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What went wrong with wireless USB

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Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#61

Post by stavros »

londons_explore wrote: post #14

Imo, at this point nobody should be designing any wireless protocol that doesn't support full IP networking. Sure, your Bluetooth headphones only 1:1 connect to your phone... But if they could connect directly to your WiFi router they could keep playing music when your phone goes out of range... Or you could connect them to two phones... Or you could connect them to your TV to get sound from that... Basically, IP net…

The main reason why I love Zigbee is that it doesn't support full IP networking. It's about broadcasting standard messages to all the devices, like a message queue, and that's fantastic for the use case.

No firewalls to worry about, no external access, nothing, just all my devices automatically communicating with all other devices.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#62

Post by otabdeveloper4 »

ahoef wrote: post #59
beezlewax wrote: post #52

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Needing to upload files to third party servers just to get them onto your personal computer doesn't solve the case. It just injects a middleman.

How does it not solve the problem? The data shows up on the other end. The fact that you don't agree with the implementation is a different thing, but it does solve the case.

> How does it not solve the problem?

It "solves" it but in a way that's ten times slower and fundamentally unreliable.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#64

Post by coderatlarge »

dtech wrote: post #44
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.

Imo cloud storage like Dropbox has 95% solved this use case for years, which is why alternative solutions haven't popped up.

Dropbox is unavailable to huge populations. also sharing private bits with a cloud service should not be necessary to transfer files locally between devices. at least user level file encryption should become straightforward on a mobile device which it is not today.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#65

Post by afiori »

kmarc wrote: post #56
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.

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

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#66

Post by consp »

kmarc wrote: post #56
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.

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. The amount of square wheels (for me I must add, ymmv) reinvented is astonishing.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#67

Post by m4rtink »

hnlmorg wrote: post #50
nurettin wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't see why Bluetooth took off and wusb didn't. It must have something to do with marketing.

Back when Bluetooth was new, the alternative for wirelessly sharing data between mobile devices like phones was infrared. IR was exceptionally slow, required line-of-sight and even at the time, felt like a shitty solution. So even though the early implementations of Bluetooth also left a lot to be desired (battery hungry, insecure, and also slow), it was still a massive improvement on what came before. Wireless USB w…

IR with palm devices was super nice - just point to the other device and send, then confirm on the other. No persistent pairing bullshit & you could also use it to control TVs.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#68

Post by gbear605 »

freehorse wrote: post #38
_Algernon_ wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Basically, IP networking still allows direct connections, but also allows far more possibilities.

> allows far more possibilities. >> attack surface, and give manufacturers access to way more information than I am comfortable with When your device is on your WiFi you cannot be completely sure what it does (unless you monitor the traffic).

As opposed to a USB device which requires you to install an opaque driver, which could also phone home? That’s hardly a win as far as security goes.

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#69

Post by tehbeard »

freehorse wrote: post #42
hmry wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The proprietary protocol can use absolute positions between device/dongle, and then the dongle can translate to relative positions at the edge, by returning the difference since the last poll

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 has the previous mouse coord and can make a fairly accurate correction once a packet gets thru (get's from A to D, but might skip points B+C).

Re: What went wrong with wireless USB

#70

Post by rakoo »

dist-epoch wrote: post #43
variaga wrote: post #10

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…

> 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.

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
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