This needs to get all the likes
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And 4k is struggling to find a market, I can barely see the benefit in 1080p with my crappy eyes. They need the new standard to drive sales but for once people literally aren’t buying it. TV makers are horrified that they’ve finally saturated the big screen market and the boom is over. That said, my 6 year old Samsung 46" is crapping out, so time to replace…
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There just aren’t enough people with the wall space to put up a TV over 65" or so without having a large screening room that makes 4k pointless. Still, that’s the bulk of what’s on the market.
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Well, I was not speaking literally with stop watch in hand regarding battery life when off. 
And 16 weeks would count as “weeks” and that’s about as long as I have gone without sticking it on a charger on principle so it doesn’t go flat at a critical time when traveling.
I prefer to keep all my devices “hot and ready” to go at a moment’s notice. I get very twitchy if anything I depend on gets to 50%, from a car’s gas tank on down to anything rechargeable.
I carry a good sized “:juice box” for my tablet/e-reader/MP3 player etc when I travel but I prefer to start with things at 100%.
mpeg2 is easy (particularly if you’re just grabbing the the data from an ATSC stream). Recompressing it into mpeg4 is harder–certain apple devices don’t like mpeg2, and if you want to build a media library, mpeg4 takes up less space.
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I have a 4k telly I paid AU$400 for, that makes a freakin’ sweet monitor.
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“No SIM available” sounds like clueless run through a few layers of telephone; but it would not be terribly surprising if the phone would run up against the fact that 2G GSM and CDMA 1X are both either retired or very close to being phased out in a substantial swath of the world.
Worst case you can adapter-up or cut-down a SIM to reach appropriate size; but the phaseout of older protocols is not something you can do much about short of rip-and-replacing the modem, if modular. It’s been the cause of a fair amount of wailing and gnashing of teeth among people who used cell modems for embedded systems and sensors.
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Not just good enough, in some cases just flat-out better. My smartphone is great, but physical keys, physical keys, my fucking kingdom for physical keys. When I was in college in the early 00’s, I carried around an HP Jornada that was bulky by today’s standards, but still easily portable. It had a real keyboard with scissor switches that was just big enough that even my rather large hands could touch type on it at a decent rate. If I want to do that with my phone, I have to carry an extra thing and the extra thing isn’t even remotely as nice to use as the old thing.
People give Texas Instruments a lot of crap for “overcharging” for graphing calculators because they are so much less powerful than smartphones, but that really misses the overall point. The graphing calculator’s job isn’t to be a flashy consumer electronics status symbol, it’s a tool and it costs what it does because it does that job extremely well. Yes, a smartphone has more everything, more processing power, more RAM, more storage, but you’re not paying for the hardware as much as you are paying for a bespoke application-specific operating system that’s optimized down to the byte for its specific hardware so it can run a full CAS suite on a thing that you can use daily for months on a set of AA batteries. Even if I installed a CAS suite on a smartphone, almost all of the screen real estate will be dedicated to input which will make it cumbersome to use. If I pull out my TI-92+ I’ve got a full QWERTY keyboard, tons of application specific hardware buttons, and every single piece of it is designed to do one thing very, very well. My phone might be able to plot a three-dimensional graph that is faster manipulate and prettier to look at, but I’ll take the trade-offs for application focus.
Meanwhile Apple and Samsung get a free pass to issue the same product over and over for the same huge price tags because they make quite literally the smallest possible changes they can get away with and still remain competitive. “No bezels!” “Bigger screen!” “in-display fingerprint reader” aren’t the result of smart people working very hard to improve already good things, they’re what the money and marketing people think will be momentarily interesting enough to keep people buying. You won’t see much in the way of big innovations from major manufacturers because big innovations are both risky and they set an expensive precedent.
Before people say, “but the iPhone!” stop to consider what the iPhone actually was when it launched. They weren’t taking on the considerable risk of launching new hardware because they thought the hardware sales themselves were going to pay off (even though they did) the real goal of the iPhone was far more subtle: to put an always-on electronic storefront in the pocket of as many people on the planet as humanly possible.
