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?

Comments

Open Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Open Standards

[arglebargle_xiv]

Reliability is what we're missing. 99% of IT today is like an incontinent toddler, it needs constant maintenance and mucking out and patching and updating just to keep it running. Not to add new capabilities, but just to keep it running. 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.

Re:Open Standards

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Open Standards

[Wycliffe]

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.

Re:AI

[ShanghaiBill]

The premise of summary is silly. I NEVER think "everything tech that is needed already exists." To the contrary, I am frustrated at how much stuff isn't available yet. WERE IS MY FLYING CAR!?!?! Where is my household robot? It is 2018, and I still need to manually load the dishwasher, and take out the garbage. WTF? How about a voice assistant that actually understands reality? How about really good telepresence so I don't have to go to work? How about a vacation on the moon? I could list a zillion other things.

Privacy

[Anonymous Coward]

Privacy.

Medical answer

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Seems simple.

[Gravis Zero]

* 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.

An entire concept is missing:

[Gravis Zero]

Privacy. Every asshole corp. is trying to bleed you for data they can sell.

Re:An entire concept is missing:

[jd]

We'd have privacy by now but consumers wanted IPv4 rather than IPv6. We lost Mandatory IPSec across the Internet as a result.

We'd have privacy, but American voters chose not to have EU privacy laws and EU data protection laws, thus defiling the globe.

We'd have privacy, but users chose AOL.

We'd have privacy, but users chose Microsoft's email clients over ones that supported PGP/GPG.

We'd have privacy, but users chose Microsoft. (Windows 95 stored passwords in plain text. And users felt this was much safer than the encrypted stuff Linux and BSD were using.)

Sorry, I have no sympathy for a society that feels deprived of privacy when they have actively chosen to throw it away.

Another Medical answer

[Okian Warrior]

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.

Re:AI

[whoever57]

WERE IS MY FLYING CAR

Elon Musk sent it into space.

Ehtics and Accountability

[RonVNX]

Seriously.

My axes to grind

[tepples]

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 to

Here's a short list.

[jd]

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

a better definition of "tech"

[Goldsmith]

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.

Re: Common sense and decency

[c6gunner]

Wrong is a woman showing her face in public; right is stoning her to death after she gets raped. Duh. Everyone who was raise right knows these things.