# What things would be designed differntly if they had to be made from scratch?
**URL:** https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833
**Category:** In My Humble Opinion
**Created:** [March 26, 2008, 8:47pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833 "2008-03-26T20:47:19Z")
**Posts on this page:** 20
**Page:** 2
### Author:  [@ChrisBooth12](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ChrisBooth12)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/21 "2008-03-26T21:39:45Z")
[QUOTE=Snarky\_Kong]
That’s the entire point. Computer keyboards don’t jam, but we’re stuck with qwerty because it was carried over from typewriters.
How about humans? Having a breathing hole you don’t use to eat is an obvious improvement.
[/QUOTE]
I guess i didn’t make my OP clear.. Logically when computers came around you would keep the same key arrangment regardless if it was fast or not.
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### Author:  [@Rysto](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Rysto)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 9:39pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/22 "2008-03-26T21:39:52Z")
A lot of the core protocols on the Internet would be changed. When they were developed security was not an issue – networks were small and used by professionals, so there wasn’t any issue with people deliberately trying to cause trouble. Here are some examples:
DNS – DNS is the domain name system. I won’t go into too many details into how it works, but DNS is used to translate domain names, like [boards.straightdope.com](http://boards.straightdope.com) or [www.google.com](http://www.google.com), into IP addresses. Computers on the Internet identify each other using IP addresses. DNS is comprised as a hierarchy of servers. Each server is responsible for knowing how to translate some subset of all domain names into IP addresses. The translations are held in redundant copies in many different servers around the world, and the servers communicate with one another to keep those copies up-to-date with the proper translations. The problem is that the communications are not authenticated – _anybody_ can pretend to be a DNS server and try and put erroneous translations in real DNS servers. There are a bunch of hacks in place to avoid this type of problem, but the real solution is to properly authenticate DNS messages, so that a DNS server can definitively tell where a message came from. There is ongoing work on this.
Email – spoofing email return addresses is trivial. It’s pretty much equivalent to how you can write whatever return address you like on a real envelope when you send a letter. With proper authentication this wouldn’t be a problem. I’m not aware of any efforts to fix this.
IP – The current version of IP only allows for about 4 billion computers on the Internet(actually, significantly less than this but 4 billion is the absolute limit). This isn’t anywhere near enough. A new version has been developed that will allow us to address every atom in the universe, or something like that, but acceptance is up in the air at the moment.
No doubt there are lots of others that I’ve forgotten but this can give you a flavour for the types of problems that exist on the Internet.
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 9:53pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/23 "2008-03-26T21:53:57Z")
[QUOTE=ChrisBooth12]
but you have to figure about how these things were designed..QWERTY was made to slow typist down so the typewriters would not jam. And the idea carried over into computers. If typewriters would designed again the keylayout would not be DVORAK because it would be to fast
[/QUOTE]
[Uh, no.](http://www.straightdope.com/classics/a1_248.html)
> [@Cecil Adams](#):
>
> Baloney, say the authors of the article you enclose, S.J. Liebowitz and Stephen Margolis. They point out that (1) the research demonstrating the superiority of the Dvorak keyboard is sparse and methodologically suspect; (2) a sizable body of work suggests that in fact the Dvorak offers little practical advantage over the QWERTY; (3) at least one study indicates that placing commonly used keys far apart, as with the QWERTY, actually speeds typing, since you frequently alternate hands; and (4) the QWERTY keyboard did not become a standard overnight but beat out several competing keyboards over a period of years. Thus it may be fairly said to represent the considered choice of the marketplace. It saddens me to know I helped to perpetuate the myth of Dvorak superiority, but I will sleep better at night knowing I have rectified matters at last.
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### Author:  [@scr4](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/scr4)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 9:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/24 "2008-03-26T21:54:49Z")
[QUOTE=ChrisBooth12]
But say things like CDs for example. Their basic shape and size where made just because some guy wanted to fit a specific symphony on them.
[/quote]
Snopes lists [this story](http://www.snopes.com/music/media/cdlength.asp) as “undetermmined.” And the choice of the Beethoven’s 9th Symphony, even if that _was_ the reason, is not very arbitrary. It’s an extremely popular and well-known piece of music, especially in Japan. It’s hard to think of any other music that’s as popular _and_ long.
> [@Skammer](#):
>
> Rail travel. … if you ever changed the guage of the rails, or used a different kind of track, suddenly your fleets of cars and engines are obsolete.
That’s not a huge problem for new rail lines. Subway trains don’t need to be compatible with main lines, for example, but they usually use the same gauge because it’s a pretty good choice for most rail lines. Japan used a wider gauge for the bullet trains, so they are not compatible, but there’d be no reason to run the new trains on pre-existing tracks anyway, or vice versa.
