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New Pixel 7a user... am I not "getting" it?
  • I hope somebody has a better answer for you but I think it's just that the world has decided that one has to use two hands to operate a Smartphone now. I'd love a phone with a 5" screen but it looks like we are a (vocal) minority that's not profitable to serve?

  • CassetteFuturism @lemm.ee ISMETA @lemmy.zip
    How far could cassettes have gone if there was no alternative?

    Let's do a thought experiment.

    Let's assume we just never got hard drives to work all that well, head crashes are common and large storage capacities are only possible in servers with incredibly expensive anti vibration setups and what not and there's no way they'd ever work in portable devices. And optical media just didn't work out. Maybe somehow we didn't discover the science in time and the companies working on it just failed or bad management decisions killed off the research into it before anything useful came off of it. And flash storage just never came down in price.

    How far could we have pushed cassettes and tape if all the effort that went into other technologies had to be put into cassettes because there simply wasn't a good alternative for data storage. What are the limits of how fast we could move tape in a cassette? How miniaturized would the technology be by now in 2023? I know that there are contemporary tape backup systems with large capacities but there hasn't been any efforts into high speed seek times or making cassettes a viable tiny medium for use as removable media on PDAs or mobile phones.

    If we could pack data densely enough and move the tape quickly enough how possible would modern computer tasks like high resolution digital video or image editing be? Assuming that we still had the high speed processors and non-persistent memory of the present but just no other data storage medium aside from magnetic tape.

    For inspiration consider that in 1992 we had NT Cassettes that are about as big as an SD card an could store nearly a Gigabyte and in the enterprise LTO-9 tape (released in 2021) stores around 18 TB. So it doesn't sound impossible to have tiny cassettes with a lot of storage if we spend the last 3 decades working on it.

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    Which retro games have never been outdone?

    We all love retro games but let's face it: Objectively some modern games are simply better. For example I'd argue that Pokémon Crystal is brilliant and one of the best GBC games but BW and BW2 are simply better in pretty much every way.

    However the opposite can also be true. Which retro games are just better than their newer equivalents?

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    FCC chair: Speed standard of 25Mbps down, 3Mbps up isn’t good enough anymore
  • Sounds good but there isn't any consumer equipment that can handle 2GB/s. Even 10 Gigabit Ethernet switches are super expensive and I don't think we have anything that can do more than 10Gb/s in the consumer Networking space at all .

  • What are the main challenges in Linux adoption for New users, and how can it be addressed?
  • As somebody who likes using the terminal I too have mostly stopped using dd and use gnome disks instead. Getting the rightdd flags to get the best performance and progress indicators is a challenge to Google every time.

  • Street­Complete "promotes or depends entirely on a non-free network service"

    I downloaded Street­Complete to contribute to OSM and on https://f-droid.org/en/packages/de.westnordost.streetcomplete/ it warns you that "This app promotes or depends entirely on a non-free network service". I'm not super concerned about that and will still try out Street­Complete but i was just wondering what non-free network service this is. Does anybody here know?

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    The Pixel 4A will stop receiving security updates in August. New phone suggestions?
  • I like the idea of a Linux Phone. I don't know much about it. My bank's 2FA probably wouldn't be supported on that and i do need to have WhatsApp because it's the default mode of communication for everybody that's not deeply into privacy, right? What DE would you recommend?

  • The Pixel 4A will stop receiving security updates in August. New phone suggestions?

    After only 3 short years my Google Pixel 4A is EOL. It still works perfectly fine, but since our entire lives run through our phones I don't feel safe trusting my bank accounts and so on to a phone without security updates. I feel like I wasn't quite aware how short the supported time would be when i bought it.

    So I gotta get a new one. I don't really have a lot of requirements. I just need the basics: A camera, headphone jack, USB-C charging and F-Droid (so app side loading). I just watch some YouTube, use lemmy and messaging apps, 3fa, email and so on and if there is something to take a video of photo of I like doing that too. I don't need NFC or high refresh rate or 3 cameras or wireless charging and I don't play any phone games so pretty much any phone should work, right?

    I was thinking of getting something a bit sustainable and long lasting so I looked at Fairphone but the Fairphone 4 is only supported until 2026 which is not really long and also it's really expensive for just another 3 years. Looks like there will be a Fairphone 5 soonish? But since the 4 didn't have a headphone jack the 5 probably won't either?

    So since it looks like a ~6 or 7 year lifespan is just not something that's available I've been thinking why not go cheap? Thus I've considered getting the Samsung Galaxy A14 (non-5G). Are there any significant differences with the 5G version? The 5G version has good reviews as far as i can see. Feels a little bad to downgrade to a phone that cannot even record 1080p@60 and to go back to USB 2.0 and 15W charging but whatever.

    So I'm open to suggestions, either on the longer lasting side or something cheap yet secure for a couple of years.

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    InitialsDiceBearhttps://github.com/dicebear/dicebearhttps://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/„Initials” (https://github.com/dicebear/dicebear) by „DiceBear”, licensed under „CC0 1.0” (https://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/1.0/)IS
    ISMETA @lemmy.zip
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