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    1. RollinLower

      RollinLower

      so is this appropriate or ironic?

    2. da na

      da na

      Just now, RollinLower said:

      so is this appropriate or ironic?

      Appropriately ironic, I'd say

  1. Start by doing just that (hitting normal quote which then opens the editor for a new post) and then simply cut that quote box and paste it into the post you're editing.
  2. I recently had an idea for what some might call a smart watch, but significantly more restrained than the phone-on-your-wrist that most try to be.

    • No android or ios or any other big system, just a very simple firmware.
    • It would have an e-ink display and show just time, weather, and a notification counter.
    • It would be solar powered so hopefully no need to ever charge it "manually".
    • Because of this simplicity it would be a more agreeable form factor than some of the thicker options out there currently, not to mention quite a bit cheaper
    • It would use one of the various low power communication systems available for devices like this rather than bluetooth.  I realize that phones generally not having such a thing built in would be a problem in practice but I'm just brainstorming here :P

    I believe the purpose of a watch, smart or traditional, is to provide access to basic, commonly used information as quickly and effortlessly as possible.  You could simply check your phone directly, but perhaps saving those few seconds is a convenience worth having.  I think too many of them try to do too much however, and lure you into trying things like reading, typing, etc. that because they are so awkward on such a tiny device, end up taking longer than it would to just use your phone for in the first place, and this is what I've attempted to eliminate here.  By doing so, it frees up resources that can improve the device in other ways, such as size, cost, and battery life.

     

    What do you think?  Would there be any market for such a thing?  Does such a thing perhaps already exist unbeknownst to me?  I feel like it would actually do well, provided that hitch about communication with the phone could be resolved.

    1.   Show previous replies  1 more
    2. Curufinwe_wins

      Curufinwe_wins

      These devices did/do exist. Garmin has a solar smartwatch that is only slightly stripped down for 56 day rated batterylife, with a lower power mode that is "unlimited", likewise some early devices went that way instead. 

       I don't actually think it's all that popular of an option, but certainly there is a niche for it.

       

      https://buy.garmin.com/en-US/US/p/679335

    3. vanished

      vanished

      Ah well, that was sounding good up until I saw the price lol that may be why it's not popular

    4. Curufinwe_wins

      Curufinwe_wins

      Yeah, a company called matrix has even less functional watches with endless battery life supposedly, but they are even more expensive (500-800 dollars), and pretty laggy.

  3. Either I'm missing something big here or this has been blown totally out of proportion. If an attacker is able to run commands on your PC like this to make your PC download something they want you do have, you're already infected/compromised, so that feels like a catch 22. Moreover, the ability to download a file with the command line doesn't seem unusual to me... have they not heard of wget?
  4. Hmm ok yeah that's what I was thinking that if such a thing exists, it would have to be a stand-alone unit. That is what I am ideally after anyway as there is some benefit to that - can use it on any display anywhere without needing a powerful PC, and should be simple as plug and play. Based on other replies and this, it sounds like sadly it's not really a thing though commercially.
  5. In theory yes, I'm very much of that mentality myself as well, although I've yet to find software that will do what I'm looking for. I know it's possible for videos, either live or as a "re-render and save" sort of thing, but what about general purpose that would act on anything and everything on screen, including (for example) games?
  6. Very true, but something like "1080p" is instantly recognizable as a resolution since (at least as far as what's coming to mind at the moment) nothing else is really stated that way. The number "1080" alone on its own like that however is far less clear. Plus, it's not really so much effort to add it.
  7. Congratulations!  You just found a cubic meter of solid gold!  You are now a billionaire and thus more wealthy than 99.997% of the world's population, and well on your way to matching the first percent of Jeff Bezos' net worth.  Keep it up!

    1.   Show previous replies  3 more
    2. PCGuy_5960

      PCGuy_5960

      Still fake news, no billion dimmadollars.

