Reply to post: Re: Fix the broken stuff first

Tech that we want (but they never seem to give us)

Anonymous Coward
Anonymous Coward

Re: Fix the broken stuff first

To the extent that things are not limited by the above, bandwidth is constantly a stumbling block.

And it's ALWAYS going to be a stumbling block because you have to do deal with a minimum quantum of data (the size of the electron, basically) and the maximum amount of room (the physical constrain of the transport medium, which can actually be calculated).

People who say things like "[insert any arbitrary limit here]-bits allows more than every particle in the universe so you can't need more" are idiots.

So you're saying the people behind ZFS are idiots? How do you plan to use more matter than the universe allows? We haven't been able to leave the PLANET, let alone the UNIVERSE.

Secure and private everything. Everything should be doable with proxies. If my identity is going to be attached to something it should be my choice alone.

There's a tradeoff for that privacy, and in fact true privacy is impossible. It's a "hard" problem in secrecy: how do Alice and Bob establish their identities securely to each other when they've never met before? As for proxies, that's a trust issue. Do you trust the proxy? That's why Trent isn't a reliable solution to the problem. There's also the matter of side-channel attacks. That's how TOR gets beaten: the plods take over an endpoint and watch where everything comes and goes from there. Just the source or destination is plenty of identifiable and indemnifying information. The only way around that is something like Freenet, which is by design hopelessly inefficient.

Building block inter-operable devices. My phone should connect to my local system and allow me to edit files on it, compile programs -- whatever I tell it to do. I should not have to utter any strange incantations to do this. It should connect as long as it has permission.

One problem: masqueraders. The hoop-jumping is to make sure you're connecting to YOUR system, NOT someone POSING as your system.

Copyrights and patents are sub-optimal. They should be scrapped.

If you don't recall, the alternative was the commission system, when only the rich and affluent could request the services of artists. Copyrights and patents may be sub-optimal, but they're (a) better than the alternative and (b) still fixable, such as by reducing their term lengths to reflect the faster pace of society.

IPv6 needs to be ditched and replaced with a protocol that is backward compatible with IPv4.

That defeats one of the purposes of IPv6 which is to improve routing efficiency. Then again, you also stated you didn't want your route to be traceable. In which case, why not ditch IP altogether and create a new protocol built on inefficiency instead?

One programming language should be enough for scripting, compiling, data manipulation, procedural and object oriented programming, assembler, etc. Designers should start with C and avoid the ridiculous mistakes of Java and C++. If your language makes it hard or impossible to do something another language can do then there is something wrong with at least one of those languages. A 'language' should in fact be a 'tool-chain' that includes everything from the operating system kernel on up, including revision control and facilities for developing feature rich 3D GUIs. The language should allow a skilled programmer to write programs at least as small and fast as hand-coded assembler on up to a complete modern operating system.

Sorry, but that's impossible. There's a reason we have two levels of programming languages (low-level and high-level): because each level requires extremely different ways of thinking to work (low-level means you're talking in the machine's way, high-level means in an abstracted way--they're mutually exclusive). Low-level can be more efficient but is harder to structure since you're dealing with the constraints of the processor, whereas high-level leaves the gritty work to the compiler and lets you structure the program more as you visualize it. It's the difference between swimming across a river and searching for a boat: each has its pros and cons.

I want my CPU cycles back. The bloat of current systems is appalling. My first program was less than 128 bytes long. I wrote, by myself, a multi-user system in less than 14K. Every second literally hundreds of billions of small decisions are made by CPU cores on my network here. Is it too much to ask if, say, ten percent is devoted to me, the owner? My old Atari 400 with less than a 2MHz single core CPU put me at a command prompt faster than my 32 cores pushing out nearly fifty thousand times as many cycles. If that machine ran at the efficiency of these ones it would take a week to boot up and on my Windows machines that would mean they would never boot without needing a reboot immediately.

Welcome to "necessary complexity". If an 80's computer powers up in two seconds, it's because it didn't have much to worry about on power-up. Heck, arcade machines from the period took longer to start up but were more thorough at it. Similarly, modern PCs have tons of memory and peripherals to inspect on startup to make sure things don't go splat (the C64, for example, never had to deal with a hard drive). They're also expected to do a lot more things than an 80s computer, like networking, background tasks, etc. All because we asked our computers to do more.

Before we start delivering the flying cars, we should be fairly certain they won't crash.

THAT'S why we don't have flying cars. As long as something is in the air, gravity guarantees there WILL be at least SOME risk of a crash, as we see from the occasional airliner incident. The public won't be confident with less than a perfect flying car. Since that is an impossible expectation, the demand can never be met. Ergo, no one tries.

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