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Ask Slashdot: What Is Missing In Tech Today?
dryriver writes: There is so much tech and gadget news pouring out of the internet every day that one might think "everything tech that is needed already exists." But of course, people thought precisely that at various points in human history, and then completely new tools, technologies, processes, designs, devices and innovations came along soon after and changed everything. Sometimes the opposite also happens: tech that was really good for its day and used to exist is suddenly no longer available. For example, many people miss the very usable Psion palmtop computers with their foldout QWERTY keyboards, touchscreens, and styluses; or would have liked the Commodore Amiga with its innovative custom chips and OS to continue existing and evolving; or would have liked to be able to keep using software like Softimage XSI or Adobe Director, which were suddenly discontinued.
So here is the question: what tech, in your particular profession, industry, personal area of interest, or scientific or academic field, is currently "missing?" This can be tech that is needed but does not exist yet, either hardware or software, or some kind of mechanical device or process. It could also be tech that was available in the past, but was EOL'd or "End Of Lifed" and never came back in an updated or evolved form. Bonus question: if what you feel is "missing" could quite feasibly be engineered, produced, and sold today at a profit, what do you think is the reason it isn't available?
So here is the question: what tech, in your particular profession, industry, personal area of interest, or scientific or academic field, is currently "missing?" This can be tech that is needed but does not exist yet, either hardware or software, or some kind of mechanical device or process. It could also be tech that was available in the past, but was EOL'd or "End Of Lifed" and never came back in an updated or evolved form. Bonus question: if what you feel is "missing" could quite feasibly be engineered, produced, and sold today at a profit, what do you think is the reason it isn't available?
Feminism.
Open standards are what we're missing. Things like Apple's AirDrop provide a rich tool for sharing all kinds of content, but only within the Apple ecosystem. Tools like this and others can only truly be useful when they are open and interoperable with the majority of devices on the market. Closed ecosystems are limiting the potential for technology to improve communication across the board and eliminate paper.
We need AI to answer these market research questions so we're not pestered with them on the Slashdot main page.
sweet homophobia bro.
i could live a little longer in this prison
That's what's missing in tech today. We haven't caught up as a society to the tech we have. There should be no more new tech until people learn how to behave.
If you don't eat yer meat, you can't have any pudding
How can you have any pudding if you don't eat yer meat?
You are welcome on my lawn.
Privacy.
What could be made today? Programs without all the useless resource hogging bloat that the users neither need nor want that makes a new version run as slow as the old one a decade ago, despite running on vastly superior hardware. Why isn't it made? 'Developers are morons' is my best guess.
I can't give you an answer for general tech, but medical tech would be greatly advanced by the ability to put people into suspended animation.
Basically, if the person's body isn't *operating* - needing to breathe, needing to circulate, and so on - then repairs could be done much more effectively and cheaply,
I read where gunshot victims would be suspended temporarily as an experimental method a couple of years back.
Whatever happened to that?
Perhaps a combination of sudden hypoothermia coupled with sulphur dioxide treatment or something.
* Standard form factor for making upgrade-able smartphones-esq devices. (oh capitalism)
* Large MEMS based displays. (Apple bought the patents but who knows if they are developing it)
* Consumer-grade ASIC lithography and chip packaging. (are custom 20um chips too much to ask for?)
* Inexpensive microinverters for solar panels. (price fixing?)
* Solid-state lithium-ion batteries. (in development)
The list goes on and on but those are some big ones.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
All the different architectures and types of computers were fun. There was diversity. Now it's a boring pile of largely the same stuff. Even the internet and computer networking was fun, and now it's just a pile of bullshit group-think, and advertising.
Wanna read something FUN? Look up DTACK-GROUNDED, or early BYTE magazines. That's FUN to read. It's opinionated, slightly crazy, full of technical details and piles of fun.
If anyone knows of similar sorts of stuff being written now, please post a link!
These were cheap and effective. Now, we're forced to buy laser-annealed multiblades at multiples of the price. Yes, I know about the shave club, but I like buying my stuff at the local supermarket or drug store.
Chrome and Firefox keep fighting each other but they keep copying each other crippling their features in the process. Opera is ran by a Chinese spyware company now, Safari and Edge are both ran by their own evil empires. That leaves us stuck with forks like Waterfox, Palemoon and Iridium, and also rans like Midori, Uzbl and Netrunner.
What we need is a new open source browser that basically gives geeks what they want, and is suitable for normal users (dosen't get malware and is "Blue E" level easy to use).
See, that was easy.
Privacy. Every asshole corp. is trying to bleed you for data they can sell.
Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
I read an atricle about Australia sending a life saving device to kids drowning in the ocean. I would like to see more of that. Easily produced as far as hardware goes, but the hard part is liability and insurance if there is an accident or it doesn't work correctly.
As a developer I would like to see some better/easier integration when pushing to the cloud or a hybrid setup. For everything docker images, VMs, cloud, hybrid cloud, etc, are suppose to do, it still seems clumsy/overly complicated.
We're missing tech that is secure and reliable, and that doesn't violate our privacy. We're missing tech that has a logically-designed user interface. We're missing tech that is well-documented and that serves its stated purpose without hype, and without trying to manipulate our behavior.
A box I put in my basement with a bunch of hard drives. I turn it on and configure a couple of things via a web UI. I download clients onto all of my devices and aim them at the box, and they all automatically get backed up. I open a port on my router and my phones/laptop/tablets do incremental backups OTA via encrypted tunnel. The box has a couple of removable drives I can swap out and keep off site. There's an option to mirror in the cloud - encrypted on my side, for a nominal fee.
There are things that do some of the above for some devices. There isn't anything that I know of that does them all for every device.
My Other Computer Is A Data General Nova III.
Um, respect for peoples' privacy, maybe? Honesty in advertising? A company that produces products without planned obsolescense? A company just trying to make good products, instead of trying to get the most out of peoples' wallets, like e.g. not selling two versions of a product where the difference is literally $3 worth of components and different firmware, but where the one with all components is then priced at $200 higher?
Oh, I dunno. To condense this, I feel like respectability is one of the things companies and the people running them that is sorely needed -- not that I expect things to change for the better in the future!
Another medical tech that we don't have is quick, multiple diagnosis elimination systems.
For example, suppose you go to the doctor feeling tired. They could draw some blood and test for (or eliminate) the 10 most common problems with that as a symptom. Flu, cold, mono, lyme, infection (other), anemia, vitamin deficiency, thyroid, allergy, and so on.
Rather than rely on reported symptoms and playing odds by trying treatments (".., and see if it goes away") we should have ways to more accurately detect or eliminate the most common conditions.
Teleporters - And all fedex DHL UPS TRUCKS and pesky delivery drones are DOA. You might as well keep on worrying that driverless trucks are coming -- and AI will take over their jobs.
WARNING: Smartphones have side effects--most of them undocumented.
... I'll list a few things that I think ARE missing in tech. One thing that I would love is a programming language that can automatically compile to multiple OSs - Windows, Linux, Mac, Android, iOS - without any sort of adjustment or porting happening. Hit Compile, and your software runs on a number of supported OSs. I would also love for someone to invent something like GPU BASIC, a programming language that is as easy as BASIC, but can be used to write code that runs fully parallelized on modern GPUs. In the 3D content creation space, the biggest problem right now is that different 3D apps cannot read each other's 3D scene files at all. For example, LibreOffice can read and write Word or Excel files just fine. But 3D software that costs many thousands of Dollars a license cannot pull this feat off. Maya cannot read 3DMax files, Cinema4D cannot read LightWave3D files, Houdini cannot read Blender files and so on. Its a huge pain in the ass. Nothing is compatible with each other in the 3D space. I would like more work done on visual coding interfaces like DataFlow languages, where you basically program using nodes or flowchart-like visual paradigms. DataFlow languages exist. But most are for specialized applications. I would love a DataFlow language that has all of the power and flexibility of something like C or C++. A DataFlow language that could be used to code just about anything, even an Operating System Kernel if you are so inclined. In programming, one of the things I miss is automatic porting/translation to another language and syntax, and multi-syntax programming languages. Imagine writing an algorithm in BASIC, and being able to see that algorithm instantly as C, Python or Rust code. There are a few language-to-language auto translation tools out there. But I'd love to have this built into my programming IDE. In terms of electronics and gadgets, I'd love to have a camera that can capture the world in both Stereo 3D and Volumetric 3D. Companies like Lytro are doing some pioneering work here. But the resulting film camera is huge, heavy and expensive. I'd love to have a camera like that shaped like a handycam or GoPro camera. And to finish on a more domestic note, the number one most requested domestic robot helper is a dishwashing robot. You throw your dirty dishes on a counter. The robot takes care of them. A robot that irons clothes, mops floors and clears crap off your table would be cool as well.
