There's nothing wrong with challenging paradigms, but if you want to replace something as ubiquitous and entrenched as the humble keyboard, you'd better bring your AAA+ game, and this guy certainly didn't.
I used an Acer Chromebook 13 (Nvidia Tegra K1-based) for a while. The build quality, keyboard, touchpad, battery life and just about everything else was amazing. However, the screen was a horrible TN panel (1080p, though), and the performance was absolutely garbage-tier.
16:9 has no place on a machine for "those who do", extra vertical pixels go a long way to help with many things in productivity related tasks.
You can easily get laptops with 1440 or 2160 vertical pixels (Thinkpad T470 and P51, respectively), so what exactly is the drawback to the extra horizontal pixels when compared to a 4:3 of similar vertical resolution? Extra horizontal resolution is wonderful for terminals, documentation and various side bars, further freeing up vertical space. People complain about not having 4:3 screens anymore, and I will concede that there was a couple of years where 1080p was the biggest you could get, but we've had massive vertical resolution for years now, in widescreens. If you buy a laptop with a shitty 1366x768 or similar screen today, it's simply because you didn't do the research.
The only people still complaining about 16:9 are the people who haven't realized that 4K and 5K monitors exist.
That's a shame, because while it is a damn good movie, it's also an audiovisual spectacle. You really should see it on a big screen (or at least a serious home cinema).
Just everything, from the gorgeous visuals and the awe-inspiring visual design of literally everything in the movie, to the bleak attitude of life in 2049 Los Angeles, the sheer noise (visual and auditory) of the city, and the overarching theme of Man playing God.
Like anything else, Thinkpads suck with Windows on them. Install Linux and be happy. Mint installed flawlessly on my T420 and everything works out of the box (except hibernate, which is for scrubs, anyway).
They have pretty much dropped all the unique features that made the devices more convenient for engineers and programmers.
Such as?
The main thing now is, why pay a premium for a device which is marginally different to the entry level stuff in terms of function, or at least, imperceptibly different from the mid range?
Because they're better built, more reliable, easy to repair and have amazing parts availability? Only HP and Dell come close to matching that, and they're still far behind.
I participated in the retro thinkpad surveys (looks like that has gone nowhere)
It's coming out, with an oldschool 7-row keyboard and all.
I recall a memo from lenovo, regarding their concern about losing a lot of business sales to macbooks. Well my sentiment is when you start dropping features to make your product more like a macbook, as a customer why should I go for some wannabe, might as well just go for the real thing. Similarly, if they're going to make the product rather indistinguishable in function from entry level to mid range devices, why bother spending premium dollars?
As I mentioned above, because Thinkpads are better built, more reliable, easy to repair and have amazing parts availability.
Try changing the battery on a Macbook. Heck, try changing anything on a Macbook. I hope you have an Apple Store nearby.
Ratio doesn't matter. Vertical resolution matters. As long as you get the same or better vertical resolution, having extra horizontal space is quite nice.
What? Our entire company uses Thinkpads, ranging from T420s to T470s and the equivalent X-series. Not a single one of them has a glossy screen.
Widescreen!
Yes, like literally every single other laptop on the market. I'll let you in on a secret: Unless you select the absolute bargain basement 1366x768 shit screen option that literally only exists to hit a marketing price point, the available screens have the same vertical resolution as your beloved 4:3 screens, PLUS additional horizontal space.
It's really quite interesting how much output you can get from very little power, if you choose your speaker drivers and cabinet design carefully. Even a basic bass-reflex design can get to 105+dB with the right drivers and a tiny 10W amp.
For transmission line type designs, folded horns and so on, you can hit 110+dB with just a single watt, however those cabinets tend to take up a lot of space.
I'm working on a DIY bluetooth speaker, which will probably use either the brilliant little Dayton RS100 4" full range driver, or some inexpensive car speakers of some kind. I'm debating whether to use a 2x15W amp, or two 25W mono amps. The ones I'm looking at are available on Ebay for around $2.50, which is just completely ridiculously cheap.
Xmax is 11mm +/-, that's some pretty serious distance. Given the amount of DSP built into it, of course they're actively controlling the drivers to minimize distortion.
In a well-tuned cabinet, with high-quality drivers and DSP, I bet they can hit 50Hz flat, no problem at all, and probably as low as 40Hz at a decent SPL. Odds are they're boosting the hell out of the low bass at lower volumes and gradually rolling it off as you increase the volume, keeping the low frequencies always right up there close to the limits of what the amps and drivers can do. Bose does the same thing on their portable speakers, and it is rather convincing, though the sound does become somewhat leaner at high volume levels. It's simply a modern version of the loudness button on old-school amps, but more advanced.
