll posts you could find 5 "Insightful" and probably even 5 "Interesting" ideas on innovation.
Have fun. Meow.
-Aaron
My name is Aaron Landry, and I approve this message.
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.
OK so I want this new system and this new game. Oh OK I just plug in this USB key, I see. Now how do I plug in my joystick? Oh, its a wireless joystick! Everything is wireless now? Cool! ... now where do I plug in this USB key?
I design user interfaces for a free network management application,
The funny thing is...
With so many efforts to bring more usability to both KDE and GNOME, does Google really needs to release an OS? Does they need to worry about what Microsoft is doing to Windows? I don't think so, all of their web-based applications run well on Windows, and even if Microsoft does something nasty to IExplorer there will always be Firefox and Opera.
The OS itself is becomming less, and less relevant. The applications are what really drives the user needs. And Google has provided lots of web applications that are OS agnostic.
Thats whats driving Microsoft mad, Google is slowly making Windows NOT relevant.
Now, imagine a Google plugin that integrates OpenOffice with Gmail, one that allows you to perfectly preview and make simple modifications to your attached documents online. With almost 2.5GB of online storage I could keep all my documents there, and access them from whatever OS I'm using at the moment. This can cause some severe damage to Microsoft, one that wouldn't be easly recovered.
As long as you can edit, preview and print your documents... does it really matter what OS youre using?
---- You know how some doctors have the Messiah complex - they need to save the world? You've got the "Rubik's" complex
Seriously. That's one area where what the industry needs isn't innovation, it's common sense. There are tons of artificial limits on what we can do that really don't have much basis in reality. There are tons of easy fixes that could be made, and tons of compatibility that could be added, but that for some political reason or other, isn't. Game publishers should stop making me waste five minutes installing the No-CD crack that they know will exist, they should just let me play without a disc. Microsoft should halt its failed attempt to own the web and spend the few months to make IE standards-compliant. Microsoft and Apple both should quit their format squabbles and ship with support for Ogg Vorbis (no effort on their part, the glue is already written). (DRM could be applied at the file level, there's no real advantage to owning the format.) On that subject, the music industry should get the clue with which iTunes's success has been beating them over the head - DRM only works when it's so dilute that it effectively doesn't exist, and therefore it's just an expensive bit of bloat that limits their market.
And so on. The general idea is, for a variety of really stupid political reasons, from an outsider's perspective, technology is going backwards in a lot of cases. When hard drives were 60MB and games came on 2 floppies, you could install them and then play them without the floppies. Now we have 2000 times that capacity, but you can't do that.
What is this, product placement for Sparks?!
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.
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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)
worst article ever
Not really, it would take a mind-bendingly bad article to top some in the past, but I don't think innovation has slowed down and your complaints seem entirely negligible and pointless to me.
Additionally, writing an article at 3 A.M. is not a very good excuse, but the real crime is that your article ended up on the front page.
Again, bad article, but it sparked some good conversation and it's not your fault it actually got posted.
True story.
Thats going to be difficult. All the energy that goes out needs to go in first. There are 1440 minutes in a day, so if you want the battery to charge in as many minutes as it lasts days, you're going to need to put power in at least 1440 times faster than it comes out. I say at least, because that would assume 100% efficiency, which is impossible.
That being said, I hope someone figures out how to do it.
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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.
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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).
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. -
"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?
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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.