Why did the chicken cross the road? Because Elon Musk put an AI chip in its head.
We have processors that are a problem and we have OS's that are a problem. Nobody really wants to deal with that and make a fresh start because backward compatibility. It's time to move forward.
Computer to Mind interface that allows me to be in my recliner with my eyes closed and have a multi screen total thought controled pointer and input mechanism ;)
;)
;)
My eyes are going bad (RA issues) and my RA has also messed up my hands
Just my 2 cents
Upstream bandwidth, peer to peer protocols (other than filesharing), widespread adoption of a standard protocol for dealing with variable IP addresses and non-standard ports for "servers" (so that URLs don't need port numbers even if the server isn't on port 80 for HTTP, 443 for HTTPS, etc.).
The industry is full of spineless "me too" followers who hide behind what "everyone else" is doing to cover for their own ignorance and indefensible behavior.
where's the love?
...omphaloskepsis often...
I miss Usenet: a single place where you could find communities centered on tens of thousands of topics. If I had a question on house painting, or progressive rock, or chip design, or whatever, there was usually a well-populated newsgroup for it, and it wasn't hard to find. Today, we have Stack Exchange, but its selection of topics is minimal compared to Usenet's. Or we can search the web for sites of interest, but in my experience, many of the communities centered on these sites are tiny and unresponsive. Usenet was a one-stop shop with tens of thousands of communities.
Yes, Usenet also had trolls and idiots and (eventually) spam. But that was IMHO a small price to pay for how well it worked. I made so many friends and learned so much on Usenet.
Women can provide a different perspective to problems typically not focused on by men such as usability, quality assurance and generally making products useful outside of flashy gadgets. What tech in general needs is more women, and in particular women of color who can bring their unique perspective in the broscialism culture that tech is today.
Just stop chasing women away and this will happen automatically.
Discernment. That is, smart people spending their time on trivial products, projects and ideas, citing an increased paycheck while one's life ticks away.
If you're older, you know what I'm talking about. Younger, and you won't understand yet, and proceed to knock me here.
Promised since the 60s!
VMS (the operating system from DEC) or at least key features from it. I really miss things like automatic file versioning, file level flags for things like backup/nobackup, a distributed lock manager (enabling seamless clustering), the ability for executables to register their syntax with the shell (DCL) and have the shell parse and enforce command syntax, and software development things like trivially simple cross language library linking.
Durability.
If I spend $1000 on a refrigerator, there may be parts that wear out and need replacement, but with only that proviso I expect it to last 10 years or more under normal conditions. If it doesn't last 8 years, it was defective to begin with.
The same goes for anything that costs $1000. The expected lifespan increases as the price increases; a car, for example, should last 20 years.
sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f(q{sub f{($f)=@_;print"$f(q{$f});";}f});
I agree
Most software sucks ass because its rushed out the door before its ready. Software must be the only business that requires you to purchase a subscription to be able to receive patches that fix the shitty software you already paid for. What a bloody scam! Why cant we have quality software?
As long as tech is good, yes it needs more women.
As long as tech is bad, then it needs less men.
I mean, I can take as a fact that there are much more men than women in tech. I can believe this is not very sane.
But how do I know women are silly and men are clever ?
Maybe men should just leave tech because it is a pointless job, and most women have known it all along.
Open standards, well there are, but not much used.
Multiplatform support.
Security.
Stability.
Decent pricing.
That's my field.
The biggest tool we're missing if you ask me is a really compelling "natural language" command line interface. I'm a Windows 10 user, so it was great when Cortana was added to the task bar, but it's really only the tip of the iceberg. It barely scratches the surface of what's useful.
My suspicion is that this will be a very active area of development over the next few decades, and once the users of the future get used to having that ability, they'll look back on us in 2018 and think "gosh, they were missing such an essential tool".
The commands given to this CLI will vary wildly depending on what kind of job you do.
Seriously.
Home and small business routers today are such a joke, security-wise.
Most of them never get updates and are thus -- easily hackable.
The ones that do get updates (Apple) are still a joke security-wise.
Open source could solve that, and WRT makes a good start, except that it seems to be bogged down by politics (sabotage ?).
Security configuration on WRT is still a confusing nightmare.
port-knocking, DNS block-lists, IP address blacklists / whitelists should all be normal/easy/semi-standard and they are not.
Suspect IP addresses should trigger alerts so that they can be blacklisted or whitelisted (with optimal expiration dates).
Unfortunately, the NSA thinks that it owns the internet and insists on being able to hack any router, even though hackers learn all of their tricks in no time.
Advertisers and trackers also seem to think that they pay for everything on the internet and they sue whenever anyone tries to distribute a good blocklist.
As a result, bots and blackhats now rule.
Compelling sexbots.
the flavors currently offered by the American monopolies aren't satisfactory.
So here is the question: what tech, in your particular profession, industry, personal area of interest, or scientific or academic field, is currently "missing?"
LISP!!! :-D
Shai Schticks:"You don't make peace with friends, you make peace with enemies"
Summarizing my list of unresolved axes to grind:
Netbooks and other GNU/Linux laptops Conspicuous by their absence from electronics stores are laptops certified by the manufacturer as driver-compatible with free operating systems such as GNU/Linux, especially compact laptops with screens 11.6 inch or smaller. This "netbook" segment was formally EOL'd in 2012 in favor of tablets running more limited smartphone operating systems. System76 and Purism laptops are not only larger but also mail order, which means the buyer has no chance to try the screen and keyboard before buying. More widespread support for non-SMS 2-factor authentication Pay-as-you-go cellular plans in the United States still charge for incoming calls, yet 2-factor authentication on Twitter still sends SMS for each login attempt even if the user has set up TOTP. Game mods Video game consoles still don't support community-developed extensions to gameplay, with a few highly circumscribed exceptions. Accidental music plagiarism Copyright law obligates composers to create original music as opposed to music that is too similar to something that someone else wrote. Even accidental plagiarism can lead to infringement judgments with damages on the order of a million dollars (Bright Tunes Music v. Harrisongs Music), which spells sure financial ruin for small-time composers. But to my knowledge there's no search engine that a composer can put a piece of music into and see if someone else has already written and copyrighted something substantially similar. Cross-site web subscription A user is unlikely to be willing to spend $6 for an entire month's subscription to a website or a 300-pack of article views just to view a single article, putting the other 299 article views or 29.9 days of subscription to waste. It'd be better if a subscription. Google Contributor would be a start toward this, except it probably feeds subscribers' click streams back to the same company's adtech services (AdSense and DoubleClick). Ad serving that respects viewers' privacy Newspaper ads do not surveil each reader to infer a detailed interest profile specific to each reader. So why do web ads have to do so? It should be easier for website operators to sell their own ad space to advertisers, so that no ad network or ad exchange needs to snoop on readers' click streams. Rural broadband A lot of the United States is still outside the footprint of any fiber, cable, or DSL Internet provider. This means home Internet users are stuck on satellite or cellular connections, generally with a restrictive monthly cap that a household with multiple computing devices could trigger just by downloading semiannual operating system updates. Transport Layer Security (TLS) on local area networks (LANs) The Internet of Things (IOT) has no public key infrastructure (PKI). Many devices that connect to a home network expose a web-based configuration interface, such as a router, printer, thermostat, or network attached storage (NAS). But with more and more web platform features becoming available only in secure contexts (meaning HTTPS unless served from 127.0.0.1), operators of home servers will have to change them from cleartext HTTP to HTTPS. And because public certificate authorities (CAs) don't issue in the multicast DNS domain (.local), each head of household would have to buy a fully-qualified domain name for use by these devices' certificate provisioning process and keep this domain renewed. Is there an alternative to this being a huge windfall for domain registrars? Code signing Microsoft requires peripheral manufacturers toThe first thing to consider is a overarching group that supports technical workers rights and can negotiate pay.
No more unpaid interns, no more 100 hour work weeks with vague promises of future profits, companies trying to pay almost slave wages to imported labor.
