Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

What went wrong with wireless USB

oldvcr.blogspot.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

171–180 of 219 posts

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#171

Post by ddingus »

numpad0 wrote: post #74
dist-epoch wrote: post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> which makes the value proposition a lot less clear. Wirelessly transferring files between a phone and a computer seems like a big use case. Still no easy standard way of doing it.

Bluetooth FTP was widely supported until ~2009. All Nokia phones and many flip phones had it. iPhone did not, AOSP technically did, but carrier phones often had it disabled, and it slowly disappeared. Windows 11 still supports it, I think macOS too. Pairing is technically optional.

It does and I managed it recently. It was painful.

I had to pair, or at least I think I did. Was fetching a file. off a flip phone. Doing these things without "file" gets weird quick.

I also seem to recall an awesome Bluetooth control panel applet I used a few times in Windows XP.

At the time I had a pretty spiffy Moto flip phone. It could be the computer keyboard, handle audio play and record and more.

Pretty sure that all came from the phone driver. I do recall also using the computer in reverse the same way when the display was badly damaged. I could make phone calls, dialing with the computer and in general use the phone taped to the back of my laptop screen.

Today, it is simpler, and far less robust.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#172

Post by ddingus »

owenversteeg wrote: post #169
brudgers wrote: post #156

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Did you even read my comment? I have designed cooling systems professionally and I can assure you that is how things work :) Not trying to be rude, but your comment is incorrect in several ways. 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…

Thank you. I learned something fundamental from your comment that I did not know prior. Well, maybe I did, but how I think about it makes it harder to reason about.

Whatever, it is easier to see for me now. Lol

Seeing the benefit of the fan in terms of increased heat transfer to everything the air touches is easy. Full stop.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#173

Post by giantrobot »

ndriscoll wrote: post #126
philistine wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 playlist…

> Your player scans your library and indexes/sorts it however you'd like.

Which means the concepts of files and folders becomes immaterial. If a music player is only interfacing with a database of music metadata it doesn't matter how the bytes on disk are organized.

There's a reason there's been 30+ years of file systems trying to tack on database functionality (BeFS, WinFS, etc) or over the top metadata indexing (Spotlight, Lucene, etc) to file systems. The files and folders abstraction is not sufficient for non-technical users in many cases.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#175

Post by terribleperson »

thaumasiotes wrote: post #93
phire wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wireless headset was the killer app [for Bluetooth] in its early days But the wireless headset is now a horrifying millstone making Bluetooth look like the world's stupidest trash fire. If you enable your microphone, you lose all audio from anything that doesn't want to use the microphone as the headset switches into "headset" mode and drops anything that wants to use "headphones" mode. There is no reason for t…

My partner's hearing aid connects (via some radio protocol) to a device that then connects via bluetooth. Unfortunately, it presents itself as a headset, which causes... problems. For Android, they have to use an app from the play store that presents itself as an audio device and then sends that to the 'headset'.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#176

Post by owenversteeg »

ddingus wrote: post #172
owenversteeg wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Did you even read my comment? I have designed cooling systems professionally and I can assure you that is how things work :) Not trying to be rude, but your comment is incorrect in several ways. 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…

Thank you. I learned something fundamental from your comment that I did not know prior. Well, maybe I did, but how I think about it makes it harder to reason about. Whatever, it is easier to see for me now. Lol Seeing the benefit of the fan in terms of increased heat transfer to everything the air touches is easy. Full stop.

You're very welcome!

Heat is a fascinating thing. I can really recommend trying to visualize it and "playing around" with it in your daily life to get a stronger intuition for things. Pay attention to the thermal conductivity of the things around you and how that "feels": aluminum or copper extremely high, other metals high, plastics and woods low, fabrics and foams very low. Notice how evaporating water is very powerful at cooling things down, and how condensing water can warm things up. Notice how a small hot object cools slowly but a larger one can reject the same amount of heat very fast. Inspect the back of your fridge, or the inside of an A/C, and understand what's going on and where the energy is.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#177

Post by ddingus »

owenversteeg wrote: post #176
ddingus wrote: post #172

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thank you. I learned something fundamental from your comment that I did not know prior. Well, maybe I did, but how I think about it makes it harder to reason about. Whatever, it is easier to see for me now. Lol Seeing the benefit of the fan in terms of increased heat transfer to everything the air touches is easy. Full stop.

You're very welcome! Heat is a fascinating thing. I can really recommend trying to visualize it and "playing around" with it in your daily life to get a stronger intuition for things. Pay attention to the thermal conductivity of the things around you and how that "feels": aluminum or copper extremely high, other metals high, plastics and woods low, fabrics and foams very low. Notice how evaporating water is very powe…

Well, your comment is timely. I am part of a project about to embark on some highly specialized thermal simulation.

I will be doing exactly what you suggested to me here.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#178

Post by frollogaston »

freehorse wrote: post #23
Findecanor wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Bluetooth mice use the HID protocol borrowed from USB, except with Bluetooth as carrier. But HID had not been designed for the possibility that packets could get lost: it sends movements as a relative vector since the previous packet. I don't know how Logi Bolt works, but Logitech has claimed that it should work better than BLE when the 2.4 GHz band is congested. Also that it would have better security than BLE.

> But HID had not been designed for the possibility that packets could get lost Doesn't the same problem exist for USB dongles with proprietary RF protocols? Logi Bolt is a good solution. But ime most other USB dongles are terrible. I have had a lot of bad connection issues with such USB dongles, and never with similar bluetooth devices. USB dongles also use the same 2.4GHz band, and even more they are prone to inter…

In all the years I've used wireless dongled mice, I've never had an issue. And all my stuff is bottom of the barrel unbranded from eBay or Amazon.

Bluetooth mice and keyboards always have trouble pairing, or there's input lag, or sometimes I can't use them to wake the computer. And if you ever want to hold a startup key...

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#179

Post by frollogaston »

brudgers wrote: post #146
freehorse wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

The dongles are common because they predate widespread availability of bluetooth equipped laptops and desktops by about a decade…00’s versus 10’s. Dongles are also plug and play (no pairing dance) and more readily support multiple devices on the same computer. Bluetooth has gotten better over the years but it doesn’t provide a meaningfully better alternative for the it-aint-broke consumer mouse market.

I bought a new mouse recently and intentionally got a dongle one, not that it was hard to find. It's just better.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#180

Post by redeeman »

brudgers wrote: post #142
thaumasiotes wrote: post #93

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the wireless headset was the killer app [for Bluetooth] in its early days But the wireless headset is now a horrifying millstone making Bluetooth look like the world's stupidest trash fire. If you enable your microphone, you lose all audio from anything that doesn't want to use the microphone as the headset switches into "headset" mode and drops anything that wants to use "headphones" mode. There is no reason for t…

It is happening because it works the way that is most useful to most people. The number of people who want to use bluetooth earbuds with a different microphone is line noise in the consumer market. Implementing special requirements is always inconvenient for users because no B2C wants to risk bad the-microphone-didn’t-work reviews, customer returns, and support tickets. Nevermind coordinating with arbitrary USB micro…

it happens because bluetooth profile for audio+microphone uses different codecs and has less bandwidth, due to being used for realtime communication.

the bluetooth audio streaming profile enables more codecs, but only playback, and allows significantly higher latency that you wouldnt accept on a call

Post reply on HN