You'll note that these things exist at the interface between cyberspace and meatspace. The boundary between the virtual and the physical.gilesgoat wrote:I think that "disks and networks" "DHCP" "printers not wasting papers" "real what you see is what you print" "filesystems that are really efficient" and "this thing still never has enough ram" are probably "unsolvable problems of HW/SW" I bet there must or should be some mathematical/logic proof that says "you will NEVER solve this problems in ANY system at ANY time"
The data might be digital, but disks - of the traditional not-solid-state variety, at least - involve actual physical moving parts. Things spinning up and spinning down. Motors. A read write head that has to move around and, thus, implicitly obey the laws of physics - so it can't just instantly change direction but has to decelerate itself to stop and then accelerate itself back up to speed in the other direction.
Because of this, file systems actually have to take into account the distances between things (where RAM basically doesn't, as all memory addresses can be thought of as essentially being "zero distance" away from each other). Seeking - actually moving that real physical moving part of the read write head - is the killer operation. If the data could be anywhere on the disk - randomly distributed - then the efficiency of a file system is basically, in effect, like trying to solve the Travelling Salesman problem on-the-fly.
Networks deal with the physical connections between devices. Physically joining up two separate instances of cyberspace. A portal between different dimensions, in a manner of speaking, that necessarily has to pass through the real world to cross over the physical boundaries.
Printers have moving parts. The ink, the paper which can jam, the print head that has to physically move back and forth.
You get the gist.
Inside cyberspace, there's one set of rules and inside meatspace, there's another set of rules (called "the laws of physics"). And at the interface between these different realms, that's when the shit starts hitting the fan.
It's like how the very small is ruled by quantum mechanics and the very big is ruled by general relativity, and the theory of how these two realms interface with each other? Umm, well, there isn't any. Fuck knows how they fit together exactly. They're bizarrely fundamentally incompatible with each other, despite us knowing that, individually, they're both demonstrably correct within their own respective realms.
Well, okay, it's not quite as extreme as that analogy - which really is a fundamental incompatibility problem inside reality itself - but hopefully you can get the gist of what I'm getting at there.
Inside the realm of cyberspace, everything is hunky dorey with itself and inside the realm of meatspace, everything is intrinsically compatible with itself. But, on the other hand, wherever the twain shall meet...
...yeah, that's where it all far too quickly turns to absolute shit and nothing ever quite works properly.
(So, by this logic, the other areas where you can expect to encounter such problems would also be in robotics - which, indeed, has more than enough problems trying to solve something that, in the physical realm, ought to be easy, like walking for a distance without falling over - and also with artificial intelligence - which has also had its issues of, well, not really going anywhere or coming up with any new theories for decades (modern AI progress has all really been about throwing more computing power at the problem, not fundamentally improving how we do it... well, except possibly for that machine which can play Go and beat humans, because that was a milestone for being a problem that can't simply be solved by throwing more and more computing power at it, as the problem is just too big to be ever pragmatically computable, and thus forces you to actually come up with a new ways of tackling the problem) - and, yes, leading to the point of this thread, VR / AR is also all about the interface between cyberspace and meatspace. In essence, it's trying to make cyberspace give off the impression that it's part of meatspace. It's all about bridging the two realms. So, indeed, expect things to go wrong and for there to be folks feeling dizzy and puking up as a result of it all. I'm as excited as everyone else for the prospect of it all, but this logic dictates that we probably need to be bracing ourselves for some new "doesn't quite work properly" problems ahead of us... although, as you're knee deep in this stuff already, giles, I'm probably preaching to the choir here, yes?)
Imagine listening to music whilst swooping about some VR graphics 