On the technical side, I'd go with limitless energy. If there was enough (plus more) electrical availability for everyone, most of the worlds problems could be solved pretty quickly.
Are we ready for running JavaScript on GPUs?
Inmho, a GRID of Data Centers of arrays of GPUs running optimized JavaScript might be last technology.
Also, i'm waiting for JavaScript3D for 3D rendering on the web 2.0.
Which is the ECMAScript's draft for JavaScript3D?
I remember the days when CPU transistor count (and performance) doubled every 18 months (or less), AND the chips reduced in price as well. Now we're lucky to get a 10% improvement from Intel over 18 months, with stagnant or slowly increasing prices.
Corruption is convincing someone that the selfless ideal is the same as their selfish ideal.
SED and FED are technologies that use microscopic versions of the electron gun from a CRT to power each individual pixel. They promised all sorts of advantages over existing display tech like LCD but both technologies just sort of fizzled out.
What happened? Did LCD (LED-backlit LCD) get good enough that the advantages of SED/FED over LCD were no longer enough to overcome the disadvantages? Were problems found in turning SED/FED displays into something that could be mass-produced at a price low enough to be commercially viable? Was SED/FED buried by vested interests who wanted to protect other display technologies from competition?
1> Capability based operating systems - These allow a user to control the risks associated with running a given program in a familiar and transparent manner, thus solving most maladies associated with the use of networked computing.
2> Small scale power sources- The personal kilowatt. It should be feasible to develop a small turbogenerator capable of about 1.4 horsepower, for all manner of uses.
3> Homogeneous non-Von Neuman computation (i.e. FPGA without the pain). A grid of look up tables (LUT) can do Turing complete computation without the need for complex routing decisions to fit into the confines of current FPGA architectures. This homogenity also provides flexibility in fit to any size compute core, and the ability to route-around faults in hardware. It is also possible to guarantee the security relationship of inputs and outputs on shared devices. This chips could easily perform Exaflop scale computation if widely deployed.
4> Cold fusion and/or Wiffleball Fusor - This could go a long way towards solving our dependence on fossil fuels.
5> Mesh networking on a large scale - We need to take the internet back into our hands
Both have totally tanked in the last 5 years. There are examples, but they seem tepid. The technology industry seems very focused on cornering markets, eliminating competition and then diminishing choice and raising prices. At best its minor innovation with maximum price extraction.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Using XML in Java is too difficult. E.g. Jackson has XML support but it doesn't handle namespaces. If you have schema and you generate classes from it the date fields use strange calendars. It is strange how hard it still is after all these years.
The current tech landscape is real barren place.
Folks have no ethical barometer, except "Whatever I Need To Do To Get A Maserati."
Without heart, we'll have some really big disasters.
OMG: No kidding. The captcha is "ruthless".
Privacy
Freedom of speech
Unix philosophy
Code quality
Standards that are not corporate interest driven
as a computer virus
You're a science-illiterate fucking moron, never a doctor. Stay that way. You don't belong in medicine or any scholastic endeavor. You prove this every day with each comment pulled from your ample rectum.
I have to say, I find your response fascinating.
You clearly read the post, as shown by the "doctor" comment, so I'm wondering: what was your motivation for posting?
I have several possible explanations, none of which seem likely.
1) You want to chase reasonable and high-level discussion off of this board
2) You want to continuously attack people over politics
3) You take enjoyment from calling people names
4) You take enjoyment from stirring things up, causing a ruckus
5) You're getting paid to harass people
6) Someone close to you died after being put into suspended animation
You took time and effort to post something utterly without merit. Of the explanations above, only #6 sounds reasonable.
I don't suppose you could let us in on your motivations here, could you?
Does anyone else have an explanation that I missed?
It's a mystery.
There needs to be more ability to open something up and replace a part, or to upgrade the machine with a new part. For example, your phone should be able to have the CPU swapped/upgraded, RAM swapped/upgraded, new modules for the camera etc optional.
There needs to be more ability to open something up and clean it inside, current products can die after a year or so in a dusty room simply because it is difficult or impossible to get at the fans that circulate airflow.
There needs to be more control given to the person who purchased the product, no more spying, no more black box code, no more insane garbage.
So how to do we achieve this? We kill rich people.
In order to get rid of the caste system we need a french revolution style event to happen, we need to express power in an undeniable way.
There are no laws which will help us, we can see that clearly, the government will not help us, the legal system will not help us, we no longer have any recourse of action other than revolution. We have exhausted our legal, human, intelligent, and civilized courses of action.
Abandoned Systems:
1. Transputer
The Transputer was a computer on a chip with four networking ports. You built clusters by linking one pin on one to one pin on another. That's it. You could have external memory to bring it up to whatever capacity you wanted. It ran a high-level language - Occam - at almost instruction-set level (your compiler was really an assembler). A modern version running at 3 GHz, with FPU, with multiple cores on each chip, would be incredibly powerful. No need for expensive SMP chips to run distinct CPUs, everything's on a local bus, your PC would be a lot cheaper and a lot more compact. Your smartphone would also be running at a decent speed. USB would be running at the same speed as PCI Express.
2. Processor In Memory
This is basically the Transputer turned inside-out. Instead of having your main memory on the CPU, have part of the CPU inside the memory. Reduced latency, increased performance, reduced chip count. Seymour Cray's ambition was to have MPI built into RAM. A glance at CiteseerX shows other efforts have tried to put the BLAST genetic search system into RAM. Not sure on the latter, but there are obvious benefits to putting very standard libraries there. I'd probably look at the Hoard malloc replacement (an obvious thing for RAM to take care of) and maybe something like the Oil library - very common functions that need to be very fast and everyone gets wrong.
3. Content Addressable Memory
There have been attempts to have RAM chips that could act as databases, where instead of giving a location, you gave it a key field and it would retrieve the contents regardless of where in RAM it was. CAM would be incredibly useful as an add-on to modern computers, NoSQL on a chip.
4. Postscript As A GUI
There was an attempt to build an X11 alternative, and then an X11 WM, around Postscript. If you're wanting to do vectors rather than pixels, it is a much better way to go. If you are wanting a WM for wordprocessing rather than web surfing or games, why pay the huge overhead involved in the current approach? Computers should always be about empowering choice.
5. True Mobile IP
When IPv6 was first developed, the early protocol (and so the early stacks) implemented a form of Mobile IP. This form allowed you to move from one network to another and remain connected to things. You temporarily had two IP addresses and upstream routers NATted the old one to the new one. (Which means IPv6 supported NAT, for those curious about such things.)
This was intended for car-to-car networks (which constantly shift topology), networks on trains or aircraft (since the vehicle changes hotspot) and other contexts that we've now had to invent thousands of new wheels to handle (poorly) because the technology was removed. It was removed not out of privacy concerns (we now know we were all being spied on anyway, and this might have actually increased privacy by destroying the associations we now know they were using) but because Microsoft lobbied against anything that might hurt their sales.
6. Wafer-Scale Integratrion
It is possible to place maybe 512 chips on a single wafer and disable the ones that don't work (as per Sir Clive Sinclair's idea for WSI in the 80s). That's a lot of chips. And, now we know how to cheaply make large quantities of ultra-pure Si-28, a lot of chips with a very low failure rate. You don't need to imagine a Beowulf Cluster of these, they ARE a Beowulf Cluster! A supercomputer not much larger than a DVD. Obviously, the Transputer idea would combine well with this. Or you can design it as Flash and put 11.1-channel 24-bit audio, UHDTV video onto it, have half your movie collection at a quality you can barely imagine or use on one cartridge.
7. Big, Properly-Sprung Keyboards
I hate touchscreens, I loathe the cheap plastic toys they use for computers and I totally despise laptop keyboards. Give me a well-spaced, big, keyboard where keys go thunk and Mean It. Something robust. Something that can handle my typing s
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)
We seem to continuously go backwards in this area. We went from stone tablets to paper to electronic files. We desperately need some way to preserve large amounts of knowledge for hundreds of years without requiring constant maintenance and without risking file format obsolescence. The ideal would be a medium that is self-documenting and which can be read with minimal technology. Microfilm almost does this for text, but what about photographs, videos, music, and other non-textual information?
I have 5 rfid cards in my wallet and 3 additional round rfid dongles..why the heck can't i combine them into one card or transfer them to my phone?
Also when i hold my wallet against a rfid reader it does not work, i must pick the correct card from my wallet and hold it against the reader. Rfid designers obviosly never imagined someone would have more than one rfid card?!
