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Ask Slashdot: What Single Change Would You Make To a Tech Product?
An anonymous reader writes: We live in an age of sorcery. The supercomputers in our pockets are capable of doing things it took armies of humans to accomplish even a hundred years ago. But let's face it: we're also complainers at heart. For every incredible, revolutionary device we use, we can find something that's obviously wrong with it. Something we'd instantly fix if we were suddenly put in charge of design. So, what's at the top of your list? Hardware, software, or service — don't hold back.
Here's an example: over the past several years, e-readers have standardized on 6-inch screens. For all the variety that exists in smartphone and tablet sizing, the e-reader market has decided it must copy the Kindle form factor or die trying. Having used an e-reader before all this happened, I found a 7-8" e-ink screen to be an amazingly better reading experience. Oh well, I'm out of luck. It's not the worst thing in the world, but I'd fix it immediately if I could.
Here's an example: over the past several years, e-readers have standardized on 6-inch screens. For all the variety that exists in smartphone and tablet sizing, the e-reader market has decided it must copy the Kindle form factor or die trying. Having used an e-reader before all this happened, I found a 7-8" e-ink screen to be an amazingly better reading experience. Oh well, I'm out of luck. It's not the worst thing in the world, but I'd fix it immediately if I could.
I'd remove systemd from Debian so that Debian became usable again.
If a led is on, the device is not "OFF", it's in standby mode, which means that is still suck a non-negligible amount of permanent electricity, like 10-20$ / Year.
These modes should be forbidden, or better, they should be taxed !
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I'd force manufacturers to open their products and support them regardless of their users.
It's ludicrous that we live in a world of locked bootloaders and warranty fuses. How can you void a hardware warranty by running a different OS? How can we release a device that gets no updates after only the shortest time?
Devices have a useful life, they should be supported throughout that useful life.
I would definitely go back and make it common practice to use email addresses for usernames instead of letting users choose.
No, I don't want a tablet in my pocket thank you very much.
Buy it.
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I would make it open source (or at least unlocked). Locked hardware (and to a lesser extent, 'cloud' services) is one of the biggest threats to the worldwide computer community these days. It gives control of things to corporations, much like AOL was trying to do in the 90s. Who wants to be locked into the AOL world?
Right to Read is fiction, but corporations have been trying to make it reality for a long time. Walled gardens are bad for our freedom (and frankly don't improve security, either).
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
I'm with you. I'm still trying to figure out why my DVD player and TV need a light on to tell me when they're OFF. And when I turn them on, the LED goes off.
Can anyone say "parasitic power draw"?
General Relativity: Space-time tells matter where to go; Matter tells space-time what shape to be.
Stop preloading crap that I don't want and didn't ask for.
If for some inconceivable reason I wanted the Facebook app, I can find it and download it quite easily. After that, it every time I upgrade my device, I will automatically have that app pre-installed. If you must pre install it to avoid tech support questions, then at least make the God forsaken thing un-installable!
I have nothing against Uber, but if I wanted their app, I would install it.
Maybe you should pre-install a computer algebra system app? (CAS) Since I use it, I would tend to believe that everyone would be interested in such an app!
I'll see your senator, and I'll raise you two judges.
Backslash-as-a-filepath-separator is extremely annoying, both because it's gratuitously different from every other OS, and because it's also used (in C, C++, and elsewhere) as an escape character, which can cause endless hilarity for anyone who isn't very careful about that.
And I'd also like them to replace the Windows DOS prompt with bash running inside a proper terminal window. Installed by default.
I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
Almost every streaming media player on almost every platform, from Windows to Linux to HTML5 Video to DRM-encrypted stuff like Amazon Video and Netflix, has severe limitations on its willingness to download the video while it's not actually playing.
This is not helping anyone. It's not a security feature, because anyone who wants to pirate the video will do so regardless of how they try to restrict it. It's not a bandwidth-saving feature, because most people who start to watch a video are going to either close the video player or watch it all the way through anyway.
