Five PC Innovations the Industry Should Get To 764
An anonymous reader writes "Flexbeta.net has an article which describes 5 great technological advancements in computing that just about every PC user wants." From the article: "Why has there been such a sudden lack in innovation as of late? Are we in a technological drought? I like to stick to my own diagnosis of the industry as being too concerned with keeping a steady cash flow over social experimentation with new products but then again that's just an opinion from a little guy."
This guy is a whiny bastard... (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't fault this guy for dreaming -- that's the stuff innovation is made of -- but I do fault him for thinking that companies seem to owe him this technology for some reason...
(Note: Slashdotted already?)
a commercial operating system... for free (Score:3, Interesting)
Since it is free, Google won't need to protect a monopoly unlike some other companies. That will encourage further innovation
I've used Windows, Solaris, and Linux. But if google made an os, I would switch to that pretty quickly.
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:5, Interesting)
That's a pretty broad claim to make. I liked this recent piece [slashdot.org], a post by an anonymous high-schooler about how useless he thought floppies were, described as an "editorial". And there have been some completely [slashdot.org] false [slashdot.org] stories published without apparently anyone bothering to read the linked articles through. But, yes, the vapidity index for this one is pretty high.
Re:Did the article (Score:2, Interesting)
Agreed. I know another ant-MS comment is kind of passe, but I feel like the lack of innovation isn't on the hardware side. The average users I meet today are exctatic with the transition to LCD monitors, high quality speakers, wireless mice & NICs, and light laptops with phenomanal battery life. But they're less then impressed with the improvements MS has made in the same time - and frequently complain that the user experience is worse with the sheer number of viruses/malware out there (sure, I know the leaps and bounds that win 95 to 2k was, but it doesn't feel different to the average joe).
I like my fedora desktop well enough, but I'm praying for an x86 release of OSX.
Re:a commercial operating system... for free (Score:5, Interesting)
No they won't. I think when people say this they haven't really thought about what's involved in marketing a new OS. Google isn't stupid enough to get involved with pushing an OS to compete with Windows, and there is much more money to be made in managing data then putting out an OS that Dell and every other OEM won't touch with a ten foot pole. I know people love to guess on what Google will do next, but trust me it won't be a Free OS that compete with Windows and OSX.
btw everything you described already happened. Recently someone developed and put out a Commercial OS for Free that was kinda like a Mac, had less features than Windows, was more stable, and had a somewhat Unix-ish core. It was BEos. It was a total failure.
Re:I got ripped off (Score:2, Interesting)
Should always be on the list (Score:2, Interesting)
(For the mice with legs, and teath)
Re:Distilled Version (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:5, Interesting)
How about a few of relevance....
1) P ?= NP
2) Memory protection through typesafety alone. Would give all computers a 30+% boost to performance if the security was handled by the compiler, and not the hardware.
3) IPv6, static IPs for everyone...
4) Diamond semiconductors. Smaller features than silicon (the carbon atoms are physically smaller), able to withstand immense temperatures, higher performance, more efficent...pretty much just better in every way.
5) Non volatile ram that doesn't burn out. Instant on computers, and more...
How's that for a top 5 list of things to do before 2025?
He's not a "just about every user" (Score:4, Interesting)
The average user doesn't realize that fans can be quieter, or that a computer even needs to run cooler.
The average user just says, "That's the computer." when looking at the case. They don't think of a way that it could be better in any way. Sure, slashdotters do, but "just about everybody" isn't one of us.
The average user doesn't know how to plug things in (I just tell people plug things into the hole that it fits in and then plug the speaker in the hole with a picture of a speaker next to it and then they get it on their own), but they don't think of wireless everything. I tell (middle age adult) coworkers that my computer has a wireless mouse and keyboard and they're very impressed. They don't think of extrapolating like that.
The average user doesn't know what a USB key is.
The average user doesn't know much about hardware inside the computer at all (my website, ChristianNerds.com [christiannerds.com] has a question and answer section, where they email me questions about computers and I try to answer them, and I get at least one person every week asking what a printer is... A Printer! "Um, it's the thing that prints out your stuff onto paper."). The average user doesn't know enough to know what else to want. They like faster and they like flashier graphics. That's about it. Oh, and music.
Luke
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
Keyboards are essentially disposable. CPUs aren't. In the non-IT-guy world, people treat computers like playschool toys.
World Domination (Score:3, Interesting)
This is because there was intense competition between a number of personal computer and workstation and server vendors using an array of technologies and platforms.
