101–110 of 111 posts
What happened to ROM cartridges?
The upside of course is that your original DS cartridge might never go bad, even if you lose it under the sofa for 30 years.
This is not true of modern switch cartridges.
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The SD and micro SD form factors are not the most robust or reliable. It would be nice to have a next step up form factor. In some ways, that's the motivation for CF Express Type B (and XQD before it), as popularized in digital photography.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/CFexpress Interesting, I didn't knew about this format. Curious picture selection on the Wikipedia, I didn't knew about this manufacturer until reading the Ars article above.
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There is a near-infinite variety of phones. People claim that they want them but really they don't. I know this because I used to try to help. I used to think that, for whatever reason, people just didn't know about all of the options out there. I was wrong. "I want a smaller phone" here's a smaller phone "yeah but I don't like that one". "I want a thicker phone with a huge battery" here's a thicker phone with a huge…
There used to be phones with a secondary display, full QWERTY keyboard, wireless split remote, whole Windows computer in the back, a completely square display, two displays of which one rotate, a plug-in dual display cover, dual SIM slot, a miniature video projector, fingerprint sensor in the back, TV tuner, FM radio, sleep-swappable battery, IP68 rating, laser barcode scanner, 1" equivalent image sensor, 42MP image…
Here's a phone with "a completely square display": https://www.walmart.com/ip/Rotatable-Phone-i19-Pro-Mini-Fold...
It even rotates but only the one screen.
I even found a phone with integrated barcode scanner, the UNIWA V9S.
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Try a Sony Xperia! Vote with your dollar or else they'll stop making them!
Xperia 5 IV owner here, don't give Sony any of your money. Their support is garbage: 1 Android version and only 3 years of security updates for a phone that cost nearly $1000. Google and Samsung offer 5+ years on their flagship phones. The cameras are held back by incompetent software; the camera app does not even rotate for a left handed mode (they only need to rotate text and icons). Their camera app behaves like a…
Most of the frustrations can be resolved by liberal use of third-party apps from F-Droid. Lawnchair and the Fossify suite make the basic experience quite reasonable, because the system UI components are thankfully not too heavily modified, only the system apps. With apps such as DAVx⁵ and Fennec it's really very useable.
Unfortunately the locked bootloader (which is completely illegal of course) is a big frustration and the main reason why you can't get custom ROMs running on it. I don't think it's about market share; some less popular brands have better community support because their manufacturers don't build artificial barriers to modifications. For security, this puts Sony's phones right down in my estimation and I too would not recommend them for this reason alone.
We already have this though. SD Express, which allows SD cards to actually protocol switch to one lane PCI-E NVME. It's been part of the spec officially since 2018, and an enhancement slightly later to add more pins to allow a second lane. And since, underneath, it becomes a standard PCI-E NVME with standard lanes, there is no inherent speed limit from the bus itself, only from the fact that SD cards are tiny and any…
Yet I don’t trust any SD*. They always seem to corrupt, and I feel like the connector is not reliable enough. I’d rather not have such a thing directly connected to the bus
Same applies to SSD drives, there are consumer drives that have colorful boxes with claims like speed or size, and there are specialized SSD drives based on MLC chips that are still available here and there
We already have this though. SD Express, which allows SD cards to actually protocol switch to one lane PCI-E NVME. It's been part of the spec officially since 2018, and an enhancement slightly later to add more pins to allow a second lane. And since, underneath, it becomes a standard PCI-E NVME with standard lanes, there is no inherent speed limit from the bus itself, only from the fact that SD cards are tiny and any…
One time where I "express" suffix makes something better, TIL
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You bought a first gen product by a company that has never had an actual hardware design division, and you're complaining that it isn't perfect? Also, how is the SD Card limitation on the Deck consumer hostile? The Steam Deck is an AMD platform PC. PCs typically do not even have SD card slots, and when they do, they are generic controllers plugged into the USB port. To do SD Express, it requires a more expensive cont…
> You bought a first gen product by a company that has never had an actual hardware design division They've released hardware before.
The controller was kinda cool, I didn't get one with mine, but making a controller is an entirely different set of skills than making a computer.
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You bought a first gen product by a company that has never had an actual hardware design division, and you're complaining that it isn't perfect? Also, how is the SD Card limitation on the Deck consumer hostile? The Steam Deck is an AMD platform PC. PCs typically do not even have SD card slots, and when they do, they are generic controllers plugged into the USB port. To do SD Express, it requires a more expensive cont…
Vale has release several hardware products, many successful as well as being the brains behind the Vive. Its not like Apple or other popular companies are any better in this regard.
And yes, Apple design is kind of shit, but in a consumer hostile sort of way, not in an incompetence kind of way.
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> I guess it's a problem of incentives. The developer of the game doesn't pay when the game is larger, I do. This is everywhere in computing but there's a better reason for it than you're giving. It's a cheaper/easier for companies to develop "bloated" software that runs on more powerful hardware. That includes uncompressed textures/sound (because why bother finding a codec or fine tuning quality tradeoff when you ca…
> A game like Stardew Valley, for instance, probably doesn't exist. I've put a ton of hours into that game and I think it's excellent but, not to cast any shade, the game isn't exactly a masterclass in efficiency. It's only slightly more advanced than a SNES game but it consumes many many time more resources. Stardew Valley is a great example of why storage does not follow the same logic of "fewer constraints lowers…
I don't think SV would have been made by ConcernedApe if he only had a SNES sdk. I believe he used XNA, at least initially. All that framework adds weight but it made SV possible. The tradeoff is 600 megabytes vs 48 megabits.
I'll take SV any day of the week.