u/into_fiction

Amazon achieved the $3 trillion market cap milestone, becoming the fifth company to do so after Apple, Microsoft, Alphabet, and Nvidia. Even more surprising, retail did not contribute much to this milestone, and it is mainly because of AWS. The cloud business generated revenue growth of 37% during the quarter, which amounts to $42.2 billion and represents the fastest growth rate in over four years for AWS, and it is due to enterprise customers needing compute capacity for AI use cases.

Is it any surprise that pop-up selfie cameras have come back? A couple of OnePlus devices, and Oppo Find X. Full screen, no notch and no whitish border. They were kind of clowned on for moving parts, but in fact that eliminated a notch/hole problem better than anything since.

As much as the idea itself is not a bad one, but it was killed off primarily for concerns related to durability and waterproofing. Now we have under-display camera, people's pretend-dead eyes. Now we have under display cameras which are still a bit muddy, or everyone pretending not to notice that there are punch-holes in their face. Thinks that we took some greater risk but a cleaner Yang for "good enough and safe"

The one you know, the whir, and tick tick tick as the tray empties, after 20 years or so it was the same type of printer for all the stores, making it a strange, universal sound of shopping.

I still remember doing the full month grocery run at Walmart and just standing still listening to this thing for about 7-8 minutes while it was printing everything. took longer to print than scanned everything , thermal printers now are almost silent, just a quiet hum and the paper slides out. quieter and faster for sure but it killed off a sound that's apparently stuck in a lot of people's memory.

There's always the part of any code base that nobody wants to touch. It's maybe some low-key config parsing, error handling, or retry logic quietly in the corner...not the 'Oh, look at this cool new feature' anyways, it's the no-glamour no talkies kind of thing. In fact no one really refactors it, no one writes a post about it, but if it fails the whole thing fails.

The more "dull" a piece of programming code is, the more important it seems to be. While the interesting stuff, the part everyone wanted to build could probably go down for a day and most users wouldn't feel the heat.

I have an old Lenovo tab that for some reason lost its default Android installation and doesn't boot correctly. Rather than throwing it away, I decided that I wanted to do something useful with this old thing by flashing some new operating system on it. I would probably use it as a kitchen screen or media remote.

Since it is not of much use at the moment, I think I should give open-source software a try rather than looking for the original firmware. So what would you recommend me to install? LineageOS, if it is supported, or something else, something more lightweight? Do I have to unbrick it first before installing an OS?

Have been interested in contributing to open source, but not quite certain about what day-to-day involvement looks like. Do you have to work on making your site faster/squander cleaner with a few optimization or new features, or do you just have to break down the buzz from issues tab and fix them. Also how many times would maintainers get rid of the PR if it is not merged, but will just remain there forever?

Also, I'm not sure if it's a good idea to start with something popular with lots of stars or if it's a bad idea for someone first using this, because the code is most likely going to be very large, and the maintainers very busy.

I've thought about it for awhile. A few apps that I open perhaps once a couple of months, such as a utility I used up once, or an event ticket app. An instinctive thing I want to do for every half is delete them and clean the phone, but then I re-install and login again the next time I need it. Other way is to put it in some folder I never check in and don't remember having until I need to find it.

Not really news, just one of those "huh, didn't know that" bits of history. It wasn't a planned invention, but rather, a result of a man working on radar technology observing a chocolate bar had melted in his pocket while standing near the equipment. This resulted in his testing it on other food and finally making it into a real product.

It's a bit of a quirk that a lot of tech history has been almost random events that people happened to notice, rather than a straight line from idea to product.

In 2007, Apple patented its multitouch gestures which included pinch to zoom. But it was more than a mere piece of documentation that remained untouched and unutilized until some later time. As soon as the Android phones started offering this functionality in their own devices, Apple sued almost all of the major manufacturers in the world, including such giants as Samsung, HTC, and Motorola. The disputes lasted for years and the damages claimed were billions, and in each of the proceedings, the pinch to zoom gesture served as one of the main points of discussion.

The strangest thing about it is that nowadays it seems to be such a trivial operation. It's just what you do to interact with the screen. However, back then the pinch to zoom gesture was innovative enough for Apple to decide that owning it is well worth a ten-year legal battle. Some manufacturers had to license it while others managed to defend themselves against some particular claims.

Does anyone remember the time when every single download page was like a minefield full of fake buttons? When you tried to find the download button for just one file, and you had five huge green buttons labeled "DOWNLOAD NOW", blinking at you and being larger than the actual one, and not one of those buttons were what you were looking for. The actual button would be some tiny grey text somewhere, ashamed of its existence. Sites like those old freeware download websites were the most guilty ones. If you missed the actual button one time, you ended up with three toolbars, your default browser replaced by something else, and a window of a "virus scanner", which is actually a virus itself. It really felt like some kind of skill that one had to learn in order to be able to spot the real download link among all the ad networks' buttons.

I currently only have a 512GB SSD on my laptop and because of my work files and other personal files, there isn't much space left to download games, even those which are relatively smaller in size become difficult to install. I have subscribed to Xbox Game Pass and using it for gaming in cloud form seemed to be the right step as no installations will be required here.

The only concern I have is that I keep seeing mixed reviews regarding performance issues with the gaming system. My internet speed is 150 mbps and it's pretty steady too. Will that be enough to ensure that there is no input lag in the game or is there going to be a delay in terms of movement in the game?

Linux gaming does appear to have developed a lot since then, but I seem to always wonder whether Linux gaming will ever really become mainstream or not. Proton and Steam Deck definitely brought about a revolution of some kind. A very large portion of games that are exclusive to the Windows platform work flawlessly on Linux using Wine/Proton, and without any effort from the developer side.

However, there is an issue of anti-cheat. Many popular multiplayers just refuse to work on Linux due to kernel level anti-cheat issues. This, I suppose, is one of the main obstacles on the way of Linux gaming becoming mainstream. Although some developers have decided to port Linux support for their anti-cheats, it happens very rarely and depends entirely on the studio's desire to invest in Linux support.

This is something I've been toying with a little bit lately. Internals are cheaper for the level of performance you'll see, and you're looking at literally zero latency since all of the action is on the PCIe bus, but you're stuck with a desktop that has an available slot and sufficient air flow, and installing one is a little project even if it shouldn't be.

Externals have obvious flexibility advantages, connect to a laptop, can be moved from machine to machine, can even use them for console captures in the living room. You're paying more for basically the same hardware performance-wise, and you're limited by USB bandwidth when dealing with higher bitrates/resolutions. There will be a little bit of added latency through passthrough as well.

This computer still starts up nicely, screen and keyboard working well, but only 4 GB RAM with an old dual core processor. Not suitable for any current tasks, even opening more than 5 tabs in Chrome causes it to moan.

Thinking before disposing of this computer to a scrap yard, whether there might be something useful one could do with this computer. For example, running some light-weight Linux distribution for surfing, using this as a network storage device or a print server or for some automation task at home. Or does the limitation of only 4 GB of RAM make all that impossible?