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Comment Re:How innovative! (Score 1) 143

The X41 had only a swiveling screen, pen and a couple of physical buttons on top. It did not come apart into two parts.

The two laptops serve different users. You could say that the X41 is primarily a laptop and a tablet secondarily, while the Helix is primarily a tablet and a laptop secondarily.
The tablet is easier to carry, and might therefore be preferable if you are going away/travelling and you don't think that you will be typing much. The X41 is when you do mostly traditional computing and you need tablet functionality only sparingly.

The X41 had a dock also, for desktop use. I would like to see a (vertical) desktop dock for the Helix tablet so that I can use it with a desktop screen and keyboard, and without having to connect the keyboard part first.

Comment Pills (Score 1) 31

Yet, practically all types of medicinal pills still contain nanoparticles of Titanium Dioxide, used only for colouring the pills white.
It is not like you have the option of choosing another brand that does not have nanoparticles. Often the prescribed medicine is the only one available with the active ingredient ... or all the brands contain TiO2.
TiO2 is also in many brands of sunscreen, but in this case it is much easier to choose another brand.

Comment Re:You're testing wrong (Score 1) 177

Precisely. I mentioned accounting for false positives, and batkiwi's algorithm does not do that. In a textbook example, you should have a delay on rising edge and "stickiness" on the falling edge, but sometimes you can take shortcuts.

I have studied several firmwares for actual computer keyboards, which all work as I described. You may want to trigger directly on the rising edge if you have another type of application where your scanning rate is quite low.

Comment Re:You're testing wrong (Score 1) 177

The scanning frequency is not that significant. The response time is more limited by something called "debouncing".

When a key switch is pressed, it does not actually change state from open to closed in a perfect way. Instead, it often "bounces" between open and closed states for a little while until it settles. Another issue is that short spurious positives may be caused by static electricity. Keyboard microcontrollers will therefore have to delay reporting each key press until it is sure that the key reports a steady state.
Debouncing is almost always implemented as a counter or a buffer with a delay - and that delay is fixed. The delay is chosen based on the characteristics of the particular keyboard switch.

By increasing the scanning rate, the microcontroller will only gather more samples for debouncing each key. As you increase the scanning rate, your response time will only approach the debouncing delay; It will never surpass it.

Comment Why do we still count the diagonal? (Score 3, Informative) 217

The diagonal means something different depending on which aspect the screen has. We have 16:9, 16:10, 3:2 (Chromebok pixel) and 4:3, and now 2.37:1 and the angle of the diagonal is different on all of them.
How about using a metric that does not change, such as .. maybe the height of the screen.
This "29 inch screen" is only as large on the vertical as a 23 inch diagonal 16:9 screen. Both are 11" high.

Comment Re:I'd consider a nano (Score 1) 82

The current 7th gen iPod Nano that came last year is too big to use as a watch.
Lots of people are using the 6th gen iPod Nano as a watch, but it doesn't have any features that a true "smartwatch" should have and you can't install apps on it.

Personally, I think that a smartwatch should be designed as a "dumb" terminal to a smartphone, although maybe with an interactive display so that you could move between pages of notifications/time/calendar from different apps.
In other words, it should be an accessory to the phone. You should only need to install apps on the phone and those apps would push data to the watch whenever there is an update.
Such a smartwatch would have a low-power screen and would sleep most of the time to conserve battery. The iPod Nano can't do that.

Comment Bathroom breaks (Score 1) 924

I don't understand people who want to gulp down gallons of soda while they watch movies.
Your bladder gets full and you have to either sit there for two hours in discomfort or scuffle out to get to the bathroom to relieve yourself having inconvenienced half the row on your way out.

If I want to eat candy at the movies, I bring my own. The selection is not always that good at the theatre, and the prices are horrible.

Comment Re:No updates in 6 years? (Score 3, Informative) 197

Actually, FLAC is technically similar to MP3 in a sense.
It consists of an inherently lossy encoding in the frequency domain (like MP3) plus an encoding of the difference between the lossily encoded audio and the original. The first part is a bit more straightforward than MP3 because it does not do any tricks adapted to the human ear.

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