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xn--cr8h

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Everything posted by xn--cr8h

  1. I think there's a huge functional difference between this approach and a dongle. You have to constantly plug in and unplug dongles, since you can't just stick a laptop into a bag with dongles sticking out of it. The modular approach not only lets you choose exactly *where* you want your ports, but reduces wear on the internal ports since ports can often break with repeated insertions. When a port breaks, a replacement is only a couple dollars and can be done comfortably by literally anyone -- you don't have to touch a screwdriver or see a single circuit board. It's a really smart design IMO -- it just depends on the company staying in business long enough to sell replacement ports through the whole lifespan of the laptop. Even so, the fact that these module designs are open source and based around a single USB port gives me a bit more confidence. Maybe providing a mixture of USB ports would have been more useful for some but it seems like these days "a mixture of USB ports" means something like two USB-C and maybe one USB-A, which doesn't really cut it for me and other people who still use a bunch of USB-A devices
  2. Main reason for me (over OSX) is the window management. I can't imagine trying to get any real work done on OSX. If I want to switch to a specific window I can just select it from the taskbar, whereas on OSX it's much harder to find the window you want -- you have to hunt through context menus and there aren't any window previews to help. Not to mention that OSX still doesn't have a functional "maximize" button. I normally have at least 10-15 windows open on my Windows system, whereas in my experience the whole Mac experience falls apart after about 2 or 3 windows. I did use various Linuxes for a while but ultimately switched back to Windows for a couple reasons: Program support -- many programs I wanted to use are only available on Windows, and WINE only works some of the time. Font rendering -- might sound petty but whenever I booted into Windows, my eyes would just relax. You have to choose between a stable distro that always has horribly outdated programs, or an unstable (rolling release) distro where you can get updates immediately but if you update things out of order it can break your entire system. Windows's package management is a pain in its own way (as in, it doesn't exist) but being able to have the latest versions of programs without having to worry about breaking your system is pretty great. Little things like little graphical glitches, screen tearing when scrolling through web browsers, random freezing, some things working better in X while others work better in Wayland, etc I felt like I had to do a lot of heavy customization to get everything to work the way I wanted it to, whereas the way things work out of the box on Windows generally works well for me. Maybe it's just that I've been using Windows forever (since XP) so I'm used to it. Here are some other little things I really appreciate about Windows: File Explorer. I haven't been able to find a file management program anywhere else, on any other platform, that's even half as good. Compatibility: I still find it amazing that I can take a program written in 1997, double-click it, and it will just work. I appreciate how Windows programs are starting to ditch the old, clunky File/Edit/View menu system in favour of systems that make it easier to find what you're looking for. OSX has the File/Edit/View menus kinda baked into the UI so pretty much every program uses them, which means if you want to look for something you need to hunt through every single menu like it's 2009. That's not to say that no Windows programs have File/Edit/View menus anymore (many do) but it's a lot easier for programs to switch to a better system, and many of them are (i.e. Microsoft Office and Fusion 360). GTK3 programs on Linux are also moving in the right direction.
  3. I'm a bit confused about this. Unless OSX has changed drastically since I last used it, I've used almost no OSX programs with tabs aside from Safari?
  4. I still use old Edge, despite its many missing features, because it's noticeably faster than the competition. No other browser can have 200+ tabs open, perfectly responsive and with the fan inaudible, and close them all in a split second. I'm not sure what I'll do when it dies. Going back to Firefox seems like a step backwards because it's become painfully sluggish over the years. Chrome... just doesn't really feel right, and hasn't since it first came out. It doesn't feel native, the scrolling physics and font rendering are awful, and it's not much better than Firefox in terms of performance. I guess I'll have to see if Microsoft improves it enough.
  5. Still going strong with my Nexus 4 on Android Pie with the April security update. Ask any iPhone 5 user how they're doing... especially since so many iPhone apps have dropped support for 32-bit devices...
  6. Might be interesting to take a look at some of those Chinese modded ThinkPad boards. Getting ahold of one of them might be a pain, but here's someone who managed to get his hands on one: https://geoff.greer.fm/2019/03/04/thinkpad-x210/
  7. GeForce Now runs on anything. It worked fine on my old Sandy Bridge Intel HD Graphics
  8. I disagreed with most of the things Linus didn't like over the previous model, especially the keyboard layout. Full sized arrow keys over a right shift any day of the week. The squashed top/bottom layout is the worst. I also prefer a non-glossy screen over touch support. Working in sunlight is just so much easier with an anti-glare display, plus they look much better. Also glad Razer ditched that cringe-worthy B L A D E branding.
  9. Imagine getting on the train, looking around you, and noticing that everyone's phone looks the exact same as yours. I would rather not have a phone. Also, on principle I will never buy any "computer" with a locked down bootloader. As far as I'm concerned, iPhones (and phones from other manufacturers such as Huawei and HMD) are pretty much bricks. Even if you're not going to install a custom ROM, you should care about this.
  10. Thanks for the quick replies! This doesn't seem like a practical or cost-effective solution, so I don't think I'll be going with this.
  11. Hi, I'm thinking of building a PC and realized I have a couple old IDE hard drives from 2001ish sitting in my basement. One is 64GB and one is 256GB. Would it be practical to put these hard drives in my system and use them as extra storage (alongside an SSD for boot/most programs and data)? I mean, who doesn't like free storage, right? Are modern motherboards incompatible with IDE? (The system would most likely use an A320 or B350 motherboard.) If so, could I get some sort of PCIe card with IDE connectors? Would this be practical at all? I remember trying to work with IDE a long time ago and it was a huge pain - changing the boot drive required rearranging the actual hard drives in the PC (though that probably won't be necessary lol). Could I create a RAID 0 array with these drives and another SATA hard drive I have lying around, or would that be a stupid idea? (Maybe a JBOD-type solution would be better?)
  12. This reminded me of something I was wondering that's kinda the opposite of this. I have a monitor with a resolution of 1440x900 - it's a 16:10 monitor, so 16:9 video would play at a resolution of 1440x810 (1440/16*9=810). But when I play 1080p video on YouTube (1920x1080), it looks noticeably sharper than 720p video. Why is this? 1440x900 is less than a quarter of the area of 1920x1080, and 1280x720 is much closer.
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