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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.
Nobody wants to be stalked with creep ware.
No LEDS to tell me the device is turned off. No LEDS to tell me it's "sleeping". OR simply a method to disable these LEDS because I'm old enough to not want my computer room looking like the engine room of the enterprise WHEN EVERYTHING IS POWERED OFF NO LEDS
I'd remove systemd from Debian so that Debian became usable again.
Mac os X remove the apple only locks.
Yes you can do your self but it will be nice to have so you can install updates without braking stuff.
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 have many little ideas to improve laptops.
- Allow disabling LEDs or have them all under the lid. I don't want my whole room blinking when the machine is in suspend.
- Do not use eye-scorching low frequencies like 200 Hz for backlight PWM.
- Make Macs with matte screens.
- Put in place dedicated volume keys instead of clunky Fn buttons.
- Have a small maintenance hatch in every machine for easy dust removal from the heatsink.
- Include a trackball so I can play 3D games on couch without an external mouse.
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.
Title says it all.
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.
How about turning fleshlight into a girlfriend?
love is just extroverted narcissism
I'd rather have a thicker laptop which could work off battery from when I wake up to when I go to sleep (~16 hours - both work and evening relaxation use), and charge overnight. A thicker phone which only needs to be charged every 2-3 days, instead of every night. A thicker tablet that can last a week or two on a charge instead of a few days.
My phone (Nexus 5) was so thin compared to my previous (Galaxy S with a slide-out keyboard) that I dropped it more times in my first week owning it than I had dropped the old phone in 3 years. I ended up getting a case for it, not to protect it but to make it thicker so I wouldn't drop it so much. I don't need nor want it to be any thinner. Do something useful with that extra space - like pack in a bigger battery. (I'm happy to report though that with the Marshmallow update, the phone easily lasts 36-48 hours on a charge. Many days it still has over 70% charge left by the time I go to sleep. Maybe we'll manage to get back to the days when you only had to charge your phone every 3-4 days.)
Everything should be two factor password system with one being a token/phone/pc, the second one should be a short, (no more than 6 symobls - including every key on a standard keyboard - and you should not have to change anything more often than twice a year.
excitingthingstodo.blogspot.com
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.
Turn off sponsored posts on SlashDot. Or, at least, allow us to comment on them. (Boy are there some stupid ones posted. Looking at you, CA.)
The Swiss Army Knife School of Software Development needs to die, please, die now. My graphics editor will never be used to email my congressman, and I sure the fuck don't need my phone texting me about what's in my refrigerator.
I want fast, uncluttered software that doesn't bitch at me or offer to order me boner pills.
because IBM's trackpoint hits the right spot absolutely positively every f****g time.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
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.
Meh, many people want locked down worlds where hackers can't infect their systems. Given the picture of infosec these days, you'll only see this getting more acute. I'm all for the 'Do this complicated step to void your warranty but unlock everything' operation. But having said thing unlocked, uninformed users can be notified with big haggard warnings that they're living in an 'unsafe' platform. Said services could live through a user's connected services instead of the host itself, but once machine trust is gone, its a tricky / useless endeavour to try and enforce otherwise.
Bye!
I would reset the popular smartphone form factor back to 4.5" to 4.7". I don't want to have to carry around a small tablet in my pocket, in order to have the latest features.
Downmodding is the refuge of the weak. Don't downmod, make a better argument!
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.
Example, my PS3 has Play TV, and is used primarily as a DVR/media center. Why when I turn it on by inserting a disc, does it load that disk, but when I turn it on after having been used as a DVR, it goes to the default on screen? Why can't I tell it to default to PlayTV or Netflix? Or better yet, Play TV if turned on between 6 a.m. and 6 p.m. and Netflix any other time?
Simple rules are impossible for that, and everything else. I want my water heater to drop 10 degrees between 8 a.m. and 5 p.m., and again from midnight to 6 a.m. Better yet, have it learn my patterns, and provide the optimal water temp with the minimal power. Perhaps some of that can be done with home automation, but that doesn't work yet, at least not on a mass consumer level.
But the single biggest product change I'd make is 240V to the socket, with a single high efficiency power supply providing 5v/12v/48v to every socket as well. 5V so you can have USB charging at the wall with no adapters (except for Apple).12V for low-use DC, such as Christmas lights, cordless phones, and other uses that need more than 5V, and 48V for high-use DC, such as laptops and such. Have them all remote-switched so without anything plugged in they are zero draw. And every consumer device will be re-designed for the new voltages. Never hunt for a wall wart or charger again. Standard power plugs for everything, shared cords, and same voltage. Cut costs and boost efficiency.
Learn to love Alaska
I miss 4 inch screen, high end Android phone. If I want a phone with a good screen I have to go to 5.5 inches or above, or settle for a low end, slower phone.
I'd get rid of APK. Everything else is fine by comparison.
That is a well-thought through list with meaningful improvements.
You realize that most of what you suggest (except possibly items 8-10) would make Windows into ... well ... something like Linux :)
For laptops, how about Kensington lock slots? Computers are not cheap, and it would be nice to be able to chain it down to a desk without having to either go with a laptop cage, lock it in a drawer, or use some slapdash method like a piece of metal between the hinges.
For desktops, I'd like to see real keylocks return. Not the crappy round-key cheapie type, but the real 5-6 pin Medeco locks that IBM used on their PS/2 machines. The keylock in front would be a soft-switch to the OS to disable all HID devices and blank the screen (so someone plugging in a USB keyboard or mouse would still be locked out.) The keylock in back would keep the case from being opened without leaving obvious damage. Combine this with some type of cable, and it will help ensure the desktop stays put.
Of course, it might be nice to have a fiber optic cable that each end plugs into a set of S/PDIF slots. If the cable is cut or unplugged, it acts as an intrusion sensor, and immediately hard-powers off the machine. This way, if a machine is physically grabbed, the data is protected.
(1a) Root/jailbreak everywhere, as an easy option (not called that any longer). Rather like the security control on Mac OS. "Security" on by default, but can be turned off with a click.
(1b) An unlocked SIM socket on every device, of every size, along with a dialer/calling app for mobile networks. So that I don't have to choose amongst the limited selection of "phablets" but can instead use an iPad Mini or a Samsung Galaxy S2 as my phone if I want to.
STOP . AMERICA . NOW