The problem with USB-a isn't that it's non reversible, it's that it's non-reversible _and_ rectangular, so it's not clear at a glance which way round it should go.
All they had to do was make the connector have a non-symmetrical shape so that it's immediately obvious which way round it goes when you pick it up - you could do it without even looking. Think of how much time we'd have collectively saved with this minor design change.
> All they had to do was make the connector have a non-symmetrical shape so that it's immediately obvious which way round it goes when you pick it up - you could do it without even looking. Think of how much time we'd have collectively saved with this minor design change.
I disagree. When connecting an HDMI cable I sometimes have issues, especially if in a weird angle.
However I do concede is faster to connect an HDMI than a USB
Yeah, I want the connector that can be attached by only moving the TV a few inches, just enough to get my hand to fit and feel around, not something I have to rearrange the furniture for and break out some headlight to see which direction the cable is oriented. With BNC cables, I could do it with my eyes closed.
Right, the only thing worse than USB was the PS2 port. What sort of madness drive someone to invent a round connector that is keyed.
Hyperbole aside, there are some very good reasons to go with round connectors, it can be very strong and you can put a big nut on them to have an extremely secure lock. however the PS2 connector is nether of these things, It would require a much more robust key to work well.
The worst connector I ever encountered was on a old ATI capture card, it was the same barrel as a ps2 connector but had about 15 pins. Everything had to be perfect for it to insert, a tiny scratch or a slightly bent pin, it was not going anywhere.
The PS/2 connector was just a mini version of DIN connectors from the mid 1900s. They were sometimes used for printers and floppy drives in place of wider parallel connectors. In general, once you knew where ‘up’ was you could figure out the orientation in a way that is still more intuitive than USB. XLR cables are similar and still widely used, but have more external cues as to their orientation.
I would line up the barrel and then rotate while pushing in until it plugged in. I don’t remember bending any pins. The mark on the top helped until the tower form factor turned the motherboard sideways. Still do this for XLR and MIDI but they’re more robust.
> Right, the only thing worse than USB was the PS2 port. What sort of madness drive someone to invent a round connector that is keyed.
The Apple desktop bus (ADB) that was used for keyboards and mice in Mac-land was also round. They improved it by using asymmetrical plugs, which marginally helped.
I’ve seen that claim but AFAICT it comes from a single source, which was a presentation by someone involved in the FireWire connector design. So at this point it’s more of an urban legend, until we have some solid confirmation.
It does not really matter though, they are very similar in construction, and are very sturdy, and I really like them both :)
I've seen the same claim made. Apparently it was the sturdiness that led to it being copied. Good enough for kids beating on it and stepping on the ends, more than good enough for professional applications.
No, they both used the same physical form factor, but it seems to have just been a model from a OEM used by both nintendo and apple around that time, rather than one spec deliberately copying the connector from the other.
It doesn't help if you've trying to do it totally blind, but the 2 open square holes go on top, once I figured that out I've never had any issues plugging them in correctly. The only one I have issues with is my keyboard because the pcb in the plug is black and the it's a little hard to tell which side is the open holes and which side is the black pcb.
Vertically aligned motherboards are hard to judge what "up" is. Usually up is where the expansion boards are plugged in. But not all computer users know how a computer looks inside.
Tbf I think the most prevalent issue with USB was from people plugging them in where they cannot see the port properly, ie the back of a computer tower (most often) or back of TV/console etc.
Not really sure that that's USB's fault so much as a lack of front USB ports. I think in those cases the consumer can chose to get some sort of hub that's easier to access/can be pulled out from behind their setup.
Now that C exists though, idk if we really need to go much further. Connector much smaller than it is now will become fragile.
I've always thought they could add a single fiber core to USB cables for some "ultra high speed" standard, since USB4 is predicted to top out at 80GBps, but we could get 50Tbps or so over a single fiber if we really needed to.
But after owning several fiber cables, for networking and HDMI fiber based cables...yeah they're far, far too weak to replace copper. Just look at 'em wrong and they snap/break.
Plus tbf if we get 80gbps from usb4...the problem then becomes that we don't reaaaally have a use case for that speed. Maybe network adaptors, but beyond that...I mean a modern SSD will saturate that with a sequential read I suppose, but still.
I guess it would be easier with the larger size of the USB-A connector, but I still struggle to plug in micro-USB cables sometimes, as it's still difficult to figure out its orientation at a glance.
I’ve always loved physical books, and the serendipitous discoverability of volumes on a shelf can’t be beat.