Then, as smaller companies died off, instead of being replaced, thay were smothered outright by platforms seeking "world domination" - Linux is partly to blame, killoing the market for specialized server and workstation hardware, but really, most of the problem was and is Microsoft and Intel.
For a while, the Gaming industry bouyed the rate of innovation, but the game consoles are getting better and better, and the market for spiffy new peripherals for spiffy new games is slowly shrinking.
This isn't to say that there's nothing new under the sun. The computer industry outside the PC/Server market is berzerk with innovation at the moment: the next gen consoles, FPGA SOC's, 24 megapixel DSLRs and cheap 5mp digicams, HDTV solid-state digital camcorders, amazing new mobile phone technologies being rolled into smaller and sexier phones on almost a daily basis, PMP systems ranging from the simple and stylish iPod to HDTV DVR's.
It's just that the personal computing field and the server/workstation field has collapsed into singularity. You got your choice of Unix-derived OS's running GUI environments on top, running on the latest version of the bog-standard IBM PC Clone. Everything else has died off. No wonder it feels as if no more innovation is possible... of course new innovations are possible. It's just that the barrier to entry is now insurmountable.
So microprocessors to make cars and pacemakers go will be getting hot new tech, and cell phones will get smaller and easier to use and last hundreds of hours on a single charge, but your Linux workstation or iMac or Windows tablet, 5 years from now, will be featured and equipped exaclty as it is now. It might be marginally faster at doing what it already does... but it won't be doing anything new.
World Domination is never a good thing.
SoupIsGood Food
Operating systems don't matter to Google (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would they do that?
When you write software that runs on any operating system like Google does, you don't care about operating systems.
As applications become more abstracted from the OS by implementations of standards, operating systems matter less and less. Why do you think MS is so big on "embrace and extend"? They have to control the standards so they can funnel people into Windows.
Google is aimed squarely at the next chunk of value in computing: abstracted functionality. Let Apple and MS squabble over desktop searching. I can already search my Gmail from any of my several PCs. The remaining relevant applications won't be *too* far behind.
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:2, Interesting)
Something a keyboard manufacturer could do though... a little LCD on my keyboard that could display things (with corresponding buttons) like:
1: open applications
2: Workspaces (with preview)
3: My weather, system monitor, battery, sound, system temp, and time applets. || gkrellm
4: xmms
I could save loads of screen space and wouldn't have to come up with hundreds of long keyboard shortcuts that I can never remember...
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Most decent inkjets will do a pretty good job here, but the US Govt. takes a rather dim view of such activity.
as for immediate start computers...
The wake up from sleep on Macs is essentially instantaneous. Unless an installation of new software requires a restart, there is no real reason to ever shut down a Mac. My PB has never even once failed to wake up properly from sleep. Who cares if a computer takes a few minutes to boot up if that only happens maybe once or twice a month, if that.
The industry has eaten itself alive (Score:3, Interesting)
Dell is a manufacturer, not a technology company... they assemble boxes cheap. Companies like Compaq, HP & IBM used to actually create new technologies that would either catch on or inspire Taiwanese boardmakers to clone similar features cheap.
The last real PC vendor that actually included new or unique technology into their products was IBM... but of course they're gone now.
Re:The two words have been stoppinig new products (Score:3, Interesting)
The wall, in this analogy, is placed by someone else. That would almost be the legislators, were it not for the heavy handed corporate lobbying that drives them, who are in turn driven by expectations of greater profit, and fear of lost income, in the absence of their protectionist lobbying. Even that is overly simplistic, given the long history of patents and their perceived positive effects on society, and the prohibitively costly access to judicial representation and remedies by the common person.
Tongue in cheek, patents and lawyers prevent innovation. The cause, and blame, is much more complex, I humbly submit.
Would it be hypocritical to find bittorrent absent of copyright infringement, and then lawyers and patents guilty of stymieing innovation? (Or would that be overly simplistic?)
I'd like three things (Score:3, Interesting)
2. Lighter laptop batteries with 5-10x the capacity.
3. High DPI laptop monitors and OS that natively supports scalable output (Longhorn is supposed to take care of that, if that's not yet been cut, too).
Re:I got ripped off (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:World Domination (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm big into language and OS design research, but a new OS becoming a success is a pipe-dream. Rob Pike has a good essay on this.
Briefly, a new OS will never happen because as you said the barrier to entry is massive. I slightly disagree with where to place blame, though. It's not so much the fault of Microsoft/Linux/Apple dominating the scene as it is apathy and laziness in users.
