161–170 of 219 posts
I 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…
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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 Most people (not the HN cohort) don't want to transfer "files", the abstraction of the file is either outdated for them or maybe even unnatural / unknown (younger generation).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…
> and barely any hierarchy of (folders etc). One of my great hate pet peeves with all smartphone and cloud apps is the "abstraction" and reliance on search. For me folders is quicker and less error prone, and as a bonus it saves on unneeded bandwidth (to load previews) and computing costs. Also stop telling me I must use your one off "feature set" of sorting and ordering which either nobody uses or copies differently…
Machine Learning is making this better, but ideally albums or folders wouldn't be such a pain in the ass to actually use in day-to-day life.
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There's no formal standard, but I keep seeing this complaint from people who just haven't installed syncthing. At this point it's not inexistence but mere ignorance
It's not only about your personal devices. Sometimes you want to exchange files between a friend phone's and your computer.
We were a bit late when we discovered wireless USB had been a thing. Still, we managed to find one pair of emitter and receiver that also transmitted HDMI, power the "receiver" side with a battery, in a backpack, and hook it up with another power bank to an Oculus DK1. Unexpectedly, battery time was never an issue. The WUSB chip in the receiver would overheat long before that and start throttling, leading to jittery…
Seems like you could spend a smidgen of that battery power on a fan, no?
But that just bought us a bit more run time without actually solving anything.
From what I’d gathered at the time, it was a common issue with products that relied on that specific chip, and I doubt most shared our use case.
I 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…
But today we can have wireless charge too, would that change things?
I 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…
But today we can have wireless charge too, would that change things?
Unfortunately, at the time there was only one phone that had wireless charging built in (Palm Pre). I know our sales and marketing did try to engage with them on getting wireless usb into "the next version" of the Pre, but nothing came of it. I don't know the details.
At this point wifi is ubiquitous enough that a new version of wireless usb would have a hard time competing with it though.
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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…
I most frequently use the latter, directory when I am talking files and filesystems.
Most people return that with "folder", and I am sure that has to with my learning about these things happening where "directory" was the norm.
I have been educating people about files when I bump into ones that do not know much. The abuses are real and growing. Nice comment.
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Yes, it will move the hot air, but typically the temperature of the chip is substantially higher than the ambient air inside the enclosure (be it a backpack or a laptop shell or anything else.) Furthermore, even if the backpack is 100% sealed, by raising its temperature you significantly increase the amount of heat that the backpack rejects. A quick Google says that the Oculus DK1 used ~3W, and you can easily find a…
Fans reduce sensible heat because humans have evaporative cooling. A backpack is pretty much a closed system and chips use convective cooling. Adding a fan won’t create a positivee pressure gradient between the backpack and outside world but will add 3 or more watts of heat to the closed system.
I'll make this very simple: The hot chip is warmer than the ambient air because the rate of heat transfer from the chip to the air is low. A fan will increase the rate of heat transfer, thus decreasing the temperature of the chip and increasing the temperature of the air in the backpack. It will also increase the rate of heat transfer from the backpack air to the backpack, which will increase the rate of heat transfer from the backpack to the environment.
Notably, the fan would help even if the backpack was a magic closed system (which it is not; put a 100W computer and a 1kWh battery into it, open ten hours later, and you will not have anywhere near 1kWh of heat.) But why would it help in a closed system? Because the chip does not care about the total energy in the system, the chip cares about the peak chip temperature. The chip will always be the hottest thing in the backpack, but the delta in temperature between the chip and the air can be quite large. Indeed, in practice, for "natural convection" (no fan), this dT between the chip and the air is considerable. When you add a fan ("forced convection") you shrink that dT substantially.
Earlier 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 want to add something to this: abandoning the fire layer allows for richer custom flows (which to many are arguably worse) For example the file API does not allow a clean, uniform, and reliable way to associate a resource with some metadata
Seems to me we very rapidly arrive at records or entities.
We see both these days in databases.
Entities show up in CAD and simulation. Records show up in business tools of various kinds.
All require a schema and serious dependencies flow from there.
In CAD, for example, the database schema can change quite dramatically from version to version of the same software tool. And all this makes writing plug in tools or anything really painful.
And forget exchanging native data between systems. STEP exists for that, and O God help you on a bigger project involving any old data
The thing about files is they are basically EASY.
And easy, when looking at where we are going, matters. A lot.
Files can exist on pretty much anything. Paper tape, mag tape, all sorts of media, up to advanced storage tech.
Databases are a different story.
I am not convinced we are anywhere rear being ready for that huge leap.
And I would normally say "forward" but on this?
Nope!
It would be a huge mess requiring we toss just about everything we have in use today