abhibeckert @ abhibeckert @lemmy.world

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2 yr. ago

It should be difficult. You need to convince ten billion people to buy new chargers if you're going to switch to a new charging standard and often several chargers per person (five at home? three at work? two in your car?).

Manufacturing and distributing 50 billion or so chargers only makes sense if your new standard is a lot better than USB-C. And if it is, then it won't be difficult to convince people to move to it.

They definitely exist. But there aren't many devices that are compatible with them - the 240W chargers run at much higher voltage than regular USB.

Also - only really large batteries (ones that you can't take with you on an airplane for example) are able to charge at 240W without overheating. So there's just not much demand for a charger that powerful. Lower watt chargers are cheaper and smaller and lighter.

The law requires a the industry agree to a "common" charger. Right now, the industry has picked USB but that might change.

It's up to the industry to figure out technical details...

But basically it needs to be possible to buy one charger, from any brand, that will "work" to charge any device. That doesn't necessarily mean it will work well... a 5w charger might take 20 hours to charge a full size laptop battery for example... And that's if the laptop is off. Some USB chargers provide 240w... you probably don't want one of those for regular use though - they will be big and heavy and expensive. And a small battery won't charge that fast anyway.

Yeah I think they'll definitely get in trouble for that. Nintendo's official statement that "third party chargers will void your warranty" is pretty clearly a breach of the common charger rule.

And it's not an empty claim either, some standards compliant third party chargers can actually damage a Nintendo Switch. Nintendo will have to fix that, or else their products might be banned across the EU.

i’m not able to understand any technical part

I'll break it down for you - it's a long list but easy to understand:

• Some cables have four internal wires. Others have over a dozen wires.
• Some have thin wires, some have thick wires. The thick ones cost more and are less flexible - the main benefit is they can be longer while charging quickly.
• Some cables have the internal wires wrapped in plastic. Others have them wrapped in plastic then that's wrapped in a metal shield, then that's wrapped in another plastic layer. The latter is more reliable and not just for the cable itself (without shielding, the cable can interfere with other electronics that are near the cable - such as your computer or phone.
• Some are just ordinary cabling, and some have complex circuitry embedded in the cable to run advanced algorithms to remove noise from the cable - this is necessary to achieve high data rates at long cable lengths.
• Nearly all use copper cables. A few use fibre optic cables. This can handle even longer cable lengths
• Some cables are just like "whatever this will do", and others are well designed and carefully manufactured/tested/etc.

.

i just want a color : yellow charger/cable go with yellow port. Etc.

There would need to be something like a fifty colors. The USB standards body is pushing cable manufacturers to use labels that show data rates (gigabits per second) and power capabilities (watts) on every cable. That will help a lot, but for all the other stuff (especially shielding and general quality...) you need to rely on either brand reputation or third party tests. Even then you need to be careful, because the best brands don't put all those features in every cable (too expensive).

Also unfortunately at 10€ you get what you pay for. The better brands all charge more than that.

Devices (not just laptops) can still have any port - it's just that at least one of them has to be the "common" charger port (as far as I know, USB-C isn't part of the legislation. It has provisions for the industry to adopt something different in the future).

no longer need to worry about that pesky 80-column limit

Um... What? Even a 13" laptop fits more than three times that many characters.

A group of people who want to stop private companies from running lemmy/mastodon/etc instances.

Windows and Mac both use KB = 1000. With Linux I think it depends on the distro.

You're thinking of very old versions of Windows... old versions of MacOS were also 1024.

It's honestly irrelevant anyway - if you want to actually know how much space a file is using on disk, you should look up how many pages / sectors are being used.

A page (on an SSD) or sector (on a HDD) is 32768 bits on most modern drives. They can't store a file smaller than that and all of your files take up a multiple of that. A lot of modern filesystems quietly use zip compression though. Also they have snapshots and files that exist in multiple locations other shit going on which will really mess with your actual usage.

I'm not going to run du -h / on my laptop, because it'd take forever, but I'm pretty sure it would be a number significantly larger than my actual disk. Wouldn't surprise me if it's 10x the size of my disk. Macs do some particularly interesting stuff in the filesystem layer - to the point where it's hard to even figure out how much free space you have... my Home directory has 50 GB of available space on my laptop. Open the Desktop directory (which is in the Home directory...) and the file browser shows 1.9 TB of available space.

Nobody gave a fuck until they bought a 300gb hd with 277gb of free space

The difference was a lot smaller when you were dealing with 700 byte files - it was often a rounding error. Also - you needed two sectors (1024 bytes at the time) two store your 700 byte file, so what did it matter anyway? If you want to get really specific, you actually needed three sectors - because there's metadata on the file... however the metadata will share space with other files so does that count?

Filesystems are incredibly complex and there's no way they can be explained to a lay person. Storage is and always has been an approximation.

It's even worse with RAM these days - my Mac has 298TB of memory address space currently allocated... but only between 6GB and 7GB of "app memory" in use (literally fluctuating between those two from one second to the next when I'm not even doing anything but watching the memory usage).