I bet they're also using clever DSP tricks, including missing fundamentals, to increase the perceived amount of bass. The Boomcloud Boomstick (love that name) is an inexpensive device that does some of these things. It's fake as hell, but it really does give the illusion of deep bass on tiny earbuds and portable speakers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I've researched this a little bit, since I'm building a DIY bluetooth speaker, and I'm interested in making it not sound tinny and lacking in bass (especially outside), despite using a small cabinet and relative small drivers. The next best thing to actual deep bass is a convincing illusion of deep bass. I see absolutely no reason why Google wouldn't be using similar tricks.
Seriously? I furnished my old 16m^2 single-room apartment (172sqft) exclusively with Ikea furniture, and I built it right there in the apartment, including a bed, a dresser, a table and various other things. Not a problem at all.
"Competing for her heart"? I wrote her for a little while online, we met up and had coffee, and continued to meet up, and we became a couple. It doesn't have to be complicated.
Well, one "chick" does, and often. I'm definitely not complaining:-)
It's not my fault you lack the skills for basic social interaction. Even ignorant inbred hicks who can barely string together a sentence still manage to get laid by attractive women. Must really hurt your fragile ego.
Maybe you should try being a decent person, for once.
Maybe you should try looking at women as something more than simple sex automatons.
Maybe, I dunno... Treat them as actual people?
I stopped being a misogynistic shitbag years and years ago. Funnily enough, my dating prowess improved markedly after I decided to not be an asshole, and decided to actually respect women as people, rather than simply wet holes to stick my dick inside. If women continue to pass you by, take a good hard look at yourself, and take a look at the women you decide to pursue. You're simply doing it wrong.
That always seems to be the rallying call of MRAs, neckbeards, incels and others who are justifiably ignored by any woman with a pulse and even the tiniest shred of decency and self-respect.
They just don't seem to get that sex isn't simply glorified masturbation, it's so much more than that, and they'll never experience it themselves. If it was simply masturbation, what's wrong with using your hand?
Slashdot Mirror
I look for refurb models with last year's high-end hardware, it's so much cheaper and the performance differences are miniscule.
400V, three-phase.
There's nothing wrong with challenging paradigms, but if you want to replace something as ubiquitous and entrenched as the humble keyboard, you'd better bring your AAA+ game, and this guy certainly didn't.
Google are working on "Fuchsia", which some speculate could be the replacement for both ChromeOS and Android.
I used an Acer Chromebook 13 (Nvidia Tegra K1-based) for a while. The build quality, keyboard, touchpad, battery life and just about everything else was amazing. However, the screen was a horrible TN panel (1080p, though), and the performance was absolutely garbage-tier.
16:9 has no place on a machine for "those who do", extra vertical pixels go a long way to help with many things in productivity related tasks.
You can easily get laptops with 1440 or 2160 vertical pixels (Thinkpad T470 and P51, respectively), so what exactly is the drawback to the extra horizontal pixels when compared to a 4:3 of similar vertical resolution? Extra horizontal resolution is wonderful for terminals, documentation and various side bars, further freeing up vertical space. People complain about not having 4:3 screens anymore, and I will concede that there was a couple of years where 1080p was the biggest you could get, but we've had massive vertical resolution for years now, in widescreens. If you buy a laptop with a shitty 1366x768 or similar screen today, it's simply because you didn't do the research.
The only people still complaining about 16:9 are the people who haven't realized that 4K and 5K monitors exist.
That's a shame, because while it is a damn good movie, it's also an audiovisual spectacle. You really should see it on a big screen (or at least a serious home cinema).
I've never been so spellbound by a 2+ hour movie
I'll second that.
Just everything, from the gorgeous visuals and the awe-inspiring visual design of literally everything in the movie, to the bleak attitude of life in 2049 Los Angeles, the sheer noise (visual and auditory) of the city, and the overarching theme of Man playing God.
I loved it.
There are certainly laptops available with higher resolution displays, but you have to pay for them.
All of the T470 models can be had with a 2560x1440 display, and the P51 can be had with a 4K (3840x2160) display.
Like anything else, Thinkpads suck with Windows on them. Install Linux and be happy. Mint installed flawlessly on my T420 and everything works out of the box (except hibernate, which is for scrubs, anyway).
They have pretty much dropped all the unique features that made the devices more convenient for engineers and programmers.
Such as?
The main thing now is, why pay a premium for a device which is marginally different to the entry level stuff in terms of function, or at least, imperceptibly different from the mid range?
Because they're better built, more reliable, easy to repair and have amazing parts availability? Only HP and Dell come close to matching that, and they're still far behind.
I participated in the retro thinkpad surveys (looks like that has gone nowhere)
It's coming out, with an oldschool 7-row keyboard and all.
I recall a memo from lenovo, regarding their concern about losing a lot of business sales to macbooks. Well my sentiment is when you start dropping features to make your product more like a macbook, as a customer why should I go for some wannabe, might as well just go for the real thing. Similarly, if they're going to make the product rather indistinguishable in function from entry level to mid range devices, why bother spending premium dollars?
