No wireless. Wireless is slow, unreliable, and a pain to set up.
Flexible cables. I’m sick of dealing with these incredibly stiff Firewire and USB2 cables, especially when plugging hard drives and cameras and things into my laptops temporarily. I can’t decide on a place for my camera, and then plug it in - I have to plug it in first, and see where the damn cable will flex enough to let me put it. This never fails to be a ridiculously bad spot. Any attempt to move it somewhere more reasonable puts so much pressure on the connectors that the connection is lost.
No multiple connectors for the same technology. I’m sick of having to hunt down my mini-USB and mini-Firewire cables every time I need to use one of the devices that has one of those connectors. You want to be able to use tiny connectors? Make all the damn things tiny.
Also, keep the connector the same on both ends. Firewire does this (unless we’re talking about the damn mini connectors again), but for some reason even standard USB cables have a different design on the device end than the computer end.
Make the connectors support more than one orientation. Somehow, when I’m plugging in a Firewire cable, the orientation the (extremely stiff, see #2) cable naturally wants to be in is always the total opposite of the way it has to go into the connector. The next connector design should be connectable in any of four orientations, each 90 degrees apart.
It would be nice to be able to disconnect a device without going through the “Safely Remove Hardware” Step. Also, if you accidently unplug a device during a transfer it should be able to resume from where it left off rather than corrupt data like it does now.
Unfortunately, nobody has discovered a reliable, durable, flexible substance to use in any data cable. If it’s too flexible, you risk breaking it.
The size of connectors is related to this, but it doesn’t sound unreasonable to ask for a universal plug that’s reletively small. I’d like it to lock in place like an XLR connector.
I honestly don’t see the point to this one. Is it really so hard to twist to cable so that the connector goes in right? To do things your way would require a lot of redundant hardware, which would just make things more expensive.
This a an issue with each individual manufactorer. They put a proprietry connector on one end of the cable so that if you need a replacement cable, you have to buy it from them. It’s still a bitchy thing to do, but I can’t see a way around it.
Well, it could be made part of the standard’s specifications - and if you don’t follow those specifications, you don’t get to put the nice “absoluteWire-compatible” trademarked logo on the package. Not foolproof, but maybe it would help.
I think the reason that the USB standard has different connectors on the PC side and the device side because otherwise it would be far too easy to jumper the cable back to the computer. There’s voltage running out of the computer via the USB cable and I suspect bad things would happen if you jumpered it back to the computer, or to a different one.
Hmmm. I’ve got a USB cable here, and I can wind it around my little finger. However, it came with a crappy camera, and probably won’t work in six months’ time.
My guess about the ‘standard’ vs ‘miniature’ options is that standard USB sockets could be part of a PCB, simplifying production, whereas all miniature ones have to be separate sockets.
The problem there is data loss. You can only make a cable go so far without losing information. Of course, seeing as ethernet cables are sometimes many meteres long before they are intercepted by some kind of hardware, it is obviously possible to do it in some fashion, but I don’t know of the nature of USB makes it more difficult, or if manufactorers simply think no one needs a cable longer than 10’.
The problem there is ethernet cables carry packets of data that are reconstructed on the other end. USB/Firewire send data a little differently, ie. all at once. There could be protocol built in for data loss and retries over longer cords, but this would slow down transfer speeds.
A little more power would be nice. Enough to power a 3.5" HDD or DVD recorder directly.
Of course, then you have the problem of laptops not being able to devlier such power. I suppose you’d have to go with 2 variations of the connector, one with power and one without. I believe FireWire works that way now.
What’s the point of this? Each cable must connect to a computer (or hub) at one end and a device at the other, so yo don’t gain any flexibillity by using the same connector. You just increase confusion.
The way USB is set up, you can look at a USB hub and instantly tell which connector connects to the computer, and which ones to the devices. Not only that, but it makes it impossible to connect them incorrectly.
If you make the connector too big, people complain that it’s big and clunky. Make it too small, and it’s pathetically fragile and people complain.
Make the wire too stiff and people complain that it’s too difficult to work with. Make it too flexible and people complain that it’s not reliable enough.
Poeple complain about wires being strung all over the place. So we make wireless. Then people complain because wireless stuff interferes with other stuff that works on radio waves.
Whatever we make, someone complains about!
Arrggghhh!!!
People wonder why us engineers walk around muttering to ourselves all day long.
You can. Right-click on any drive in “My Computer”, select the Hardware tab. Select the USB drive from the list, click the “Properties” button, then the “Policies” tab.
Choose the option that says: “Optimize for quick removal.”
You can now remove the drive without using Safe Remove, and it remembers the setting for all other USB drives inserted.
In theory this makes writes slower, but I’ve never been able to notice a difference.
On second thought, I guess FireWire uses the same connector on both ends because FireWire devices can be daisy-chained. I suppose that might be a useful feature, but I can live without it.
Another thing: when introducing an updated but backward-compatible standard (like USB-2), I want the new connectors color-coded. I should be able to look at the back of the computer (or front) and instantly know which ones support the newer, faster standard.