> [@](#):
>
> But, if we were starting over, we would probably use mag-lev propulsion with more straightaways, fewer elevation changes and long, banking curves to facilitate high-speed travel.
I think the OP’s question was _not_ “what would we do differently with today’s technology,” but “what standards are arbitrary and could easily have ended up very different.” And I _don’t_ think the railway gauge is an example of this. Various gauges were tried all over the world; different parts of the US had different gauges. In Europe and US the 4’8.5" standard was adopted as being the best compromise.
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### Author:  [@ChrisBooth12](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/ChrisBooth12)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 10:24pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/25 "2008-03-26T22:24:45Z")
> [@](#):
>
> I think the OP’s question was not “what would we do differently with today’s technology,” but “what standards are arbitrary and could easily have ended up very different.” And I don’t think the railway gauge is an example of this. Various gauges were tried all over the world; different parts of the US had different gauges. In Europe and US the 4’8.5" standard was adopted as being the best compromise.
yes this is waht i meant to say thanks for clairifacation.
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### Author:  [@Mangetout](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mangetout)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/26 "2008-03-26T22:29:44Z")
[QUOTE=Snarky\_Kong]
How about humans? Having a breathing hole you don’t use to eat is an obvious improvement.
[/QUOTE]
It is, but unless you want to redesign in quite an alien way, you’re then going to end up with redundancy of some kind.
The breathing mouth needs to have lips, a tongue, a palate, a nasal passage and maybe even something approaching teeth, if you want it to be able to speak, shout, cry, sing etc in a way that would be intelligible to us.
The eating mouth needs to have lips, a tongue, teeth, an olfactory sense of taste (wait, how do we get that to work without inhalation?), in order not only to process food, but to appreciate it too.
With which mouths would we kiss?
I’m genuinely curious as to how you could devolve the functions of eating and breathing, without loss of function or significant duplication of structures.
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### Author:  [@Bosda\_Di\_Chi\_of\_Tricor](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Bosda_Di_Chi_of_Tricor)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 10:29pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/27 "2008-03-26T22:29:49Z")
Bathrooms.
Full of slippery surfaces, frequently wet & underfoot.
Hard metal/tile/marble corners, often sharp(ish). Fall on your head, why don’t ya?Or mirrors.
Glass? No. Stainless steel? Yeah!
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### Author:  [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 10:32pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/28 "2008-03-26T22:32:18Z")
For people interested in debating the Dvorak keyboard, this [recent thread](http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=452852) in Comments on Cecil’s Columns may be of interest.
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 10:36pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/29 "2008-03-26T22:36:28Z")
[QUOTE=Bosda Di’Chi of Tricor]
Bathrooms.
Full of slippery surfaces, frequently wet & underfoot.
Hard metal/tile/marble corners, often sharp(ish). Fall on your head, why don’t ya?Or mirrors.
Glass? No. Stainless steel? Yeah!
[/QUOTE]
AKA, the [Dymaxion Bathroom.](http://www.bfi.org/node/548)
> [@](#):
>
> With the sections bolted together, the interior has no germ-harboring nooks, crannies, grout cracks or anything that can rot. Large-radius corners make germicidal swabbing easy and complete. Downdraft ventilation draws fumes and steam to the undersink vent. Both sink and (deep) bath-shower are arranged to ease the care of children and seniors. The mirror doesn’t steam up, the sink doesn’t splatter, and the toilet paper stays dry.
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### Author:  [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 10:37pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/30 "2008-03-26T22:37:44Z")
[QUOTE=Rysto]
IP – The current version of IP only allows for about 4 billion computers on the Internet(actually, significantly less than this but 4 billion is the absolute limit). This isn’t anywhere near enough.
[/QUOTE]
I don’t know for sure, but wasn’t the current numbering scheme chosen with efficiency in mind (less storage required for IP addresses, or to fit in a standard word size)?
For example, I would hope that computer character encodings would have been more originally designed to be more flexible, but I doubt that people working on the IBM System/360 would have said “let’s design a scheme to allow the use of up to 32-bits per character so that we can handle Chinese text” - not because they were necessarily opposed to Chinese, but because this would have been a costly waste of space or processing power.
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### Author:  [@Arnold\_Winkelried](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Arnold_Winkelried)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 10:42pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/31 "2008-03-26T22:42:08Z")
The OP made me think of one thing: DVD boxes. They are designed to be the size they are now so that they could fit in the storage space that was already in retail outlets to handle VHS cassettes. It would be more logical for the DVD storage box to be the same size as a CD storage box.