Hypothetically, if OS/2 crushed Windows we would all be split between OS/2, OS X, and the Unix variety. Once an OS gets a decent amount of apps written for it, it's nearly impossible to leave it. This is also the cause for the backwards compatibility insanity of today. I've written an x86 assembler and was dumbfounded by the crap one must go through just to do what appears to be a simple task (translating mnemonics to binary). ModR/M+SIB is hell and deserves the Ugliest Hack of the Universe award. Microsoft, Intel, Apple, Linux, etc. They are all bound to backwards compatibility. That alone puts a big block on innovation. I'd love to just toss out the traditional WIMP interface some time. It will likely never happen.
I must say, I'm more than a little concerned about languages as well. There have always been many languages around, but not like today. COBOL, Fortran, C, Lisp, BASIC and a few others with small userbases were around 15-20 years ago. Today it is looking more and more like the Tower of Babel.
I'm tempted to say that the language design insanity (Perl, Python, Ruby, PHP, Java, JavaScript, etc. etc.) and the excessive search for the silver bullet is a response to the stagnation of software innovation. Why I say this, is because it is completely misplaced.
Perl is a response to a platform (Unix) that has hideous structured information. Or, rather, it has no structured information. Everything is unconnected text that sits in files. The closest thing to the ideal Perl replacement today would probably be SQL and a RDBMS. If properly integrated into the OS, I wager that 99% of the problems Perl solves would disappear. Hence, Perl would be unnecessary.
TCL, Python and Ruby (with Perl overlap)? Those are there because people tire of using low-level languages. C *is* Linux and Linux (Unix) is C. And of course, much of it politics which completely kills innovation. Python/Ruby aren't that far removed from Lisp, yet we must reinvent for political and egotistical reasons.
Look at Java for the worst example of NIH ever, and I don't see how any of it solves a single practical problem. The portability problem will never be solved by a VM, because everyone knows that the quality of the VM implementation is the key factor and varies widely. There is no difference between porting a C compiler to 100 platforms or porting a JavaVM to 100 platforms. The portability benefits are equal. Except Java has a seperate layer of indirection which adds further complexity and is a source of inefficiency. Sure, you can't distribute C apps like Java. But Java definately isn't the pinnacle of distributed applications.
The biggest area of innovation will happen vertically as it is today. Things like Final Cut Pro, Photoshop, Firefox, etc. They will continue to go off on their own direction. But essential system-level innovation is dead, I'm afraid.
On a side note, Linux employs the purest form of democracy seen to date. If you want something, you stick it in the system. This unfortunately does not make a well-designed system. A single person or a small team design the best systems. There are simply too many cooks stirring the pot to make it unifed and coherent. What we end up with is a pile of hacks on top of hacks. Nothing really well thought-out. It wouldn't be such a big deal if Unix was a system designed for evolution. It's not.. it's a big static ball of bits. Linux (and many other things) seem to require a recompile on the simplest changes to the system. And rarely does anything adhere to the Unix design philosophies (everything is a file, simple programs that
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
When I ban you from accessing my server, I want you gone. Oh, and while we're at it, make those dial-up IP's static, too. And get rid of all the fucking proxies.
Here's what I want to see. A hardware OS. Fuck software. Hrdware. Faster access, faster loading times, make the OS an actual hardware card with perhaps upgradable firmware for security patches, bugfixes, stability issues, etc. People always talk a 'plug and play' OS, why not make the OS itself plug-in and off you go, like a Nintendo cartridge? (I still say optical media is BS, cartridge-based/solid state is where it's at)
Re:Innovations the Industry Should Get To: (Score:2, Interesting)
I consider it a defect in the HTTP protocol that Slashdotting can happen. Distributed caching ought to have been built into the protocol from the start. Coral [coralcdn.org] is a step in the right direction.
Re:He's not a "just about every user" (Score:3, Interesting)
The end user would benefit, because they would see significantly enhanced plug-and-play. If they bought a printer, and their OS supported printers, then their printer would work.
Hardware Dongles... (Score:4, Interesting)
This USB key idea is pretty much exactly the same as the old parallel port dongle idea people once used.
I'm sure he would realize what I meant the day he had to start looking for that USB key about the size of a quarter he left on his desk somewhere... or the day he had to juggle what devices he had plugged into his computer.. after all, not everyone has 10 USB ports available to them.
Having one company in charge of the whole thing sounds like a disaster too... lets add a whole new layer of licensing fees to the mix...
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:2, Interesting)
Consequently I have only touched my PC-Laptop for playing GuildWars and I no longer have a functional desktop PC.
