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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.
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.
No, I don't want a tablet in my pocket thank you very much.
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.)
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.