Screenless smartphones could totally be viable as a product, especially for visually impaired folks.
The problem is only one: PROPRIETARY APPLICATIONS
Could you write a custom and simplified Facebook Messenger client that would allow clear and complete navigation through hardware buttons or vocal commands? Abso-fucking-lutely!
Can you do it without Facebook's approval which will never come? Abso-fucking-lutely not!
Although the hardware, the precursor, is more akin to a PDA than a smartphone it very well allows for mods targeting e.g. impaired vision, as the featured prototype of a braille keyboard shows.
I'm sure you've used software with open APIs with terrible accessibility too, the point is that with enough interest, open APIs make it easier to make alternate frontends. And open source implies an open API with the additional advantage of making it easier to modify the frontend.
In principle this is true, but my experience for accessiblity is: Apple first (they are amazing), Windows second (although many use 3rd party apps like JAWS), then Linux a distant third.
Many blind people are already successfully using iPhones. The experience could be better of course, but many apps work really well (I will admit I haven't tried FB Messenger, and don't currently have an iPhone to hand).
This would actually create a nice loop, and it would (hopefully) make app Devs take supporting blind users more seriously.
Your post is only partially correct. Even with completely open firmware, or at least a documented interface, the biggest roadblock would become be abysmal state of OSS digital image processing. Engineers at major smartphone and camera companies are paid top dollar to improve how the images are processed, this is no laughing matter and is obvious when you compare the image quality from a no-name chinese brand with Samsung or Apple even though they are using the same exact sensors.
FOSS smartphones such as the Pinephone would then need a whole bunch of accelerators to perform such computations because the general purpose CPU would be too slow for that, and image could take seconds to finish processing and get saved in the gallery. But at that point Pinephone itself would not have enough expertise for such a design and everything would crumble.
> is obvious when you compare the image quality from a no-name chinese brand with Samsung or Apple even though they are using the same exact sensors.
This is an area where FLOSS has an opportunity to shine. I think many of these algorithms are described in scientific papers and considering FLOSS is much more collaboration-prone, I'd really expect the best algorithms (except for the ones that require much training data) to soon be implemented. An example of a success case: AV1.
... to add to your point, then take companies like Google who rely heavily on ML to improve the quality of the photos further and the distance between "RAW data off sensor" and "the best Samsung/Apple/Google can generate" is a HUGE gap.
> To understand why these drugs could be so revolutionary, you need to understand how obesity works—which is often different from the way it’s talked about. Many people are under the misconception that their weight can be completely controlled by diet and exercise… But researchers and doctors are more inclined to think of the condition as just that: a chronic health condition. “Our brains regulate our appetite, and they regulate our metabolism,” said Jay. For the obese, those regulations are set to retain weight. A healthy lifestyle can help prevent obesity, but when a person who’s already overweight goes on a diet, their bodies increase appetite and decrease metabolism.
It is understandable to be skeptical of an increasing medicalized world, but a society-wide “fixing our lifestyles” isn’t an answer for people who need treatment now.
For example, prolonged screen use is linked to myopia. Would it make sense to say “glasses are a panacea, but the real question is: is the world ready to rethink computer-based careers?” Sure, maybe it would be better for our health if we all were on our computers a lot less, and there are probably deep-rooted societal problems at the root of our health issues, but… I need glasses.
> please specify which kind of diversity fosters innovation
To keep an open mind I did a thought experiment and found a few: entertainment, fusion food, music, those things I'd imagine benefit greatly from diversity.
You told me human endeavors in which "diversity" (which again, means nothing) fosters innovation.
But that wasn't my question. I asked what kind of diversity fosters innovation, not what kind of innovation is fostered by diversity
I already told you this is not what I asked. Your replies are all over the place and I sincerely am not understanding them.
[EDIT]
wow, you edited your whole long form reply and just replaced it with "I'm not a bot"? That's such a misleading and dishonest thing to do for everyone reading these posts from now onwards
Torrenting is a pretty standard, official, way of distributing Linux ISOs. Linux' license also doesn't really stop anyone from doing so, as it very much wants its users to share it with others (GPL v2, see the 4 freedoms of the FSF). There could be problems distributing e.g. Red Hat-owned stuff (trademarks, copyrighted things, non-FOSS software and such) without permission, but Linux itself is completely legal to share.
Torrenting also isn't illegal by itself or a direct link to pirating, it is just a very common way of sharing pirated data.
Emulation and virtualisation is a pretty standard, official, way of running software on other devices, where the software licence also doesn't stop anyone from doing so.
Emulating also isn't illegal by itself of a direct link to pirating, it is just a very common way of playing pirated games.
I assume you are probably trying to make fun of the comment or playing devil's advocate or something, but you are correct. The illegal part comes when you try to share things you have no rights to share, such as the ROMs or BIOS.