Rfid sucks.
Use a system similar to Slashdot's rating system, where all phone users can mark an incoming call as merely undesirable for themselves or else undesirable for everyone.
People who seem to do this inaccurately would have their "reputation" score decrease, and would have less effect.
People who seem to do this accurately would have their reputation score grow, and would have a large effect.
Individuals could set their own thresholds for what calls they want to go directly to voice mail, and which ones they never wish to receive.
Just think, no more political "polling", "Jenny from Card Services", fund raising, etc.!
This could be an incredibly popular phone app!
And the means to implement privacy-respecting software: software freedom—the freedom to run, inspect, share, and modify published computer software.
You can't have proprietary software protect your privacy because proprietary software is inherently untrustworthy. Users are not allowed to know what it does, fix or improve the software, share copies (either verbatim copies or modified copies) to help their community, and sometimes the software is so restrictive it will refuse to let the user run or access the data the program controls access to (such as DRM schemes are designed to implement). We can have better computing that serves the public's needs but we'll have to fight for it and code for that future. We'll also have to teach people to understand what software freedom is and value software freedom for its own sake. Virtually every story on repeater sites like /. have to do with software freedom, and the shills that frequent sites like this know it. That's why they publish proprietary software-accepting/convenience-prioritizing views masquerading as something the public wants. How do we know the public wants their privacy respected? Take it from Glenn Greenwald and Edward Snowden in their talk almost exactly one year ago (youtube-dl and avideo can help you download this without subjecting yourself to YouTube's nonfree software)—nobody has taken up Greenwald on his offer to allow Greenwald to become their impostor by sending him the credentials to all of their accounts (no exceptions for bank accounts, social media accounts, dating website accounts, etc.). Privacy is still desired, but people aren't as computer literate as they should be to make wiser choices about electronic goods and services. Ignorance is not rejection of privacy, it's a social need going unfulfilled.
Digital Citizen
Literally a palm sized PC compatible computer that ran on two AA batteries for a month. Sure my smartphone is 1000x faster but it really isn't a PC with a qwerty keyboard that can run all my desktop apps.
Title says it all.
new things come and go so fast - especially programming languages - that you can't appreciate or even learn them - things change so fast that it's an endless, joyless churn of whirlwind technologies - ideas are ephemeral and hard to grasp - cognitive overload sets in as so many languages do the same thing with wildly different syntax it's hard to keep them straight - we're left in a dull, death-march stupor to learn the next whatever-it-is moments before we need to use it, only to have our knowledge erase itself as the grind wears on - there's no appreciation or joy in the tech any longer, just endless churn - one formerly great thing after another is ruined when people run out of ideas and just start changing things for no reason - languages lurch into existence, cobbled together from other languages without any goal - new projects are launched from scratch when existing things could be improved - and it all goes so fast it's hard to remember any of it - last one to leave, turn off the lights
I think it is fairly obvious what is missing. Today's technology lacks the software quality and build quality that it once had. I remember when a 640K computer was considered really advanced. Since hardware wasn't cheap and resources scarce, software had to be carefully written and debugged so crashes were rare and software was generally more stable. Fast forward to today and we accept crashes and bugs so easily. Stuff is built cheaply and poorly. Of course, computing has become much more complex with multitasking and multithreading but the attitude of just throwing more hardware at a problem prevails. Furthermore, the technology companies have pushed beta testing onto the consumer and some even have paid support options so they make money at beta testing.
God is missing. Heathens, the lot of you, destined to burn in hell for all creation.
1. Computers we control, not that are wiretapped and controlled by the big corporations and government.
2. Cars we control, not that are wiretapped and controlled by the big corporations and government.
3. Recording devices we control, not that are wiretapped and controlled by the big corporations and government.
I've been writing LOB apps since the early 1990's with quite a bit of that being for very large enterprises (100k+ employees).
When web apps became a viable platform for LOB (1998-ish), I breathed a sigh of relief because I no longer had to contend with deployment issues for my apps. As long as the user had the correct web browser, deployment was nothing more than giving the user a URL.
These weren't fancy apps by 2018 standards, but they did what they needed to do: enable users to do their work.
Beautiful !
Fast forward a few years to the intro of ASP.NET MVC. Not a whole lot prettier but more maintainable.
Add in AJAX and we're delivering an all around truly decent user experience (when done correctly).
However, we could still deliver more functionality to the user via WinForms apps than anything on the Web (discounting Java as that's not my world)
Then came Silverlight ! Whoa ! Even more maintainable MVVM, beautiful UIs and the potential for cross-platform delivery. Easy to learn, easy to maintain. Not without it's problems, but with the promise of continued refinement, it held incredible promise !
Truly high quality apps LOB apps were made that rivaled or even exceeded WinForms in what could be done WELL.
Then.. enough people at Microsoft were persuaded that HTML5/CSS/JS was the future (circa 2010 IIRC) and that Silverlight was not "da wey".
Javascript was the new (old) hotness.
I know SPA techs like Angular, React, Vue, etc are viewed with love by most of the dev community now, but not me. The code required to do the most basic LOB app in Angular or React, is laughably complex and verbose. oh, and you have to implement your business logic in TWO places now because any advanced user can hit F12 in Chrome start modifying your app.
Frankly, it feels like we took 1 step forward and 5 steps back by ditching Silverlight and embracing the hot mess of SPA's.
1. software that can be mathematically proven correct and secure
2. a programming environment that's actually productive.
- no worrying about syntax. Let the software handle the syntax. Why do I need to deal with it? Let me enter the code whichever way and auto-convert it between languages as needed.
- no worrying about optimization. Software handles it, like a JIT compiler that experiments with different implementations and picks the fastest one.
- no worrying about parallelization. Software handles it. I tell it only the sequence of operations and what's needed for what.
- no worrying about security. Software generates secure code.
- minimal worrying about platforms. Software handles most of the differences.
Consumers are now just given a lot of hardware that is essentially a walled garden. It seems like manufacturers don't want to allow the people whom buy their products any freedom to get really creative with them. I miss the days when manufacturers encouraged their user bases to tinker to their heart's delight. Entire groups and lifestyles grew around these forms of innovations. Nowadays manufacturers want dictatorial control over products that you purchased. In fact, you don't even really own what you've purchased. You have a license to use it in a prescribed manner.
Would be nice.
What about building products that actually work as advertised?
I'm freakin' done playing test-subject with my own dollars./
M$ MapPoint and Streets & Trips were excellent packages for creating far more detailed, customized maps and travel plans than you can create in Google Maps.
Sure, they had their drawbacks -- chief among them being the static nature of their mapping information -- but they did things that Google never replaced.
Someone should create a front-end like that for Google Maps data, so we could tailor up-to-date mapping data to meet our actual needs.
with ip protected for so long it's difficult for people to innovate without paying high tarriffs for things like rounded rectangles, puttings a loading notification in a "windowed interface" and so on.
Privacy.
More ram, more OS/app/display gpu color support, more cpu, more network bandwidth.
Crypto that works and is not a backdoor, trapdoor for the creator, police, mil, gov.
Color that works from a game creators code to the users OS, to the gpu, to the display.
Color that works from a dslr brand to an OS, to an app, to a display.
An OS that is not designed to report back on a user.
A cpu thats tested when designed and not sold with security problems for generations.
Domestic spying is now "Benign Information Gathering"
I want cookies. I like oatmeal and chocolate chip cookies. Can I get homemade-style oatmeal cookies with chocolate chips instead of raisins? No, not unless I make them myself. I live in a big metropolitan area and no one makes these? There's no app I can use to tell people to make these for me.
Compared to the analog age of paper, film and tape, the digital age of information storage seems much more delicate and transient. Hard drives are notoriously unreliable. Solid-state storage discharges over time. Optical discs have been plagued by bit-rot. Magnetic archival tape is inconvenient and expensive. Cloud storage is only "permanent" until the company discontinues the service. And, so many of the technologies of the recent decades get abandoned and become unreadable as no one supports them anymore. The only current solution is to keep copying from one format to another, and considering the multi-mega-terabytes of information we're generating these days, that's becoming less and less practical.
What we really, really need some form of non-proprietary and affordable permanent digital storage. It doesn't need to be erasable or rewritable if it's inexpensive. Something that one can save bits in their simplest and purest form possible, and know it won't fade, rot or discharge 1000's of years in the future.
