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Comment Re: Add a 5 row slide out keyboard (Score 1) 45

There was tthe Astro Slide... I'm one of the lucky ones who actually got their device. Still using it, typing this post on it,, in fact. Unfortunately the company behind it are a clusterfuck so it only got one firmware update and they essentially ghosted Indiegogo backers after that. I'd like to get Lineage on it, but since there are proprietary Mediatek blobs involved I doubt it is going to be possible. So stuck with Android 11...

Comment Re:No BSOD but Linux PANIC (Score 4, Informative) 82

Linux has utilized - pretty much forever - all the available memory as cache/buffer, so you were bound to run into the problem much sooner.

The Win95/98/ME could run for long time without ever accessing particular physical memory chips.

Windows NT didn't have this problem, but on the other hand WinNT and successors also had better isolation so if a driver crashed due to memory issue, it recovered better (This applies really to WinNT 3.5 and perhaps 4, back when it was still going with the Dave Cutler's VMS-derived approach - WinNT 3.5 is almost a microkernel).

Comment How about getting rid of the first past the post? (Score 1) 110

The stupidest voting system for representational systems ever. Ok, it was the first - dating back to Magna Carta days - but why is it still being used today?

Pick almost anything else, and you get better results. My favorite would be Concordet, but any Single Transferrable Vote would probably work fine.

Comment What about clustering synchronization costs (Score 1) 21

As everyone is quick to point out, uploading data to cloud costs nothing. However, downloading it back out costs potentially lots. I have sometimes been involved in setting up communications between multiple cloud providers and key factor has always been to set up some sort of bandwidth limits to make sure some process does not attempt to download the entire storage bucket from another cloud service.

So how is this going to be billed, if it's now officially supported? Especially if I have a working service on AWS and decide that hey, I'll add redundancy via Google. I'll just add a node there and sync up all my data...oops, just spent the entire department budget on the initial sync from AWS to Google.

Comment Windows 10 ESUs work just fine (Score 3, Informative) 56

In the EU, you can just click "enroll" and boom, Windows 10 is supported yet another year with security updates, and no need to worry about AI getting in the way (that much). AFAIK elsewhere you need to enable the stupid cloud backups, but with some tricks you can avoid that too.

I'm still running Win 10 Education, I got the license from my university via Dreamspark back when it was a thing, and now I enrolled also for ESUs for that. I should be covered until 2028.

(Migrated to Linux on most of my PCs, but using Windows for gaming. After 2028 I guess I'll migrate to Steam Deck).

Comment Reused house coax wiring (Score 1) 108

Related on reusing coax cables...

The original builders of our house had coax in every room (I guess they wanted to watch TV a lot). No Ethernet. Fiber comes to house technical room, but from that point onwards no network cabling. Would have been a pain to deploy a new set of fiber or CAT6/7 cable everywhere, so mostly surviving with Wifi. However, for "trunk" connectivity I got a couple of these:

https://www.gocoax.com/ma2500d

I'm just using them for point-to-multipoint connectivity - had to get a new splitter. I got one next to my router where the fiber comes in and I get a pretty sweet throughput. Even though the bandwidth is "shared", it's actually close to 3 Gbps total across all endpoints. For point-to-point you get 2.5 Gbps because the Ethernet port only supports that.

Comment Re:My eyes, my control (Score 1) 72

I agree that full control is the ideal, but I also don't really get the appeal of 24 fps film effect. It seems more like a legacy limitation of the medium, than something that enhances the look. I like to see detail and enough clarity to understand what I'm looking at, and 24 fps on film seems to be the opposite of that.

Agree. We are running at hundreds of FPS in games. Should I suddenly have my GPU limit to 24 fps to create "cinematic" feeling for some weird reason?

When the Hobbit movies were shown with 48 fps in theaters I was thrilled, and was hoping that to be adopted further - but looks like it has fizzled. I sometimes understand that director might want to show things in technically inferior way - say black&white for flashbacks scenes - but that should be a specific effect for specific purpose. Keeping the 24 fps rate is just ridiculous. Granted, motion blur makes it better than it sounds, but just give me the choice.

Maybe this is just because I've been gaming with at least 60 fps for 30+ years, getting Quake I to run with 120 fps on a CRT was darn impressive at the time, and I had early interpolation on my TV with Philips NaturalMotion(tm) so I have never considered smooth motion as "soap opera" - it's just how things are supposed to be.

Comment Re:Fuck Smart TVs. (Score 1) 67

Grandma just wants to plug the thing in and watch.

Grandma either would have not cared that the UI sometimes freezes ("Oh, it's just one of these newfangled things"), would not have cared about the privacy implications of online requirement (so she would have gotten the update over Wifi anyway), or would have complained to the seller, and they would update the firmware using the USB stick method.

Comment Re:Fuck Smart TVs. (Score 1) 67

I've always taken issue with smart TVs and their probable accelerated obsolescence. The TV vendors are not motivated to maintain or update the software on old models, instead focusing solely on next years model.

Why would you care if you get a "Smart TV"? I have LG OLED, 5 years old or so. I have never installed any software on it. I have never connected it to the Internet. There were a few obvious bugs in the UI at the start, so I downloaded firmware update and updated via USB stick. Now those are gone, so why would I care about software support?

As long as the HDMI connectors and the screen works, what's the problem here?

The TV still needs to run OS (in LG's case, the WebOS, which is Linux-based - you can jailbreak it too if you want), so if some folks are running apps on top of that, fine by me. If you'd get the exact same TV without "Smart" features, meaning you couldn't install apps on it, it wouldn't be any different. Maybe slightly smaller flash storage for the firmware and apps because you wouldn't need apps.

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