    3. Jumper118
    4. Jumper118

      Jumper118

      i need to buy a fork lift truck first to move the damn thing, and a massive vault with armed guards 

  8. vanished

    Mixer replacement

    Nice, glad to hear it
  9. The rule of thumb I often hear quoted is that emulation requires the underlying hardware to be 10 to 100x more powerful than the system it's emulating. Of course this is a broad generalization but it is true that there is quite a significant loss of efficiency. Couple that with the fact that the Raspberry Pi CPU is, although a quad core, probably somewhat similar in raw performance to what a lot of machines would have actually ran on back in XP's hay day, and I don't think it would be capable of providing a good experience even if such an emulator did exist.
  10. I guess I should clarify, I don't mean an old-school sledgehammer full page reload like hitting the browser button, I mean like how it dynamically adds new replies with you click "show reply", just instead of showing new ones, it would update the existing ones (but as I said, with the added convenience of it just happening rather than prompting you with a link at all).
  11. Now if they'd just make this the normal price for everyone AMD would be back in some seriously hot water
  12. Better yet, if it could just automatically refresh without even having to mention or ask, but I suspect that can't be done. Well, with that said I suspect this can't be done anyway but I hope it can, it would make a lot of sense. As for the notifications, if possible it would be good not to get them as I agree that would be excessive. Just a note for when you're actively viewing the page.
  13. Regarding a HDD, in theory, if you had a folder full of many tiny files, and the partition was properly defragmented, they would all be stored contiguously, would they not?  And as such, if you were to copy or move the entire folder, despite the fact that technically it contains many tiny files and would thus normally be subject to the terrible random IO performance of HDDs, you could theoretically instead read the entire block of data that represents the contents of the folder sequentially for a massive performance improvement, could you not?  If anyone knows better I'd like to hear why this wouldn't be the case, or if it's correct, why such an optimization hasn't been created by now.

    1.   Show previous replies  2 more
    2. Sauron

      Sauron

      Quote

      Regardless, wouldn't it make sense to try to keep all files within a folder together?

      I could be wrong but as far as I know defragmenting utilities don't do this because it takes longer for arguably no reason. Reading all files in a given folder contiguously isn't a very realistic scenario (if you're doing that often they should probably be a single file or in an archive). Moving all files to be contiguous among each other on the drive would take a lot of time since you may have to copy every single file (plus you may have to sort them to respect folder structure) and it would place a lot of unneeded stress on the platters and heads.

    3. TopHatProductions115

      TopHatProductions115

      Wouldn't this be considered an FS-level HDD optimisation? 

    4. vanished

      vanished

      Perhaps, but I could imagine it being done on the HDD firmware level, or even the OS itself as well.  Perhaps it was naïve of me to think folders would be structured like this and thus that it should be common and easy to benefit from it, I can see that now.  With that said though, I think such an optimization would be nice.  Perhaps the opportunity to use it wouldn't come up often, and perhaps it would only end up applying on a large scale, or by chance on files that seemed to be unrelated, but when and if it could be done it would certainly help.

  14. I feel like there is an (undeserved) perception of titanium as this super metal that can do anything and is better than anything else.  In reality, steel can be as good or better in terms of both hardness and outright strength.  What makes titanium special (among other things) is just that it can be as strong as it is while weighing much less than comparable steels.  Much like aluminium then, it's stronger per mass but weaker (or at least similar) on an absolute scale.

    1. Curufinwe_wins

      Curufinwe_wins

      Yes and no... it is both underrated and overrated... 

       

      To give example... along the right axis, pine wood exhibits a higher specific strength than basically every single metal in existence (except for beta titanium alloys). Balsa wood can have twice the specific strength of the strongest metal alloys around.

       

      But titanium has much better temperature resistances than most steels or inconels (obviously superior to aluminium) and far better dimensional stability, while also being more workable/formable than high chrome iron/nickel alloys... better volumetric strength than any aluminum or magnesium alloy and among the best of conventional alloys (some high entropy alloys challenge things)....

       

      Point is... yes for normal people doing normal things it's overrated, but at the same point there is a reason it's used so incredibly much in the harshest/tightest environments where margins are the smallest to failure.

    2. Curufinwe_wins

      Curufinwe_wins

      Oh and hardness is a pretty damn overrated spec, since ceramics exist.

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