Cordless power tools typically use interchangeable lithium ion battery packs. There's a few different systems out there from Ryobi, Ridgid, Milwaukee, Makita, etc. It's not just impact hammers and drills; there are fans, radios, lights, hedge trimmers, garage door openers. Some of these companies support dozens of tools. Many of these tools see daily use by professionals, but a lot are sold to home owners and hobbyists where most of their time is spent sitting on a shelf. The battery packs are reasonably big, 70 watt-hours are not uncommon.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why these companies don't offer a combination charger + uninterruptible power supply as part of their pantheon of tools. That way these battery packs could be doing something useful by providing emergency backup power to an electrical device, when they aren't being actively used in another tool.
It'd be a simple extension of teledildonics.
Back in the early days of the web, it was a wonderful place to be. Then the big media companies came in. Since then we have lost any reasonable sense of privacy and more lawsuits than you can think of.
If we can't ban them, then lets create a new Internet like the old one, for people who don't want a pop-up or threat of a lawsuit
We need to stop calling concierge services, entertainment, and financial services "tech." It was fine 20 years ago, but we're past that now.
Outside of pharma, new companies based on actual new science are few and far between. There are measures associated with this: percentage of science phds staying in science (10-15%), research efficiency (inflation adjusted economic output of $1 of "basic research" has been going down for 30 years), market segmentation of new business investment markets (lots of service apps, some bio hardware & wetware, statistically nothing starting from chemistry and physics)...
A lot of the comments here are focused on the negatives of the current label of "tech." Privacy, for example, has little to do with technology, but everything to do with marketing and advertising. Google and Facebook are now marketing and advertising companies, not tech companies. (10-20 years ago they were tech companies, but it's time to update that definition.)
There are plenty of things like solar fuel, advanced nuclear reactors, and brain interfaces that we're good enough at doing in research labs right now to commercialize. For various reasons, the economics don't work to actually invest in commercialization on science based products.
The exception is pharma, and only because the high prices of drugs in the US can sometimes give a return.
Changing the definition of "tech" won't change these economics, but right now big increases in investment in entertainment and advertising are hiding a real economic weakness in science.
$670 Million Losses in Q4: Look, Distraction!
More hardware switches, knobs, sliders, buttons, real keyboards.
And less slow as hell unresponsive fragile touch screens.
At work we now havee those awful touchscreen elevator controls. You have to enter the floor number and it tells you what elevator to take (there are 6).
Problem is the interface is sluggish, doesn't record half the keypresses, and those morons had the great idea to put a 0-9 keypad on the screen, while there are only 11 floors! Wow! There is more than enough space to put eleven BIG buttons on the screen, but instead you have to push 1 twice to go to the eleventh floor. Half the times you end up calling the 111th floor, or else the 1st floor.
It seems like today the only solution is touchscreens everywhere, even when it's dangerous (like in a car).
And most electronic devices these days take AGES to boot up.
I miss the time when powering up the receiver and the tape deck and pressing play as fast as humanly possible was working every time. Now you have to wait for the poor machines who can't keep up with a puny human.
Try it! Library of Babel
Adults.
Circle the wagons and fire inward. Entropy increases without bounds.
... is missing.
Why the fuck can people click on a link in an email and get hammered.
You and I know better.
A computer ought to know damned well better.
All this talk about "AI." How come AI can't predict the behaviour that will result if I click on an email link and tell me, "No."?
Take that idea as a starting point and apply it to a broad range of irresponsible behaviour on the part of users.
It little behooves the best of us to comment on the rest of us.
The term is only derogatory because it is associated with homosexuality.
Using it is, by definition, homophobic.
It's ironic that you are so angry at conservatives and Trump, considering that you are literally identical to them in every way.
A stereo receiver makes it easy to take inputs from multiple components - CD player, computer, phonograph, radio - and select one to play over the speakers. This allows you to have components of various quality, you can swap out speakers or get a new tape deck if you want to.
There is no commercially available device for video, because all of the video device makers agreed that intellectual property and the threat of piracy were too important to allow people to pipe a video stream through a convenient device. So now that we are in the digital video age, we have the madness of a device made my Apple that requires a special app built by Netflix to view Netflix content, but you have to make sure your television is on the right input. Do you plug the cable box into the Apple device, or the Apple device into the cable box? Which input should you use for a gaming console? Why can't consumers have a video receiver that will output to a television without this crazy paranoia that a video signal is going to be pirated?
ownership.
There are a lot of big answers but here is a very small answer.
I would like to buy a full size keyboard where the left and the right are not attached to each other. I had a small travel one for a while but it was laptop quality and has since been discontinued. It's such a simple item but it doesn't exist. There are likely thousands of similar items just waiting to be made.
Maybe throw in a few from Fringe, Lost in Space, Heavy Metal, and Linux: The Torvolds Project.
We have tech everywhere but nothing to control it. Whether it is controlling how much your kids are on their phones, how much you yourself are on your phone, or just getting all the different tech to work together, the software to manage our tech is severely lacking. Even something simple like technology able to limit kids to 10 hours a week of video games doesn't really exist.
Number 1, most importantly : Non-cloud/non-monthly subscription based software.
Fuck you Adobe, Fuck you Autodesk, fuck you Microsoft, and fuck you everyone who requires always-on access to use a damn product on a single machine. This is going to be the death of production software, and you're sacrificing the ability to learn software (eg, educational editions, learning editions) to try and push training and cloud storage business models on people who largely can't afford it, and don't want or need it.
Number 2: Internet-free, Cloud-free, ad-free, paywall-free, fragmentation-free content.
I long for the era of the CD-ROM that I could just put in the damn computer, or the audio CD I can just play in ALL cd players. Fuck you Microsoft, Sony, Nintendo, Time Warner, Disney, Comcast, Verizon, etc etc
You are going to see a resurgence in 8-bit and 16-bit FPGA console/computers that don't have all this shit attached to it. One FPGA to rule them all. If movie, music and game production companies think people are going to pay $150 to play a game, or spend upwards of $50 to watch a new movie, fuck no.
There is going to be a reckoning sometime in the next 7 years as Moore's law goes kaput, and internet bandwidth stops increasing, where the internet starts looking more like a rundown inner-city rather than a information superhighway.
At that time there be a demand to return to rom-cartridge (eg sd-cards) type of media, but instead of being shipped to stores, one media file per cartridge, there will instead be kiosk's and vending machines that store blank cards, and you buy cards from the machine in the lobbies of buildings where the mailboxes are, or at train stations. You queue up and prepay what you want to purchase via smartphone, and then bring the smartphone to the location you purchased from to receive the card with a unique label.
You answered the question : What's missing on Slashdot today?
Silverlight was a bad idea, just like Java and Flash was.
What really fucked everything over was not Javascript, but "frameworks"
Good fucking god is Angular, React, Symphony, etc more work just for some pretty widgets.
I can write things in pure html5, pure php and pure javascript that work better. But because of the way mobile shit works, we're often left building two versions of every site, and hiding "business logic" on the php side, only giving the data to the browser, but not trusting the browser to work it correctly.
Case in point. the JC Penny website is so full of framework shit that you actually can not buy anything on the website. I have not been able to buy anything from JC Penny online in two years.
Obviously.
We need a new method of authentication to replace passwords.
The technology seems to have peaked at the G1
Pay-as-you-go cellular plans in the United States still charge for incoming calls
prepaid cell phones are usually unlimited talk and text at the bare minimum. Trust me, I pay 50.00 for mine and I even have unlimited data.
"Pay-as-you-go" and "unmetered prepaid" are not the same thing. The lowest tier prepaid plan at T-Mobile is $3.00 per month and comes with 30 voice minutes, texts, or a combination thereof in a month, with 10 cents for each additional, and no data.
Besides, that isn't the only thing wrong with Twitter's mentality of using TOTP as a backup for SMS as opposed to the other way around. If someone social-engineers your carrier or exploits SS7 flaws, he can get into your SMS and from there into your account.
Why we don't have RasberryPI turned into small pocket computer (with its own full keyboard, built in speaker and full screen, like a little laptop)?
Or similar emulator based small laptop computer that can switch between emulating C64, S48K etc with full programming ability and game libraries.
Why we don't have true RGB laser scanner based (small but very bright) projectors?
