Tech That Seems Stuck on the Runway

"Our ship is broken. Can you make it go?" - the Pakleds, Star Trek the Next Generation, episode 'Samaritan Snare'

Every now and then in our exciting world of technology, we pause amidst the rapid pace of change to notice those technology innovations that don't seem to catch up. The what-ifs, the might-have-beens, and the has-beens. Herein, we present a list of ideas that captured our imaginations at one time, but have since seemed to fade into obscurity. Maybe someone will try to spur them along to give them a fighting chance?

eBooks

This is the least-failing of the lot - ebook readers are still selling fairly well, and ebooks are at least surviving. But you'd think they would have picked up the pace a little! The ebook sphere is choking on some 20 incompatible formats, so you can't guarantee one book will work in another reader. Sites like Lulu.com are standing by to publish your ebook at no cost to you beyond a commission of the sales, but so far, we have yet to hear of a world-class author who got their start on ebooks. We're waiting.

Online Currency

When we want to buy or sell something online, we're still stuck with running real-world money through the web - a clumsy technology involving everything from wire transfers and PayPal to credit cards. The Internet should really be treated like its own country - you log on, exchange your cash for web cash, and thereafter can spend it out of a virtual wallet, without having to worry about exchange rates between marks and yen. In trying to implement this idea, we've seen the flop of Beenz, E-Gold, Flooz, and countless other bright young companies that were all ambition and no follow-through. The latest attempt is Ripple, but its future is so far in the dark.

DRM

That's "Digital Rights Management", although it could also stand for "Damned Rip-off Media". Honestly, we really do think that artists should be paid for their work. We don't want to see piracy of music or film any more that the next bloke. We just wish the industry could manage to put in a reasonable system that doesn't come off like a two-bit hustler that bails us up in the corner and leaves us robbed blind. For every DRM implementation that has been successful, there's two more where the company tried, failed, and gave up, leaving everybody who'd purchased media in the meantime up the creek. Yahoo music store is the latest example. File incompatibility, license incompatibility, technical failures, and then it doesn't work half the time and the other half somebody hacked around it anyway. Get it right or go home!

Voice Recognition

Somehow, this isn't working out like in the films. In movies like '2001 A Space Odyssey', we had computers that could understand people just like people talk to each other. Now, here's a real conversation with a computer today: "Please answer the following question: Would you like to pay by money order, credit, debit, or PayPal?" "CREDIT CAAAAARD!!!" "You answered 'credit card'. Is this correct?" "YEEEESSSS!!!" "Please answer the following question..." Need we say more?

Linux on the Desktop

No, you didn't see this. We did not suggest, for a minute, that Linux isn't ready for the desktop. Please do not send us 100,000 flaming emails from Ubuntu servers. We really didn't say that. But we notice that sites like Slashdot and ComputerWorld keep asking "Is Linux ready for the desktop yet?" for the past ten years or so, and we're about to get sodding tired of hearing it. What is "ready for the desktop", anyway? Does anybody even have the to-do list ready?

Antivirus Systems

Of course, computing security will always be an issue. And you Apple and Linux fanboys can pipe down, because even your platform isn't bullet-proof. It's just that, so far, antivirus software has had one model for 15 years: wait for an attack to happen, find out what the file name of the attacking program is, enter that file name in their database, and then make every one of their customers contact their database every day to download the new list of attacking files, and then the antivirus software scans your computer looking for the matching files. This is like if the police consisted of one man in uniform who went from house to house with a fugitive list and took roll call. It's obtrusive, expensive, and systems get infected anyway. Will there ever be a better way?

Filed Under: Featured • Mobile Computing • PDAs • The Internetz