Technology has far to go

June 27, 2008

Technology still sucks a lot. This is probably obvious to everyone, but as a technologist, I know exactly where the failings are and get more frustrated than the average person. Sure, you get annoyed when your wireless network doesn’t just work, but I actually know why it doesn’t work, see the terrible engineering decisions that lead to this outcome, and get frustrated and disappointed in humanity.

Ok so it’s not that bad. But we have far to go. An example: I can no longer get on my home wireless router, because a neighbor just added a router in their house on the same wireless channel. So the signals are competing. So I’ll have to change my router to a new channel. Which begs the question – why should I need to do this? The two routers know they’re competing, they can “see” each other, they should switch channels automatically. Little things, big headaches.

Filed under: development, ideas, professional

  • James
    You know what really grinds my gears? Wireless networking. It's amazing that the wireless software to manage our radios is so difficult. It does a half-way decent job, but anytime there's a problem it's completely untroubleshootable.

    "New networks are found". Great. "Double click on a network to connect." Double click. Wait. Nothing. Click refresh. "You are not connected to any network. Networks: homenet, unsecured, you are connected to this network, click here to connect."

    And then P2P wifi... while I'm sure it works in some crazy fashion, it's so obscure that no one uses it. Why can't it be like rendezvous, a presence-aware thing that just shows you what AP's and what computers are in the area, and allow you to connect to any at the same time?

    Technology is so stupid.
  • Completely agree - wireless networking is the perfect case study in stupidity. Why should humans be subjected to such bad software? It's not home networking if it doesn't work safely, securely, and simply in the average home.

    You know what else grinds my gears? Cable companies installing cable modems with a single ethernet cable into the back of a Windows machine. That's like asking for a huge botnet of zombie computers. Why not build a simple NAT router into every cable modem? That must exist for $1, would hardly impact the price. That alone would probably prevent most of the botnets.
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