Why we don't have exact digital water temperature setting ability for our showers and sinks at home?
i miss the netgear ntv500 -- it played bluray and dvd isos -- i don't trust the newer, cheaper machines
Ironically, information!
We used to have search engines that provide every result, instead of just those Google thought you'd personally want to see. We used to be able to AND search terms to drill down to just the pages we wanted, instead of Google changing our searches to what it believes we meant.
We used to have web pages before we had walled gardens. Now you can't search something as basic as a forum, because the forum's design prevents access to outside searches. You can't search private services that compete with searches. Services don't want to be services, but traps that you never leave, and psychologically manipulate people to stay.
We used to have newsgroups, unified sources of topics you could go to find experts. Now we have an infinite amount of resources where we can find neophytes. It takes longer to find the resource that has the knowledge than it used to to find the knowledge!
We used to have manuals. Now things are designed to be as few buttons onscreen as possible. Oh, it has a prerequisite? You aren't allowed to know that. Oh, the prerequisite requires a different setting? Nope. Half a dozen emails traded with support to discover what should have been on the first page before one attempts to use the "simple" button.
Nowadays you can't even turn off a computer without already having the knowledge of how to turn off the computer. Computers used to come with basic operating info.
We used to worry that "form over function" was making things useless. Now "clean design" over info has made things unusable.
Security, Privacy, Sensible design (so you can understand/learn how to control it- all of it), Sole owner administrative Control, Property rights (if you don't control it you don't really own it), elimination or segregation of ring -3 hardware, elimination of DRM and closed source 'black box' software/hardware....
We are in the fucking stone age of tech- hopelessly distracted by the shinny things- literally moving backwards in some ways...
1. I'd like to see a well usable SASOS+Micro-kernel combo. Think grand-son of AmigaOS.
2. I want a versioning filesystem. If you are about to press "reply" to say something about something practically-just-about-as-good-as then you are missing the point. Sorry.
3. I want linux distros to actually test the "upgrade" option. Good thing none of those devs have been in arms reach or I'd be behind bars for strangling them so hard my fingers would lock in place.
4. I want old PC standards to go up in flames and die in a horrible fire. Primary and secondary disk partitions - W.T.F.? Bootloaders: Nope, still not making sense and user-unfriendly written all over.
5. Sensible Linux audio.
6. Faster progress from the Mill Computing camp. Would mix well with 1.
7. I'd like to hear some more about the progress on memristors.
8. Why are there no ICs not based on silicon but instead using more exotic materials? Are there really no-one willing to pay the premium for the premium performance?
9. In short: Excitement is missing. Everything is streamlined and uniform and conformant. My local newsagent has a total of 5 different games and computing magazines. I am sure there used to be 20-30 back in the day when computing was exciting and heading in all directions at once.
Missing!? There's way too fucking much of it.
Give up the internet. Mostly bullshit now anyway.
I want to upgrade my AMD Phenom(tm) 9750 Quad-Core Processor with a Ryzen threadripper. But doing so will create yet more e-garbage for the world.
Computers that can deal with all the details that computers require instead of making people specific every last dot and slash. Small $6000 electric cars, every other country is building them but the US is only making big $25,000+ electric cars. Networks that are reliable, self healing, easy to configure. Our current networks are continually breaking, require constant human management, are difficult to connect to, and insecure.
1. A decent GUI/CRUD UI-over-HTTP standard. DOM/JS/CSS/HTML is a fricken mess.
2. Dynamic relational: columns and optionally tables are "create on use" unless constraints given against such.
Table-ized A.I.
The end of the iPod Classic series, based on the flawed premise that we'd get all our media from "the cloud," left the market without any quality high-capacity portable music/media players. Considering that 1TB+ SSDs are now in "quite affordable" territory, I don't understand why no company has made an affordable media player built around one (well, I kind of get why companies like Apple wouldn't want to make one... it potentially eats into their attempt to sell us all bandwidth-sucking subscription services). The only "high capacity" options readily available are smartphone type devices that top out at a paltry 256MB. So anyone with a sizable music library who wants to keep it in a high-quality format is pretty much stuck being unable to have their entire collection conveniently at their fingertips.
From smallest to biggest:
1) The Microsoft Intellimouse Optical desktop mouse - It was the perfect wired mouse. All of a sudden, Microsoft stopped making them. There are only Chinese knockoffs of inferior quality out there today. Why couldn't we have good things, Microsoft?
2) V6 engines in cars for the middle class - Modern V6 engines deliver a ton of power with much better gas mileage than 15-20 years ago, but you can't get them anymore without buying a pricey luxury/sports car.
3) Nice cars without superfluous technology - Give me a volume knob and a few other knobs for basic controls to go along with the power and comfort of a luxury vehicle. Shove the huge touch screen up someone else's ass.
4) The old Netflix that had good streaming movies. - Not the 198 proof vat of sh** they call "content" today.
5) A stock market that traded securities in larger denominations - eighths (or dimes, maybe?) - not pennies - I wonder if going back to that system would inject a little more stability.
6) Privacy in technology. If it has current running through it in 2018, it probably tracks you. Why can't I go off the "information grid" and still enjoy modern toys? And I should be able to travel without my car manufacturer, insurance company, and governmental agencies tracking me everywhere.
You don't have to maim people to protest and cause political disruption. Read some Gandhi.
But if something is not done soon about inequality, it will end rough.
Table-ized A.I.
1) On your computer or screen, there should be four physical switches. These switches enable or disable
- the computer's built-in camera,
- the built-in microphone,
- the ability to share your screen remotely,
- and the ability to share your files remotely.
My computer has software (user preferences) that enables or disables them. But I also want the ability to physically disable them, so that if my computer's software is corrupted somehow, I can still disable the camera, etc.
2) I want my keyboard to be both a keyboard and a trackpad. If you press a button, it toggles between being a keyboard or a trackpad. When it's a trackpad, it's flat and stiff. But when it's a keyboard, the keys should give a bit when you press them.
3) I want the ability to stretch computers and screens. I want a watch or phone that you can stretch out into a 27" screen. Then when you're done using it, you can push it back into its original size.
4) I want electronic paper that's as light, thin, and easy to read as regular paper, for no more than $10/page. You'd probably wouldn't need more than 10 of them, to spread out on a table and compare pictures, what you requested vs. what you got, etc.
Plus you should be able to put the papers next to each other, and have them share one image. If you taped them together 2 by 2, or 5 by 5, you'd have a cheap large screen.
Slashdot, news for nerds
We have too many bad standards as it is.
The Linux Standard Base requires a bunch of useless crap that is applicable to only 1 overly controlling vendor (Debian distros need `rpm` to comply because Redhat) There are plenty more examples: https://refspecs.linuxfoundati...
On the opposite side, you have POSIX, which is held back by another big industry vendor (this time Oracle because Solaris) Most shells have support for a large percentage of "bashisms", yet no useful sh features have been added to the standard.
Then you have pseudo standards that are woefully un-maintained at https://www.freedesktop.org/wi... which by their own admission isn't a standards body. Half the links are either 404 or completely dead URLs
Syncing a phone with a desktop. Like you walk within wifi range and it logs in, syncs music, text, downloads, calendar (moot for me, as I use google calandar, but it opens up third-party tools).
I'd also like to just have the phone show up as a window on my desktop. So you walk up, open an application, and you can then use your mouse and keyboard on a window that has the phone's screen and you can enter the code and run stuff, etc.
And while I'll always have a desktop for crunching power reasons, most people could get by with the processing power and storage space of a phone. Even at work. But it's torturous and cruel to make them use such a small screen and swiping. So blue-tooth keyboard and mouse.... and wireless or dockable video port and you can have most employees just walk up to any terminal and it's their computer they're typing on and seeing.
I'd also like easy man-in-the-middle HDMI recorderr and IoT tools. Like something that flips on a relay and logs power usage to inbetween a wall socket. Boom, anything you can plug in to turn on is now an IoT device. Anything that turns itself on and or draws different rates of power is loggable with... phone messages or whatever.
I'd need a laptop that I can travel with for one week without charge. Frankly, the current models are optimizing for the wrong criterial, they are power-hungry supercomputers with poor batteries that last a day (a day and a half if you're luck), they have glossy screens because some people watch movies. So you have to travel with chargers, power cables, adaptors etc. I just need a machine that is light, last a week on one charge, and that can be used for note-taking / Web / Email / reading/writing/editing documents. Perhaps such a machine could have an e-paper screen and a proper keyboard.
