81–90 of 191 posts
> an intuitive UI for configuring everything in xorg.conf
> an intuitive UI for everything involving mounting, fstab, mdadm (raid), network shares, etc
> improve the awk, cairo-bar interfaces to be on par with RocketDock
> a more intuitive PulseAudio interface that controls everything relating to sound (including OSS and older)
Longer lifetime...200-300 years. There is just too much to do and time flies way too fast. One minute you are a 20 year old college student, the next minute you are 40 years old, running out the clock.
End all fraud. The online version of this is, Spam, Phishing, Spyware, identity theft, etc. Offline: con artists, political bribery, tax evasion, ponzi schemes. I don't believe eliminating all crime is possible, as I can always whack my neighbor over the head with a stick and steal his wallet, but alot of crimes are only possible because the victim has a lack of good information. This is fraud. Eliminate or drastical…
One click install java IDE and compiler. One click install C IDE and compiler. One click install Erlange IDE and compiler. And so on and so forth.
The OLPC project took a shot at this but besides creating net-books it wasn't too successful, to summarize, the OLPC project was ambitious but rubbish ;-) I don't know yet how to solve the problem of educating people ion those countries, especially when it comes to basic things like literacy and/or math but I definitely think it would be worth quite a lot of effort and also be a business opportunity because of scale (if not now maybe also in the long-run).
Moores law applied to Batteries.
Lithium Ion batteries -- the current king of the hill -- are pretty much the same today as when they first came into use in the 1970s.
We've been seeing longer lifetimes and shorter charge times because device manufacturers can afford to throw in more hardware to control discharging and recharging.
Convenient travel. Let me or at least my goods travel from any point to any other point with low overhead (<10 mins) at a speed of 100 mph or higher. And let me do so on demand without advance planning.
The rising cost of education. I've yet to receive a response from my institution or others that I've considered, of why it is they keep raising their fees, tuitions, etc.., especially in a recessed economy. It seems to me to be counterproductive - folks are losing their jobs, therefore losing their finances, and now possibly finding out that they need more training or they need to enter a new field, thus requiring ed…
I think the problem you seem to be interested in - the rising cost of formal education that results in a degree will be solved not by reducing its cost, but by reducing its value. It will continue to cost a lot to get a degree, but you probably won't want one.
[0] which seem to be growing less important: http://paulgraham.com/credentials.html
Wifi debugging tool. Something that can tell me why the hell my signal drops 30 seconds every 10 minutes, etc.