That said, ebooks provide worthwhile benefits in their own right. Fulltext search, text‐to‐speech, changing fonts and font sizes, small physical size convenient for travel… other times I come up with some operation I want to perform on a particular book, like counting how often a particular phrase is used, or comparing certain passages side by side, where having an ebook copy would be useful.
So for these reasons, I often buy the ebook edition of my hardcopy books, if I can find it DRM‐free. Similarly, after reading a good ebook I’ll often get a physical copy to stash on my shelf. (In any case, though, DRM‐encumbered ebooks are off the table, at least for me!)
Makes me wish for a well‐made book scanner and OCR package, so I can format shift all those physical books I can’t find acceptable ebooks of.
For me it's the absence of an affordable automated page turner that makes this conversion difficult. I have an Auramate from Czur (https://www.czur.com/) which does a pretty good job of the scanning and OCR (about 2 sec per page or double page) and corrects for curvature at the spine. However I have zero experience with other equivalent machines which are undoubtedly available.
If I bought physical books of everything I read I would run out of space in my apartment. I already have so many books, so I started only buying physical books if I felt like they contain a lot of pictures or are pleasing physical objects. For general reading kindle books being available on demand without going to a bookshop or waiting on postage, that my partner can read the same book at the same time, and it being lightweight for commuting are all also nice perks but the space saving is the key element for me
I think the argument is that the further left you go, the more likely you are to explicitly describe yourself as an anti-fascist and make a big deal about your opposition to fascism, as opposed to just quietly disliking fascism like most of us do and not feeling the need to announce it.
Like all sane people I oppose fascism, but I don't put "anti-fascist" in my Twitter bio, wear antifa t-shirts, or run around loudly telling everybody about how much I hate fascists, because why should I need to? Of course I'm an anti-fascist, who the hell isn't? It feels as unnecessary as having to tell people that I'm "anti-genocide" or "anti-pedophilia".
It's also true that communist regimes have always used "anti-fascism" as an excuse for their atrocities, just like fascist regimes have used "anti-communism" to justify their atrocities. The original Antifa was an offshoot of the German Communist Party, and (as GP pointed out) the Berlin Wall was officially called the "Anti-Fascist Protection Rampart". That doesn't mean that all anti-fascists are communists, but history is what it is.
Don't take any of this as my denying that there are still fascistic forces in our world that should be opposed. If "anti-fascism" is an important part of your identity and you feel the need to tell the world about it, good for you, I'm not going to stop you, but personally I don't see the point.
I don't understand — the example in the article adds the string "magic: MTQIpN2AmwQA" to the commit message. The final hash is hexadecimal, but what you feed into it isn't.
Opportunity cost. By having to study it at all, those students lose the opportunity to study something else that might have more value or merit to them personally. In that way, it definitely is a forced priority.
The Welsh language isn't part of the cultural identity of most English-speakers in Wales. That's why they find it annoying when their children are forced to learn it. It's like forcing every child in Brittany to learn Breton when most of the population speaks French and has no desire to speak Breton.
Are you being deliberately obtuse? If you're capable, try expressing an opinion in clear and comprehensible language. The vague waffle and irrelevant rhetorical questions make you look dim-witted.
How old are you? If you're reasonably young, and vaccinated, you really don't need to worry about COVID this badly. Practically everyone I know has had COVID by now and for most of them it was not much worse than catching a cold.
COVID is going to be around forever. I don't know why anyone is still letting it disrupt their lives.
I'm 30 (I think that's reasonably young?) and have had many vaccinations, but you make a lot of assumptions about any preexisting conditions I and those close to me may have. COVID is a brand new disease and even in those with mild cases we are just now starting to understand the long-term effects, especially of getting it multiple times.
It is a bet that I'm taking; I'm definitely curious to see 10 years down the road the difference in health between me (with a few years of social isolation) and those I know that have caught COVID multiple times. Usually they are catching it multiple times within the span of a few months/a year.
Plenty of people, myself included, use Brave as a privacy-focused web browser without using or caring about any of its crypto features. Hell, I've been using Brave for years and I'm still not even sure what its crypto features are.
You don't put those on until you're actually in bed trying to sleep. It still messes with you that it doesn't get dark when it's late and bedtime is approaching.
All they had to do was make the connector have a non-symmetrical shape so that it's immediately obvious which way round it goes when you pick it up - you could do it without even looking. Think of how much time we'd have collectively saved with this minor design change.