The American copyright and patent system has caused all of electronic and computer technology to become a pile of drastically overpriced merchandise that turns into electricity wasting plastic, worthless integrated circuits and toxic batteries.
What I suggest for reform is an approach of "up and out". Essentially, licensing fees need to be made fair and limited. Instead of withholding good ideas, the system should allow best technical practice to spread without delay. For instance, after three times the cost of creation is recovered, each patent and copyright work is available for the remaining duration of the grant for re-use provided the patent or copyright notice and date and URL to the creator's web site is included in the re-use.
The present systems allow the pursuit of unlimited monopoly profits, but the practical effect is the various product areas become snake nests where a few big players tie up the primary ideas and buy up small players. Example: A cell phone uses maybe 1 kwh of electricity (22 cents worth) per month, but the phone maker and cell carriers sell phones for hundreds of dollars each and $100 dollars a month is a typical cheap cell phone service price.
Manufacturers of social culture use copyright infringement as a principal tool for preventing the re-telling of stories and the re-singing of songs and even profound rhetoric of thinkers like Martin Luther King is licensed and not free. As mentioned above, artists are in a real jam where inadvertent or accidental compositions can expose them to thousands of dollars of copyright infringement legal activity. The long duration of copyright and high dollar infringement penalties has shrunk the freedom of people to adapt, repeat and modify the music, art, textbooks and technical social writing (like building codes).
1. Microsoft has recently released a "Classic Intellimouse" with the old shape ... but don't buy it just yet.
The innards are bad. It does not register small moments at low resolution setting and there is angle snapping which can't be turned off.
Reviewers have found it unusable for gaming and photo editing.
3. Agree. Touch-screen in cars could be just as dangerous as cell phone use while driving. Stupid Stupid Stupid.
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
A repost from the poll thread:
There should be a standard wireless protocol/device which owners of a building (movie theatre, hospital etc) could use to restrict the capabilities of cell phones within that building: Silent mode, low radiation and/or to disable the camera etc.
Then there wouldn't be a need for additional manpower for enforcement of bans, long lines to cell-phone lockers before and after concerts, or of radio-absorbent paint in movie theatres. etc. Patients would not need to be called back to perform a MRI again because the first one had been disturbed by a cell phone signal.
Of course every transmitter would have to be registered and its range enforced by GPS and cryptography: that would be relatively simple to implement actually.
And... emergency calls would still always be possible! Important incoming texts would still be received, just put on hold.
Seriously, Telecom Industry: Get this done already!
"We mustn't be caught by surprise by our own advancing technology" -- Aldous Huxley
I'll focus just on one subject, phones: 1. Quality dumb phones. No touchscreen, just two functions: text and call. Make it matchbox-sized. Connect these to 3rd party texting / call apps like Skype and WhatsApp using a desktop, make the voice call quality superb. 2. A way to get premium voice quality. It's 2018, and the voice call does not sound much better than in 1998. 3. Modular phones. Google's Project Ara, that has gone the way of many other Google projects.
I agree with quite a few of the posts above about seeing lots of lacks on the honesty, common sense, openness, objectivity, quality, dependability, etc. fronts.
On top of that, it would also be nice if clueless decision makers (with neither technical knowledge nor basic understanding skills) would be reduced or, ideally, completely removed. I mean managers, recruiters, investors, proceedings, expectations, requirements, trends, etc. unreasonably constraining different aspects of the technological (at least, software/programming) world. Or, in other words, avoiding ignorance to have anything to say at all, what seems like an easy goal for a knowledge-intensive field.
Custom Solvers 2.0 = Alvaro Carballo Garcia = varocarbas.
We're also missing the matrix. Reality is too hard without it.
There have been lots of posts demanding computer security or privacy, but little in the way of actual suggestions. Here's one that went out of fashion: the executive terminal.
The PDP-11 computer could have several users. Each user had their own slice of the computer memory to play with. Another user could not address stuff in your space by setting a pointer off the end of their own space, because the memory was paged, in 4-kilobyte chunks if I remember correctly. The operating system could not work that way, because it assigns who could see what memory. There have to be additional instructions to run the memory paging. These instructions could only be accessed by the person using the executive terminal tty0 - physically plugged into the unique tty0: serial port on the processor board. You did this to kill off programs that had hung, and the sort of things you would use 'sudo' for in Linux. There was a Texas thermal printer and keyboard which was often used for tty0, so every keystroke and every character that was replied was permanently recorded on paper.
Almost every machine today has a Von Neumann architecture with one 64-bit addressable space of memory that is shared by everyone. All users, remote and local, have equal access. The modern equivalent of the executive terminal might be a laptop where I could get superuser privileges, but only on commands typed into the laptop keyboard.
Start with technology design: there's no way to link together requirements with design with the deliverable artifacts (code,, documentation) with tests that verify the solution meets requirements.
I would like to be able to pay like $0.01 cash per page request of the New York Times or Forbes, rather than be asked to sign up and pay monthly.
Take off every 'sig' !!
Serious and informative journalism, unencumbered by other not-so-serious "interests".
Fuck all the touch shit, I used to be able to text while driving a manual with the phone in my shifter hand without looking at it. Now the best we have is swipe and vibration nonsense. This shit would go a long way toward making touch garbage useful eyes-free and it has existed for like a decade without being implemented.
See it in the news all the time. Companies taking each other to court for infringing stupid patients that arenâ(TM)t innovative in the first place and are only there to stifle competition.
Tech patients should have a max limit of a year to help move the industries along.
Were AI is used to determine the direction and intensity of the lazer!
This is my sig, there are many like it but this one is mine
As a software developer and cyber sec pro, secure software, system development life cycle and secure devops policies are amongst the hard to find.
"Gentlemen, you can't fight in here! This is the War Room!" -- Dr. Strangelove
Any consideration of user privacy.
What I miss is decent support for backward compatibility, the ability to run old programs on the latest systems.
I think Apple is one of the biggest offenders here. They tossed out Rosetta from OS X (goodbye PPC apps), they will toss out 32bit-x86 apps from macOS this year. If you have a 15-20 year old Mac program, there is a 0% chance it will run on the latest version of macOS.
On iOS they tossed out 32bit apps as well. Those were deliberate decisions by Apple.
On the contrary, I see Microsoft as a decent supporter of backward compatibility.
If you have a 15-20 year old Windows program, there is a good chance that you can make it run on the latest version of Windows 10, especially if it has no 16bit components and does not include drivers. We even had a full WinXP VM in some Windows 7 editions just for compatibility.
We got support for hundreds of Xbox 360 games on the Xbox One, support for original Xbox games has started. It's not perfect, but at least Microsoft is trying and showing goodwill.
Meanwhile, there are strong rumours that Sony has a full PS2 emulator for the PS4, but it is only used in rereleased PS2 games on the PSN, so you can't pop your PS2 disc into the new console and start playing. Why? So Sony can sell you old games once more.
I miss a complete lack of preservation in walled gardens and closed ecosystems, and the complete lack for a contingency plan in the inevitable case of their shutdown? How will we get patches or DLC for PS3/XB360 games in 20 years? Where do we get a copy of P.T. from these days?
On a completely unrelated note, I wish Google had LTS versions of Chrome/Chromium.
An email system that's impervious to spam.
Or, at least, that doesn't happily send a single spam message to millions of recipients.
I could type so much faster with my old LG Lotus than my even my galaxy note.
Bluetooth cellphones are not very practical. They are a PITA to connect and rip through the battery in no time.
Everyone makes the same stupid candy-bar cellphone, now : (
https://www.youtube.com/c/BrendaEM
A soul.
And, no I don't mean in the hippstery brogrammer sense you think I mean.
We're missing privacy, accountability, security and end user ownership.
Today's "tech" has morphed into nothing more than spyware to collect all your personal information so you can be sold to marketing companies, Governments and scammers.
Where there's an egregious screw up, no one is ever held accountable and problems are never fixed.
Why are you an AC? Get an id dude. You're not a moron.
1 year is nothing. I think it should be for 5. That's plenty long enough this day in age.
No software patents.
Copyright needs a big overhaul. The fact that we're still reading about SCO shows this very well.
We are almost there.
For example, if voice controls were a little better people who don't have good use of their hands, or maybe visually impaired, could send emails, or more easily operate the television. We have tech now that will manage some of this, but not all of it.
