To the aithor : careful, on one picture at least you blacked out the human-readable PIN of a device, but forgot to black out the corresponding barcode right below
What went wrong with wireless USB
121–130 of 219 posts
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#122Earlier quoted context omitted.
Bluetooth is bad enough that wireless mice/keyboards usually have a USB dongle receiving what I guess is a proprietary RF protocol. Some wireless headphones have that too. And wifi requires too much power.
I don't know why USB dongles are popular for manufacturers (I assume to make their product more plug-and-play friendly), but I don't think they are a better solution than bluetooth. For example, it is common that if another USB device is plugged close to a USB dongle, it can cause interference to it, which results to unstable connection and eg makes a mouse "jump", keystrokes not register etc. Finding the right place…
Some things are difficult to do with a Bluetooth keyboard: you cannot do anything before the OS is booted, such as changing BIOS settings, installing an OS, or choosing a GRUB boot entry. There are workarounds (buying a Bluetooth adapter that can act as a HID proxy) but for me this is enough of a reason to not want to rely on Bluetooth.
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#123Earlier quoted context omitted.
scp works well for me.
That requires having an account on the other machine. What's missing is anonymous scp, where the other side just opens up a directory, and you can copy into it. One can build something like this with rsyncd, but it's not a pretty shell one-liner to get it going and it still requires both devices to be on the same network.
What I responded to was "wirelessly transferring files between a phone and a computer", assuming that I am the user at both ends of the transfer.
If I want to share something with someone else, there's a "File Sharing" section in phone's settings that enables anonymous WebDAV sharing, and it works fine too. There's Bluetooth OBEX too, but that one's fiddly.
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#124Earlier quoted context omitted.
I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.
Bluetooth had some early success in cellphones, mostly to support Bluetooth headsets and car radio integration, starting from about 1999. It could do other things, but the wireless headset was the killer app in its early days. Bluetooth didn’t really hit mainstream until the arrival of chipsets that multiplexed Bluetooth and WiFi on the same radio+antenna. My memory is that happened sometime around 2007-2010. At that…
The ironic thing is the Bluetooth ignored it's audio use as much as possible for as long as possible. They wanted it to be used for tracking shoppers in stores...
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#125Earlier quoted context omitted.
Folders as an abstraction don't really make sense beyond documents, though. If your music is stored in a folder hierarchy, and can, in principle, be located anywhere, how do you index it to provide a library view? How do you distinguish it from random audio files that just happen to be ID3 tagged, but which you don't want as part of your permanent music collection? How do you efficiently react to deletion events? Wha…
You index it with btrees just like everything else. You distinguish it by configuring which folders to watch. You react to events with inotify. You don't give your music app write permission to your library. It only needs to write its indexes and playlists. All of your other questions become irrelevant; you delete the files you mean to delete with your file manager. In practice, music is small and storage is cheap, s…
What if I want to look at a list of composers, but the folder structure is by artist?
What about playlists?
The limitation of the folder is that there’s only one.
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#126Earlier quoted context omitted.
You index it with btrees just like everything else. You distinguish it by configuring which folders to watch. You react to events with inotify. You don't give your music app write permission to your library. It only needs to write its indexes and playlists. All of your other questions become irrelevant; you delete the files you mean to delete with your file manager. In practice, music is small and storage is cheap, s…
What if I want to look at a list of composers, but the folder structure is by artist? What about playlists? The limitation of the folder is that there’s only one.
Your player scans your library and indexes/sorts it however you'd like. I think this is how basically every player with a library function works? Like jellyfin loads my library in the same structure I've had it for 20 years, and it gives me various ways to view by name, artist, release date, rating, etc. and builds search indexes. I just point it to the roots of my libraries.
I said it needs a place to write playlists (or write access to your playlist folder(s)).
I wouldn't do it this way, but there can be more than one folder containing the same file (hardlinks).
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#127Earlier quoted context omitted.
Is position estimation from the signal that accurate for that?
They don't mean the absolute real distance between dongle and mouse. They mean the mouse communicates an absolute position (relative to some arbitrary 0,0 the mouse decides upon) instead of a relative direction. Dongle can then take latest coord packet and diff it against previous coord packet to get a relative coord to pass via HID to the system. If the RF packets are lost, some latency occurs but the dongle still h…
What happens with that "absolute position relative to some arbitrary 0,0 picked by the mouse" when the user picks the mouse up off the table/pad/etc. and repositions it (i.e., they hit the edge of the pad and now "re-center" to continue moving left (or right) on screen). The mouse loses its 0,0 point reference as soon as it is picked up.
It could send a "reset 0,0" packet of some form in this case, but now reception of that packet becomes critical to continuing to properly communicate motion to the attached computer.
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#128Earlier quoted context omitted.
Yep! It would be a marginal. Improvement at a huge increase in complexity Adjacent intention on the same action that leads to a connected computer, eg. I put my laptop on my friend table for storage, and it connects against my intention.
Totally. Many accessories nowadays require bluetooth/wifi where actually they could be connected with a cable: they don't move and they need to be charged. Connecting over a cable is trivial: you detect the connection and that's it, and the user physically sees the connection between the devices. Connecting over radio requires pairing, that is very frustrating when it doesn't work. Pairing is annoying so devices try…
> Connecting over radio requires pairing, that is very frustrating when it doesn't work.
Everything's frustrating when it doesn't work.
> Connecting over radio requires pairing
This is a solved problem, plagued by technology fragmentation. You could very well save the necessary information for discovery and pairing onto an NFC tag and use that to access the network (further authentication might happen, if configured).
This is basically never done on WiFi because you cannot assume a client host has a NFC reader (let alone proper code handling the tag and the information).
But it's done in the world of bluetooth: some big-name headsets (Sony IIRC) can do bluetooth connection negotiation via NFC. You activate the feature (dedicated button), tap your phone and off you go. No pin, no pairing annoyances.
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#129I worked on the design of wireless USB chips around 2008 - 2010. They worked - you really could get USB 2.0 full rate connections wirelessly and we had some neat demos. I would say the major problem it had with adoption was that wired USB also provided power . (A lot more people use usb to charge their phone than to sync their phone.) So great - wireless connectivity... but you still have to plug the device into a ca…
I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.
My guess is just that Bluetooth and Wi-Fi came first, and when wireless USB entered the party, there wasn't a real need for it, as most of its use cases were already covered by Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.
It maybe could have worked with better marketing, but convincing potential customers to change something that works (somewhat, BT wasn't without issues) is hard. That's why we are keeping abominations like cigarette lighter sockets in cars even though they often can't even light cigarettes anymore. It is already well established and it works well enough as a power outlet.
Re: What went wrong with wireless USB
#130Earlier quoted context omitted.
I assume this is the same "problem". Most people (not the HN cohort) don't want to transfer "files", the abstraction of the file is either outdated for them or maybe even unnatural / unknown (younger generation). They might want to transfer (a better word: share) photos/videos, documents, etc. And for those they use specific apps and "the cloud". No "files" (for the sake of files), and barely any hierarchy of (folder…
I think I disagree with that. This "people don't want files, they want to share photos", to me, is what product people want to believe. The whole thing has been enforced on users and is self-reinforcing: of course if you don't show files to users, they will not know what a file is. Sure, I may be in a photo gallery and I may want to share a few photos with a friend who may want those photos to be treated as photos (i…
> is what product people want to believe
It's quite clear what you never had to explain why 'only looking at a pictures/photos on the Internet' wasted the mobile traffic.