The people it really hurts are, oh, I don't know, *the vast majority* (at least in the US), who don't have enough connection throughput to stream the video "live" at the highest-available bitrate. Almost no one has the ability to stream 2K or 4K at decent quality. Most people still don't have the ability to reliably stream at 1080p; "smart" streaming players will frequently drop down to 360p or 480p during playback when there are throughput bottlenecks caused by other customers or background programs or other users on the same uplink. There are even probably a lot of people who can't reliably stream 720p.
Yet streaming video players are deliberately coded to be as stupid as possible, and not allow the user to "pre-roll" the entire video, basically meaning that they open up the video player, then leave it paused for half an hour or an hour while the video downloads, then come back and watch the whole thing at full quality with no "graceful downgrades" due to their connection being slow.
This is a draconian and quality-killing misfeature that puts users in a bind, since most (good) streaming video content providers don't allow downloading, or if they do, it's in SD only. HD viewing is almost universally restricted to streaming only. And on the few devices and services where downloading in HD is allowed, often the video is encrypted and can't be streamed off of the tiny tablet you have to download it from (see the Kindle Fire lineup) without using some flaky, unreliable piece of shit like Miracast.
Apparently the video content providers are wholly uninterested in giving the best experience to the vast majority of their customers who aren't lucky enough to live in a high-income, high-population-density area that got fiber to the premises before all the big ISPs decided to stop rolling out fiber to new customers. They're perfectly content to let us watch video in varying levels of quality as the player constantly recalculates the data transfer rate and delivers quality varying between 240p and 480p most of the time, with occasional jumps to 720p.
It's galling to think that something as commonplace as streaming video has been implemented so incorrectly, and probably deliberately so, by so many tech companies -- Amazon, Netflix, Hulu, HBO Now, and so on and so forth. And if it's actually the content cartels making them do this, well fuck them. I've stopped subscribing to their services and stopped handing them my money. They can get my money when they and/or the ISPs stop putting every citizen who doesn't live in Dallas or Seattle or San Francisco in a double bind, where they can't get a decent ISP, and can't take advantage of commonplace and desirable online services even if they pay for them, without moving their life, family, job and household into the inner city where they're choking to death on smog and can't even fart without being heard by a dozen neighbors packed in an apartment like sardines.
Of course the problem with this is it somehow presumes I trust entities with my damned phone number.
And I'm sorry, but that's not happening ... if Google wants my cell number so they can ostensibly text me with two factor authentication, the reality is I simply don't trust them and fully expect this will be used for further marketing/tracking/analytics.
Take the marketing weasels out of the mix and make sure this stuff is to protect my privacy and security.
But until then, every web site which says "oh, just give us your cell number for added security" gets a big "fuck you". Because time and time again they prove they're not to be trusted.
Lost at C:>. Found at C.
If so, revert it to how it was about 8 years ago.
Also, make Apple not do about half of what they've done, design-wise, in the last 5 years, to both hardware and software. Thin gray letters on white? Buttons that look like text? Colors from the background creeping into every UI surface? A phone that's so thin, there's a bump for the camera lens to fit, and so thin that its battery doesn't survive one day of moderate use? Fuck all that.
Dear Slashdot: next time you want to mess with the site, add a rich-text editor for comments.
The LED is immaterial. The power supply is still there, and while on standby it's consuming way more power than the LED is.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Seriously, touchpads are the worst pointing devices in the history of pointing devices. Every manufacturer claims to have a "better" touchpad, but they all just end up sucking in different ways. I typed my thesis on a 10+ year old IBM keyboard with a trackpoint on it, because I couldn't stand any other option that was on the market (and I paid dearly to acquire it!).
My change would therefore be for more manufacturers to use trackpoint (or trackpoint-style) keyboards. Laptops, desktops, even foldable bluetooth keyboards for tablets. Give us something that works. We've seen other vendors (Dell, HP, Toshiba, and even Sony) use them in past years, it can be done again.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I really really hope hundreds of thousands of people working with ads lose their jobs soon. They simply don't deserve to get paid.
I'd like to get rid of everyone that uses the subject line to start their comment. That is all.
Windows XP didn't exist in the mid 90's.