Mac mini- as fast as you'll need, reliable, compact and quiet. Sure, even OSX isn't infallible but it's a damn sight better than my experiences with windows.
Well, back to the point, because I never turn it off, and never put it to sleep, wake up is essentially instantanous. I have an apple mouse but use a Saitek Notebook mouse (white, mmm) which has never spontaneously brought it out of monitor power-saving mode.
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Well, that's the WHOLE point (Score:4, Interesting)
- being locked out of a game I've paid for, because the CD got scratched.
I've started to wonder whether or not this is actually a planned benefit for media companies, rather than an unintended side-effect. This way, when you scratch your video game/DVD/software CD you are forced to either buy a new one, or at the least pay the (gradually increasing, I've noticed) fee they require to replace the disk, which is always quite a bit more than the cost of the disk itself. And since anything copy-protected is illegal to make archive copies of under the DMCA, there's nothing you can do.
And to address your complaints about all the other fun side-effects from copy protection (mostly bug-related), companies just don't care. Once they have your money, you aren't getting it back, because the return policy on all entertainment media is same-copy-only exchange once it's opened. And while they claim it's only to reduce piracy, it does have the wonderful benefit for them that evey sale is absolutely final once you try the product.
Seems to me that software/entertainment publishers are just using piracy as a good excuse to pillage their customers nowadays. Hell, you could argue that piracy is the best thing that ever happened to them.
Safe languages (Score:4, Interesting)
You're thinking too classically, like a C programmer. With a higher-level language, more design intent can be expressed directly by the programmer, and used by the compiler for safety and optimisation purposes.
Sure, you can't check all arrays access for bounds violations, but if you think about it with your human level of understanding, very few accesses can ever really be dangerous. The trick is to be able to convey that level of understanding to the compiler, so it can perform the necessary checks, and no more.
As for NULL pointers, there's really no need for them at all if you have a serious type system. Recursive data structures are trivially dealt with if you have concepts like disjunctive types and pattern matching.
In fact, as useful as they can be at lower levels, pointers generally are only useful as reassignable references to objects. There's no need to relate pointers and arrays, nor to provide arbitrary pointer arithmetic and the NULL concept, with a moderately powerful type system.
There is a reason that many languages make a point of saying they don't support pointers, even if they have a more limited variation of the concept, as with things like Java. The killer isn't the concept of indirection, or changing the target, it's the arithmetic, and assignment of arbitrary values. That leads to a world without proper type safety, and it leads to aliasing concerns that have horribly negative effects on optimisation.
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
5.) A printer which can print $20 dollar bills (my personal favorite).
And why not? You can print stamps [usps.com], after all.
Paypal and the like are fine for pure electronic transactions, but being able to issue your own checks/currency on paper that you could take down to some storefront vendor and have them punch in your name and 20 digit number (or read it from the bar code) would make everyone happy (except VISA and its member banks [yahoo.com] who exert monopoly like control over the transaction fees).
I would guess the biggest problems with setting up a personal line of credit system based on public key cryptography and 3rd party certificates from anyone who wanted to be a banker are not technical problems, but rather political problems [com.com] with intruding onto someone else's existing scheme for making money.
Sure, you can be a bank if you comply with these 48 lb books of barriers to entry , er, I mean, regulations to protect the consumer. (Yes, it's an oversimplification, but there's plenty of margin for profit in tailored industry regulations as the FDA evidences.)
Anyone who has paid 18% credit card interest ( or even 5% on a mortgage) and gotten paid 1.2 % on their bank balances knows there's got to be some slack built into that system.
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:2, Interesting)
Actually, I can see this as a prime reason to adopt the technology....
If a user has access to sensitive material stored on network fileservers, the GPS could be used to make sure that the laptop was actually IN a secured area before allowing its user access. It'd be just one more added layer of security.
If you don't want to access the corporate network, you don't have to have the GPS reporting application running.
That having been said, if it's a company-owned computer, then the company is well within its rights to demand that such an application is always active when the computer is in use.
Re:This is a joke, right? (Score:3, Interesting)
I agree...but what right does an employer have to know that you smoke marihuana? Or, even more preposterous, what your credit rating is? I love the last one: it actually can stop you from getting a job when you really need one!
The only thing an employer should need to know about you are your educational/employment history and your personality (to see if you fit in/can work with your collegues).
But that hasn't stopped employers from wanting to know everything from your DNA-specified prediliction towards cancer of the little pinky and your sock-size.