Just as you can go to to arch linux' web page and download through their recommended method (torrent), you can go play old PS1 games on the PSClassic (based on the PCSX emulator), or play GB/GBC games on your 3DS Virtual Console (in house nintendo-made emulator afaik, correct me if I'm wrong).
I interpreted the comment as a comparison between torrenting and emulation, "but torrenting isn't illegal but is used for illegal things" and thought it was implying the opposite for emulation, i.e that emulation was illegal.
I was making fun of that comment to point out the same is true of emulation. However I obviously misinterpreted the initial comment since you're clearly aware emulation itself is legal. Sorry.
No, in the way that advertising that your product can play a few homebrew games when it already can play thousands of Steam games makes no sense. It's obviously to hint at playing Nintendo titles.
Why does that matter? It's like torrents and Linux distributions, perfectly legal, it's not the software developers intent that makes the file sharing be legal or not, it's the users usage of such software.
1. Then you don't have to carry a steam deck and a switch.
2. This way you can buy physical copies of games, keeping full control and the ability to resell them, while also carrying your current game library on an SD card.
Edit: I forgot modding! That's a huge use of emulation.
So you don't have to travel with both your Switch and your Steamdeck. So you can play games at higher resolution and fps than the Switch. So people can make playthough and tips/tricks videos of Switch games without needing to buy a capture card. So you can use game mods without jailbreaking your switch.
Such mechanism already exists. Look for the comment by @nightpool
It works best between Mastodon instances, but between different apps the migrations are often also supported. New apps like GoToSocial have the migration still as open issue sitting in their tracker, but will support as well.
Webtorrent is a modification to the bittorrent protocol to allow it to be used from a web browser with no plugins/extensions.
It's built on top of WebRTC.
Webtorrent and regular torrents can exist of the same file, but crucially, at least some small percentage of the people in the network have to support both webtorrent and regular torrent to act as a kind of bridge between the two.
If this isn't the case, you might have a webtorrent user who has the file, and a regular torrent user who wants the file, but the two people can't connect to eachother because they're talking different protocols, so the file won't be delivered.
Simply seeding for the 1+ hour you are watching the movie is typically enough to keep a torrent swarm healthy now that the majority of users have 10 Mbps+upload speeds. In that time, you can easily upload more data than you downloaded, meaning you are a net benefit for the swarm.
In a general sense, any video content where the bitrate is lower than the typical users upload bitrate could work for a webtorrent only swarm of 'regular' users who aren't going to do anything special for network health.
Only if they seed more than they leech. It has little to do with time. If you take a year to seed more than you leeched, you're a positive contribution to the swarm.
Problem is: they can't watch movies in their browser because they can only leech from people who are seeding from a webtorrent client.
Let's say I have a movie I want to let other people stream with their browser. I am obligated to use some javascript horror webtorrent-compatible client. If I already have a seedbox running transmission I simply cannot use that for this purpose, which is a shame
So where would transmission support come into play ? In being able to recognize files that include both web and regular torrent ? Or in being to transparently talk to web clients from transmission ? Both ?
> In being able to recognize files that include both web and regular torrent
The actual .torrent file is the same for both, so it already has support there.
> Or in being to transparently talk to web clients from transmission
This. Currently if all peers who have the data of a torrent are webtorrent clients, then transmission won't be able to download that file.
Most importantly, the webtorrent ecosystem is still small, and browser-based webtorrent-only clients suffer because frequently they can't get the file data they need because all the other peers only talk the original-torrent protocol.
Well, webtorrents are just regular torrents using websockets as a transport mechanism, since you can't just have raw sockets from a browser sandbox.
If it supported these as a transport mechanism, transmission would be able to communicate with torrent clients that run in the browser, making the potential number of peers much higher (both for swarms that are mostly in-browser, and for those that have a majority of traditional clients). It would be very useful for seeding peertube videos from transmission, for instance, which was the quoted use-case.
Webtorrent allows you to download torrents from a stock iPhone: you use a JavaScript interpreter from the app store (that is allowed as per the app store guidelines, same for Python interpreter), then just run Webtorrent that works in JavaScript only. Like that I downloaded a lot of things while outside.
Wait, you're not allowed to run anything using the BitTorrent protocol on iOS? I never had the need myself, but I just assumed it would be allowed, because there is no reasonable explanation you wouldn't. Like the whole protocol is banned from the AppStore?
As soon as it lands in transmission, I will start seeding my favourite peertube videos 24/7, and I hope others will do the same. Unless peertube videos are typically being seeded like this, I'm sceptical of the platform.
The problem is only one: PROPRIETARY APPLICATIONS
Could you write a custom and simplified Facebook Messenger client that would allow clear and complete navigation through hardware buttons or vocal commands? Abso-fucking-lutely!
Can you do it without Facebook's approval which will never come? Abso-fucking-lutely not!