Controls in cars that could be used without having to take hands off the wheel, or eyes off the road, would be helpful.
Maybe tech for elderly that would automatically turn off the stove, or turn off water, or lock doors and windows, in case they forget.
All of this stuff seems easily feasible without any technological breakthroughs.
Most things that I think are missing are really just better implementations of current tech: - Battery capacity - the largest 18650's right now only do 3500mAh - Cooling - I'm really tired of fan noise and super hot laptops. Maybe you can't beat physics here, but maybe some new thermal transfer cooling solutions could be made - Wireless everything is still pretty flakey. Both LTE and Wifi, though 802.11ax looks like it will improve things - Cars: Just way way too complex. I'm not sure what can be done but maintenance on vehicles is just a money pit past 10 years old.
Efficient heat to electricity conversion that works for small deltas in temperature. Much of our electricity is used to power air conditioning or datacenter cooling systems. Such a waste.
Distributed energy storage. A flow-battery whole house UPS that could maintain power for a week would eliminate power outages for all but the most extreme events. It could tie into residential solar systems, and help energy providers better meet peak demands in cleaner and more efficient ways.
We still need a replacement device for the QWERTY keyboard. One that allows the user to input text with one hand (or no hands) at >5cps without looking at the device, and allows the user to know when an error has occurred. It could be a handheld chorded keyboard, or a subaudible interface, whatever. The fact that we're still using screen real estate on cell phones and tablets to display a slow, error-prone keyboard in 2018, years after the iPhone was introduced, is just unforgivable.
Outside of the Macbook Pro, all laptops have these ridiculously-size bezels and the top and/or bottom.
Solutions instead of subscriptions
According to APK what is missing is widespread use of his hosts file engine. That way everyone will always be vulnerable to the latest attacks until real security people do the hard work.
If we ever figure out how to link two points via micro-wormholes and send energy through them, ubiquitous wireless power would make a massive difference to the world. Imagine never having to worry about your phone losing charge. Electric cars would have essentially unlimited range (wear and tear permitting). If we could utilise the same tech for data transmission as well that would be a nice bonus!
my fucking comment! Am I being shadow banned or what?
Modular tablets and phones, being able to upgrade it in what fashion is necessary for your life. Less proprietary future, room for creativity.
When I was learning to type on an old Remmington typewriter, ths machine had the lowest row containing the space bar and the zx,c,v... through to the punction on the right,
The next row above, was had the keytops slightly higher that the preceding row, (letters a,s,d,f... again through to other punctuation.
The third row was higher than the second and less height than the fourth. And of course the dimples for the two home keys on the F and J were more pronounced.
I noted that it was great for touchtypists, as we know by feel, if we were on the proper row. That is almost missing. We simulate that effect by tilting the keypad so that the rear is higher than the front. BUT IT IS NOT THE SAME. I would love to see someone add 1/4inch staircase for the keyrows.and provide feedback as to how it has turned out.
The purpose of engineering is to apply science for the advantage of mankind. This is something that Tech is NOT doing right now. Being relevant. Doing good while incidentally making money rather than making it the primary point. This is what has been forgotten.
Something about the size and cost of an inexpensive cellphone
It would cause a revolution in medicine if people (and doctors) could more accurately and inexpensively see what is going on inside of our own bodies.
Battery technology (or generally portable power storage and generation) is pretty poor in terms of what people need and would open the door to more portable tech. Inventing teleportation would solve a lot of problems too - that's a technology that even science fiction won't fully explore because it opens such a can of worms where anything is possible and all sorts of issues just go away, it isn't even kind to story-telling - it would revolutionize not just industry but society itself.
Here are some items on my list. * Super high reliable, rock solid, operating systems for phones, laptops, etc. (Sad to say Apple is going down hill.) * High security phones, laptops, etc. that require little enough tech expertise the average consumer can use them. * A movement to pass more stringent privacy laws and outlaw mass surveilance, preferably a constitutional amendment. * Better mechanisms to catch cyber-criminals (not just defend against them). * Many bioinformatics software packages are kludgy prototypes written in scripting languages that should be rewritten in compiled languages with efficient algorithms. * Solving some really hard math problems. Take a look at anything that eats oodles of supercomputer time and you will find a numeric solution to something we can't solve analytically. * Data archival systems that will last hundreds of years without data loss.
Instead of taking away consumer choice, enacting user-hostile functions, forced spying, forced bloatware and over all evil uses of technology (Think Windows 10 forced spying, Samsung TV/Onkyo Receiver evil privacy policies and Roomba mapping your house just for starters) why not try a new novel idea of gaining the customers trust again?
Most technology companies are proving to be untrustworthy. Also, there should be a third party verification system in place to make sure that spying/telemetry is really turned off. We're seeing otherwise.
Well, if someone isn't willing to spend the under $200/yr on code signing (or less as a student/academic), I don't want to run their code.
I was under the impression that many platforms required a code signing certificate specific to that platform. So how many platforms does that "under $200/yr" cover? For example, macOS and iOS don't accept any certificate other than Apple's, and no other platform accepts Apple's.
The full suite of hardware is not that much (you can use used/borrowed hardware for testing)
What infrastructure exists to let amateur developers obtain such "borrowed hardware for testing"?
I also note you left out my "just run one of the many bundlers that create a 'native app' out of JS/HTML/CSS"
Many anti-JavaScript hardliners are against "the many bundlers that create a 'native app' out of JS/HTML/CSS" for the same reason that they're against JavaScript, with the additional complication that the output of Electron, one of the most popular of these "bundlers", tends to be a RAM hog because it loads an entire copy of Chromium for each application built using it.
I think we need something like the Phillips Pronto universal remote control. I had loved that thing when it still worked. It was one remote for all the audio tuners, DVDs, Televisions, etc. And you could configure the screen to show whatever buttons and images you wanted for each device or make a screen with buttons for many devices in one place. And it blasted out enough IR that you could point it in any direction and it would trigger the items no matter what. Many times it would work from the next room over even.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
Fuel cells that can use a petroleum distillate. Jet A, gasoline or diesel, maybe even propane, doesn't matter which.
A machine that makes a perfect pizza crust indistinguishable from the best NYC has to offer.
Yes, flying cars were my first choice, but hey - great pizza is all I really NEED.
Anything that Best Buy isn't selling.. Same old tech..
Have you fscked your local propeller head today?
I code in Python and JS daily, and C/C++ occasionally. At this point in time there is no way for me to describe a system where I can describe it once, then use the corresponding sub components of the system in various languages. .NET comes close, but I'm not looking for a CLR.
There are several challenges - from straight syntax (easy) to the various libraries and approaches (functional vs OOP). Some things have gotten better, everyone has better initializers and lambdas, but other things have gotten worse (JS and Python now have async) so you don't know if you're calling a blocking function or not.
Almost 20 years after .NET we're more soloed than ever.
Slashdot's rate-of-post filter: Preventing you from posting too many great ideas at once.
driving everything they deliver to the polite society they purport to idealize.
We are the suckers who keep buying into this crap. You may have noticed the corporations who push this stuff are not the least bit interested in you, the customer. They are control freaks. They want your cash and that's it.
Built-in obsolescence is highly likely to be commonplace in the US and China* - i.e. a device that will happily function for 10 years suddenly expires because some cheap-shit component was used to deliberately fail, or to cause a failure-cascade down your Device-Romance journey.
Next step is the landfill, because to repair your treasure would cost nearly as much as to buy it new again. Easy for the corporations to arrange?
What do you think?
Another racket we keep buying into is the planned obsolescence of software, and by association/assassination, the hardware to run it. Voila! Several corporations in this rat's nest now work together to drive profits, over and over again. You never see these cheats writing articles such as "How to make our xyz last another 10 years."
Occasionally corporations slip on their own turd and suddenly the anti-turd PR primates swing into action to cover the turd and plant a flower, with a promise to "water it every day!" Ohhh...look at that beautiful flower!
The change starts with us, the disempowered owners of the doorstop. For human primates, intelligence doesn't really kick in until we're in our 30's. So the "Gee!-Wow!" factor drives the bus in anyone not awake and thinking for themselves. On the whole, women are faster than men when it comes to intelligence.
* Recently the Chinese president Xi Jinping told the West to stick their recyclable junk up their own asses. (Big Applause!)
Seamless ergonomic application integration. We were studying this in the 70's (see some of the ACM publications). I never would have believed how poorly my various applications talk to one another.