As I mentioned above, because Thinkpads are better built, more reliable, easy to repair and have amazing parts availability.
Try changing the battery on a Macbook. Heck, try changing anything on a Macbook. I hope you have an Apple Store nearby.
Ratio doesn't matter. Vertical resolution matters. As long as you get the same or better vertical resolution, having extra horizontal space is quite nice.
Glossy screens!
What? Our entire company uses Thinkpads, ranging from T420s to T470s and the equivalent X-series. Not a single one of them has a glossy screen.
Widescreen!
Yes, like literally every single other laptop on the market. I'll let you in on a secret: Unless you select the absolute bargain basement 1366x768 shit screen option that literally only exists to hit a marketing price point, the available screens have the same vertical resolution as your beloved 4:3 screens, PLUS additional horizontal space.
Not even a decent keyboard any longer!
The chiclet keyboard is great.
It's really quite interesting how much output you can get from very little power, if you choose your speaker drivers and cabinet design carefully. Even a basic bass-reflex design can get to 105+dB with the right drivers and a tiny 10W amp.
For transmission line type designs, folded horns and so on, you can hit 110+dB with just a single watt, however those cabinets tend to take up a lot of space.
I'm working on a DIY bluetooth speaker, which will probably use either the brilliant little Dayton RS100 4" full range driver, or some inexpensive car speakers of some kind. I'm debating whether to use a 2x15W amp, or two 25W mono amps. The ones I'm looking at are available on Ebay for around $2.50, which is just completely ridiculously cheap.
Xmax is 11mm +/-, that's some pretty serious distance. Given the amount of DSP built into it, of course they're actively controlling the drivers to minimize distortion.
In a well-tuned cabinet, with high-quality drivers and DSP, I bet they can hit 50Hz flat, no problem at all, and probably as low as 40Hz at a decent SPL. Odds are they're boosting the hell out of the low bass at lower volumes and gradually rolling it off as you increase the volume, keeping the low frequencies always right up there close to the limits of what the amps and drivers can do. Bose does the same thing on their portable speakers, and it is rather convincing, though the sound does become somewhat leaner at high volume levels. It's simply a modern version of the loudness button on old-school amps, but more advanced.
I bet they're also using clever DSP tricks, including missing fundamentals, to increase the perceived amount of bass. The Boomcloud Boomstick (love that name) is an inexpensive device that does some of these things. It's fake as hell, but it really does give the illusion of deep bass on tiny earbuds and portable speakers: https://www.youtube.com/watch?... [youtube.com]
I've researched this a little bit, since I'm building a DIY bluetooth speaker, and I'm interested in making it not sound tinny and lacking in bass (especially outside), despite using a small cabinet and relative small drivers. The next best thing to actual deep bass is a convincing illusion of deep bass. I see absolutely no reason why Google wouldn't be using similar tricks.
And of course it's going to be a massive success, like every iPhone before it.
Buy Apple stock. I know I am going to.
With the crazy opinions some people have these days, it's getting seriously hard to tell. Poe's Law is in effect.
Fuck no.
Translated: "I work myself to the bone, in the vague hope that my employer won't randomly decide to replace me, for no discernible reason".
Wouldn't you rather be able to relax and enjoy life?
Seriously? I furnished my old 16m^2 single-room apartment (172sqft) exclusively with Ikea furniture, and I built it right there in the apartment, including a bed, a dresser, a table and various other things. Not a problem at all.
That's cute. I'm sure my girlfriend would be absolutely devastated to learn that "KGIII on Slashdot" doesn't think she's fun.
"Competing for her heart"? I wrote her for a little while online, we met up and had coffee, and continued to meet up, and we became a couple. It doesn't have to be complicated.
Well, one "chick" does, and often. I'm definitely not complaining :-)
It's not my fault you lack the skills for basic social interaction. Even ignorant inbred hicks who can barely string together a sentence still manage to get laid by attractive women. Must really hurt your fragile ego.
Maybe you should try being a decent person, for once.
Maybe you should try looking at women as something more than simple sex automatons.
Maybe, I dunno... Treat them as actual people?
I stopped being a misogynistic shitbag years and years ago. Funnily enough, my dating prowess improved markedly after I decided to not be an asshole, and decided to actually respect women as people, rather than simply wet holes to stick my dick inside. If women continue to pass you by, take a good hard look at yourself, and take a look at the women you decide to pursue. You're simply doing it wrong.
That always seems to be the rallying call of MRAs, neckbeards, incels and others who are justifiably ignored by any woman with a pulse and even the tiniest shred of decency and self-respect.
They just don't seem to get that sex isn't simply glorified masturbation, it's so much more than that, and they'll never experience it themselves. If it was simply masturbation, what's wrong with using your hand?
Who the hell wants to hump a robot?