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### Author:  [@Harmonious\_Discord](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Harmonious_Discord)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 10:46pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/32 "2008-03-26T22:46:54Z")
Chips seem to have circuits multiply by two when they are made with a smaller die. 8 bits to a byte was tied directly to this when computer first became a personal item. Maybe a chip with 10 bits per byte would have been a better starting point. The Y2K bug wouldn’t have happened when it did. This would have affected addressing memory too. We might not have had to deal with octal and hexadecimal when programing.
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 10:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/33 "2008-03-26T22:48:38Z")
[QUOTE=Arnold Winkelried]
I don’t know for sure, but wasn’t the current numbering scheme chosen with efficiency in mind (less storage required for IP addresses, or to fit in a standard word size)?
[/QUOTE]
Actually, no. I heard a lecture (via podcast) of the guy who was responsible for the decision of what standard to go with (he now works for Google, BTW), and they were debating upon using what’s IP6 well before the internet was turned on. He said that it was a case of them needing an answer so that they could start running some tests, and he picked the current standard, figuring that before it got rolled out, they’d switch to the other if needed. He says that had he known they were going to just keep using the same standard all along, he never would have made the choice that he did.
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### Author:  [@Mops](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Mops)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 11:05pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/34 "2008-03-26T23:05:40Z")
Specifying UTF-8 as the standard character encoding from the start (in the beginning, when almost everybody thought ‘what would we need these foreign characters for’, only the range U+0000 to U+007F would have been used - no overhead involved as these are encoded in 1 byte, as they are in ASCII).
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### Author:  [@Renee](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Renee)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 11:14pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/35 "2008-03-26T23:14:53Z")
[QUOTE=elbows]
Kitchen taps/faucet sets, whatever you want to call them.
If I was to design them from scratch today I would recognize that peoples hands will be wet when they touch them (duh!) and make a catcher tray/drainer that would allow the water to run off into the sink.
So that every woman, in every household, repeatedly, every day, doesn’t have to wipe the water off the counter after shutting off the taps after doing the dishes.
Also, if I could redesign cars, the bumpers would, y’know, bump. Maybe a spring mechanism, or a rubbery material. I’m not an engineer, but if you’re going to call it bumper…
[/QUOTE]
You might be interested in a [tapmaster.](http://www.tapmaster.ca/) They’re very well-regarded over at the gardenweb kitchen forum.
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### Author:  [@Tuckerfan](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tuckerfan)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 11:22pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/36 "2008-03-26T23:22:58Z")
[QUOTE=Renee]
You might be interested in a [tapmaster.](http://www.tapmaster.ca/) They’re very well-regarded over at the gardenweb kitchen forum.
[/QUOTE]
I gotta say their website sucks ass. It doesn’t have an obvious “click here to see a photo” button. Instead everything gives you a flash movies or more things to click on.
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### Author:  [@GameHat](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GameHat)
#### Post date: [March 26, 2008, 11:48pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/37 "2008-03-26T23:48:46Z")
[The state boundaries of the United States!](http://www.tjc.com/38states/)
…I don’t exactly anticipate this could ever happen, but I do like the more natural redrawing of the US. Captures the “culture” much better of the areas in the US where I’ve lived, IMO.
Like I said, it’s not something that would ever actually happen but I think it’s interesting.
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### Author:  [@bucketybuck](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/bucketybuck)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2008, 12:02am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/38 "2008-03-27T00:02:36Z")
[QUOTE=Arnold Winkelried]
The OP made me think of one thing: DVD boxes. They are designed to be the size they are now so that they could fit in the storage space that was already in retail outlets to handle VHS cassettes. It would be more logical for the DVD storage box to be the same size as a CD storage box.
[/QUOTE]
Curious you should mention this, I just recently noticed that the Xtravision rental shops here in NI seem to be phasing in CD size DVD cases, with new releases in the smaller cases mixed in with existed standard size DVD cases.
Actually, I think the new cases may be smaller (as in flatter) than the old style CD cases, as I had some trouble actually identifing what films they were when stuck in the middle of the hundreds of other films. Didnt like them at all as I recall.
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### Author:  [@Tim\_T-Bonham.net](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Tim_T-Bonham.net)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2008, 12:22am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/39 "2008-03-27T00:22:56Z")
Biggest one I can think of would be standard AC power.
If we were designing it now, we would probably use something like the military 400Hz rather than 60Hz (North America) or 50Hz (Europe). This would provide many advantages in practice. Just the elimination of the 50-60Hz hum would be helpful.
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### Author:  [@GuanoLad](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/GuanoLad)
#### Post date: [March 27, 2008, 12:33am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/what-things-would-be-designed-differntly-if-they-had-to-be-made-from-scratch/442833/40 "2008-03-27T00:33:31Z")
I think the interior of a PC is something that, if they had considered what would actually be practical for future-proofing, they would not have made something so sharp and pointy and limiting and impractical for maintenance and upgrading.
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