“I don’t share your use case, therefore your preference is invalid and only mine is correct.”
Yeah, I know that one very well.
Progenitor of the Weird Knife Wednesday feature column. Is “column” the right word? Anyway, apparently I also coined the Very Specific Object nomenclature now sporadically used in the 3D printing community. Yeah, that was me. This must be how Cory Doctorow feels all the time these days.
“I don’t share your use case, therefore your preference is invalid and only mine is correct.”
Yeah, I know that one very well.
What? I don’t have to “imagine” anything. I literally owned one, for two years. Nothing was “sacrificed” on the Priv. It was in all aspects a completely modern phone, even managing to include a headphone jack and memory card slot, a curved edge display, wireless charging, and a 3400 mAh battery. And don’t try to come at me about battery capacity, either. Just to name an example, its contemporary in the Galaxy S7 had a 3000 mAh battery, was the flagship phone of its time, and sold bucketloads of units.
Your argument is bullshit. Slider phones aren’t made because manufacturers don’t want to make them – be that for low projected sales reasons or whatever else – not because there is any physical reason they can’t.
The Priv wasn’t. Read the entire post. The Priv from Blackberry/TCL had a slider keyboard and altogether was 9.5mm thick. My current Moto G Power 5G is 8.5. An iPhone 16 is 8.25. This is not an appreciable difference.
Obviously there’s not any technical reason anyone couldn’t make a modern slider as thin as current slates, it’s just that with the discontinuation of the Priv nobody does. And that’s not even getting into fixed keyboard designs.
I had one of those for a while. That was the best worst phone I ever owned. It was awesome at absolutely everything except being a phone…
Unihertz makes a couple of modern keyboard phones but none of them are sliders.
People who want a keyboard, that’s who.
I don’t get why people go around acting like these phones did not physically exist in the past in significant numbers, and both the “expense” and thickness problems were not, in fact, problems.
My old Galaxy S Relay 4G was not appreciably any thicker than my current phone is with its case on it. And the Blackberry Priv I had after that was still exactly as thin as current modern phones.
From what I recall this model had some exposed test pads or something on the board under the cover that were connected to the USB port. The wireless charging adapter had a little pigtail that you kind of wedged in there on top of the pads and that did the trick.
My most fondly remembered phone is easily the Galaxy S Relay 4G I had for ages:
In its time, this motherfucker was pimp. It was essentially a Galaxy S5, but with a slightly smaller footprint and a sliding five row QWERTY keyboard – with arrow keys and dedicated number row. It was the bossest thing ever for remoting into systems via SSH or RDP to administer servers at work and so forth. It supported NFC, MHL video out, USB on the go (which was not necessarily a given at the time), and I wedged one of those wireless charging stickers into it under its battery cover. Of course it had a memory card slot, a headphone jack, and a swappable battery.
Seems to be missing “hole,” “canoe,” and “whistle.”
The old Grumman LLV’s are also ugly as hell. We just got used to them over the decades.
The same thing will happen with these eventually.
Ceramics are a broad class of materials with a wide spectrum of properties. There is no one singular material called “ceramic.” Ceramic materials can be made smooth and slippery or textured and grippy, and everywhere in between.
And for those of you not in the know…
Gradius, right? Konami’s many-sequeled, side scrolling shoot-'em-up game? They made a spin off series called Parodius (parody + Gradius, geddit?) and it was utterly bizarre.
I’ll just leave this here as an example:
This is the 2nd level boss from Jikkyō Oshaberi Parodius, one of the SNES incarnations. You are a cat wielding a loaf of bread as a shield, fighting not just a kaiju sized schoolgirl wearing bunny ears, but two of them, one standing on the other’s shoulders. Who attack you by throwing angry Moai heads at you riding on paper airplanes and stuff. This is after you fought your way through a shmup stage that’s a Japanese high school based on Konami’s visual novel property, Tokimeki Memorial.
In the first level you ultimately fight your way through a disco, blasting at, among other things, multicolored penguins who are wearing afro wigs. While a SNES chiptune rendition of KC & The Sunshine Band’s “That’s The Way I Like It” plays in the background. The boss of that stage is an opera singing panda. I promise you I am not making this up.
Just… Just look at this.
Chrysler/Stellantis. Releasing anything of “perfect quality.”
Ha.
Ha ha.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahaha.
Sorry, that’s a good one.
And while we’re at it, a physical tactile keyboard.
I can do you one better: My GPD laptop has a charging indicator on the center type-C port indicating that this is where the power supply goes, but it can actually be charged from either port regardless of the icon. Both ports are USB 3.0 or 3.2 or whatever the current fast standard is this week, but only the center one supports video out via an external GPU enclosure. So if you want to use it docked with an eGPU, it’s actually required to not plug the power supply into the port that says you should plug the power supply into it.
So not only is the marking meaningless, it’s arguably worse than meaningless because in one of the headline hardware setups for the machine it is actually 100% incorrect to do what the marking is telling you to do. Wrap your head around that one…
But if they omit the symbol entirely, they save 0.003 cents per unit, but they will continue to charge the same inflated retail price for it and all their cult members will cover for them by gushing about how sleek the “minimalist” design is.
We’re not calling it that anymore. It’s been rebranded to “SuperDuper Speed USB ]|[” now. Note that this is a different standard than the previous “SuperDuper Speed USB 3,” and under no circumstances should you call it “SuperDuper Speed USB 3.0,” because there was never any such spec and pedantic nerds will climb up your nose in the comments if you ever utter it.
I guarantee you the bibles in question are provided by some local (private) fundamentalist organization. There’s no way the prison is spending its own money on that. So then you’ve got to look at who is the biggest group of religion-peddlers to find your most likely source.
In America at present, the various Christianity-adjacent sects are basically the only religious groups out proselytizing in any significant numbers. I suspect that compared to the Mormons, Jehovah’s Witnesses and Seventh Day Aventists, and assorted Evangelical/Baptist types, everyone else is basically just a rounding error.
If experience is any judge, plenty of dudes go into prison and come out Muslim. So Allah must still find them somehow.
Fucking magnets. Saved you a click.
(Magnetic clothing buttons have already been invented. Repeatedly. You can buy 20 for six bucks on Amazon.)
I am positive prior art could be claimed for most if not all of those. Square Enix could cry afoul of the “mounting creatures” one as well as I’m sure many, many other earlier games on a plethora of platforms.
You could mount and ride Chocobos in Final Fantasy 2, i.e. the real “2,” the JDM only one on Famicom, which was released in 1988. The aforementioned patent was only filed on Nintendo’s part in 2024.
They can, to use a technical legal term, get fucked.