At launch they were toys. I’m not admonishing that, there’s nothing wrong with it, but they were designed to target non-commercial users, which makes perfect sense when you take into consideration that, at least upon release, the iPhone’s primary goal was to draw people into the app store/iTunes. Most of Apple’s current “innovation” seems to involve further positioning themselves as a lifestyle brand, and streamlining their manufacturing operations to make their hardware as profitable as possible.
(which is not unique, “lifestyle brand” used to only be applicable to certain classes of products, but I’ve done work with marketing agencies, and they’ll apply the same identity-hooking advertising techniques to anything no matter how absurd–a heavy equipment manufacturer making branded work-unrelated clothing, for example. The goal is to make Caterpillar or Terex or Baker Hughes (oilfield services company) painting their freaking drill bits pink as part of its partnership with the SGK foundation.)
So use what works. It’s almost always better for the environment to use things until they can’t be used anymore rather than continually upgrading, and skipping a few generations means that when you do decide to upgrade, the sum total of incremental changes might just add up to something meaningfully new.
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Indeed, once I edit out the commercials, I transcode shows snagged from OTA broadcasts to H.264 for exactly that reason. Fortunately, my GPU is new enough to support NVENC, which even on its “slow” setting can make quick work of transcoding. It’ll also do H.265 (HEVC), but since my media center is a Raspberry Pi, that isn’t really a practical option.
Unfortunately, Nvidia being Nvidia, they pulled a dick move and artificially limited the number of transcoding jobs on GeForce cards to two at a time. Still, it’s faster than using the CPU at an equivalent quality setting.
Revision: your old gadgets that are running LineageOS (or are iOS devices if you like being locked in a Fisher-Price decorated garden for some reason) are likely good enough. (If you’re on an Android device that’s ‘old’ (more than 2 years) and you’re not running an ‘aftermarket’ ROM, you’re not getting security patches.)
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We’ve a 55" television, and I really can’t tell the difference between 720p and 1080p. (I can easily tell the difference between below 720p and 720p or above.)
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You’re buying the wrong laptops then. X-, T-, or W-/P- series ThinkPads are what you want.
Beauty is the eye of the beholder, I suppose. I find ThinkPads extremely attractive looking machines. Macbooks and lookalikes appear cheap to me. I’m aware that others have the inverse reaction. But there was a designer behind ThinkPads as well: http://blog.lenovo.com/en/blog/the-japanese-essence-in-thinkpad-bento-boxes
I can see the difference between 720p and 1080p on my 41.5", because I’m a metre and a half away. I have to lean in to see better than 1080p, though
Do moms still yell at kids not to sit too close to the TV??? My 46" is about 11’ from the back of the sofa. Oh, and I fixed it!!! (kinda)The picture was skitzing out at startup till it was warm, and the sound had dropouts when watching its internal sound, but not when I was using the bluetooth headphones from the HTPC. After testing the PC output on another HDMI TV I moved the input to another HDMI slot on the TV. I thought I had tried this before, but this time it worked. I guess there’s separate preamps or whatever for each slot and that one was cooked?
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I actually prefer the no-nonsense look of ThinkPads; they’re designed to be a useful tool rather than a fashion statement. Not only that, they’re built to be serviceable.
Not all is perfect, though; in particular, the hardcoded Wi-Fi card whitelist really rubs me the wrong way.
I reflash the bios with Coreboot or Libreboot - gets rid of white/blacklisting WiFi cards and cleans out the Intel spyware!
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I would be very happy to keep using my iPad 2, from 2011. Nothing has gone wrong with it, and the battery still lasts longer than any other phone, tablet, or laptop I have.
But seemingly the Web has moved on. So many pages load superslow or broken, if at all. Has the basic function of the web changed that much? I don’t think it looks that different. And many many apps are now broken, and the new version in the app store won’t install on the system that the tablet can run.
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Yes, they are what I buy. I’m just not a very careful owner.
We just replaced a 50" television with a 55" television. The old one was 720p and the new one is 4k. Sitting back on the couch, there isn’t a huge difference from resolution, but the HDR and super-black blacks is dramatically different. We’re watching Altered Carbon on it right now and it just looks so damned beautiful that I sometimes skip back to rewatch a sequence just to look around a little.