Initially the SI prefixes were used and used 1024 instead of 1000

Only CPUs and RAM use 1024. Floppy disks and hard drives going way back to the 1970's used 1000. In software, both are used depending on the context (and also obviously depending on the software). Most modern operating systems use 1024 for RAM and 1000 for file sizes (in the early days of computing, that agreed upon approach didn't exist, and it varied from one computer to the next).

@smokin_shinoby's tech school was shit. There has never been consistency on this issue and it's really sad that they failed to teach both numbering systems as they are (and always were) widely used.

In terms of storage 1000 and 1024 take the same amount of bytes.

What? No. A terabyte in 1024 units is 8,796,093,022,208 bits. In 1000 units it's 8,000,000,000,000 bits.

The difference is substantial with larger numbers.

The other peeve of mine with this debacle is that drive capacities using SI units do not use the full available address space (since it’s binary).

The "full available address space" goes down as the drive gets older and bad sectors are removed.

With a good drive, it might take ten or more years before you actually see the "size" of the drive shrink, but that's mostly because you 500GB drive actually had something like 650GB of storage when it was brand new.

they see 20 minutes, they’re scared off

I'm not "scared off". I'm on Lemmy to have discussions, not to read articles. If I want to read articles I'll get a magazine.

The "chunk" is often 32,768 bits these days and it never matches the actual size of the drive.

A 120 GB drive might actually be closer to 180 GB when it's brand new (if it's a good drive - cheap ones might be more like 130 GB)... and will get smaller as the drive wears out with normal use. I once had a HDD go from 500 GB down to about 50 GB before I stopped using it - it was a work computer and only used for email so 50 GB was when it actually started running out of space.

HDD / SSD sellers are often accused of being stingy - but the reality is they're selling a bigger drive than what you're told you're getting.

1024 is not the standard. The standard term for 1024 is "kibi" or "Ki" and the standard term for 1000 is "kilo" and has been since the year 1795.

There was a convention to use kilo for 1024 in the early days of computing since the "kibi" term didn't exist until 1998 (and took a while to become commonly used) — but that convention was always recognised as an incorrect use of the term. People just didn't care much especially since kilobytes were commonly rounded anyway. A 30,424 byte file is 29.7109375 kibibytes or 30.424 kilobytes... both will likely be rounded to 30 either way, so who cares if it's slightly wrong? Just use bytes if you need to know the exact size.

Also - hard drives, floppy disks, etc have always referred to their size in base 1000 numbers so if you were working with 30KB in the early days of computers it was very rarely RAM. A PDP-11 computer, for example, might have only had 8196 bytes of RAM (that's 8 kibibytes).

There are some places where the convention is still used and it can be pretty misleading as you work with larger numbers. For example 128 gigs equals 128,000,000,000 bytes (if using the correct 1000 unit) or 137,438,953,472 bytes (if kilo/mega/giga = 1024).

The "wrong" convention is commonly still used for RAM chips. So a 128GB RAM chip is significantly larger than a 128GB SSD.

"Kilo" means 1000 under the official International System of Units.

With some computer hardware, it's more convenient to use 1024 for a kilobyte and in the early days nobody really cared that it was slightly wrong. It has to do with the way memory is physically laid out in a memory chip.

These days, people do care and the correct term for 1024 is "Kibi" (kilo-binary). For example Kibibyte. There's also Gibi, Tebi, Exbi, etc.

It's mostly CPUs that use 1024 - and also RAM because it't tightly coupled to the CPU. The internet, hard drives, etc, usually use 1000 because they don't have any reason to use a weird numbering system.

Quartz (usually referred to as Core Graphics) isn’t recommended anymore on Macs.

Developers should be using SwiftUI now, which is a completely different approach:

    
class HelloWorldView: NSView {
    override func draw(_ dirtyRect: NSRect) {
        super.draw(dirtyRect)

        // Drawing code here.
        guard let context = NSGraphicsContext.current?.cgContext else { return }

        // Set text attributes
        let attributes: [NSAttributedString.Key: Any] = [
            .font: NSFont.systemFont(ofSize: 24),
            .foregroundColor: NSColor.black
        ]

        // Create the string
        let string = NSAttributedString(string: "Hello World", attributes: attributes)

        // Draw the string
        string.draw(at: CGPoint(x: 20, y: 20))
    }
}

  

Here’s the same thing with SwiftUI:

    
struct HelloWorldView: View {
    var body: some View {
        Text("Hello World")
            .font(.system(size: 24))
            .foregroundColor(.black)
            .padding()
    }
}

  

It's up and running for the Powerwall, on some grids anyway (it works in my state - but depends on having an agreement with the grid).

The thing is there needs to be coordination between your battery and the grid - you don't to drain your battery every night, they only last about 4,000 cycles.

If every home in the state had a Powerwall, then maybe it could help provide baseload power but the reality right now is all it can do is help with temporary disruptions, for example keeping the grid up when a cloud passes over a major solar farm.

They're in the planning stages of doing Vehicle to Grid or V2G power. Right now though, it's just for standalone batteries. This isn't just Tesla by the way - when it comes it'll likely be for most EVs.

Meta has well over two billion users. The vast majority of them are ordinary people who should be welcomed onto the fediverse. Yes, any network that big has problematic people... but they can be dealt with.