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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?
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!
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.
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.
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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)
Imho, the trouble with software began when vendors decided it was cheaper to pay lawyers than coders. Instead of building a product that works, they created interminable license "agreements", whose sole purpose is to exonerate them of liability for anything. No other industry could get away with this.
Compare that to a car, for which the expectation is that you turn the key and it starts up and goes where you want, without first needing to be rebooted and patched and the firmware reflashed and the networking reconfigured every time.
Henry Ford gets a lot of credit for the assembly line but his other big break thru is equally important. He decided to standardize maintenance to set intervals. The 3 months or 3k miles isn't because everything needs that interval but because by standardizing on that interval you can minimize repairs. You now have a goal to make sure every part can last at least 3k miles between services and you line everything else up to also be some multiple of this. If you need a transmission flush or tires changed make sure you do it during one of the scheduled 3k mile services. Before this, every part had a different repair schedule and they were all out of sync so you had to take your car in constantly. That's where the computer industry is today.