oktoberpaard

I don’t doubt the fact that they take some margin to extend the lifetime of the battery, but if we take iPhones as an example, they:

• charge at a slower rate when nearing 100%
• try to postpone charging the final 20% until the last moment before disconnecting from the wall outlet
• can be software capped at 80% by the user (in newer models)

This makes me suspect that that the margin between what’s reported in software as 100% and the actual capacity of the battery is less than 20%. This also makes sense from the standpoint of the consumer expecting a long battery life on their expensive high-end device, putting pressure on the companies to make the margin smaller and the charging algorithms smarter. Just my observations, of course.

I’m pretty sure that Chrome’s alternative is designed by Google to track you in a way that’s harder to block and gives them more control over the advertising market by forcing advertisers to play along and use their method instead of collecting your data directly. Sure, it’s more private, but it’s still tracking you.

Firefox, on the other hand, is focusing on completely blocking cross-site tracking. They have no incentive to completely block 3rd party cookies as long as there is also a legitimate use case for them, but I guess they will eventually also block them if Chrome is successful in forcing websites to stop relying on them for core functionality.

But then when you’re talking about 10:00 hours without specifying anything else, it actually means something completely different in the local context, apart from it being the exact same time globally. It doesn’t tell you whether it’s night or day at the other persons location. Your default point of reference in that system is the world, while even today, time is mostly used in a local context for most people. When I’m talking to someone abroad and I say “my cat woke me up at 5:00 in the morning”, I expect the other person to get the meaning of that, because the other person understands my local context.

When planning meetings you’d have to now the offset either way, because I’m not going to meet at idiotic times if there is an overlap in working hours between the two countries, which is something that you’d have to look up regardless of the time system. And if I send out a digital invite to someone abroad, the time zone information is already encoded inside it, and it shows up correctly in the other person’s agenda without the need to use a global time. In that sense UTC already is the global time and the local context is already an offset to that in the current system. We just don’t use UTC in our daily language.

But if it helps: I do agree that in an alternative universe the time system could’ve worked like that and it would have functioned. I just don’t see it as a better alternative. It’s the same complexity repackaged and with its own unique downsides.

But with such a system in place, what are we actually solving? If we’re agreeing on offsets (which would happen in a sane world), we’re just moving the information from one place to another. In both systems there is a concept of time zones, but it’s just the notation that’s different, which adds a whole new bunch of stuff to adapt to that’s goes very much against what is ingrained into society, without offering much in return. It’s basically saying “it’s 10:00 UTC, but I’m living in EST, so the local offset is -5 hours (most people are still asleep here)” [1]. Apart from the fact that you can already use that right now (add ISO 8601 notation to the mix while you’re at it), it doesn’t really change the complexity of having time zones, you just convey it differently.

Literally the only benefit that I can come up with is that you can leave out the offset indicator (time zone) and still guarantee to be there at the agreed time. Right now you’d have to deduct the time zone from the context, which is not always possible. That doesn’t outweigh the host of new issues that we’d have to adapt to or work around in my opinion.

[1] In practice we would probably call that 10:00 EST, which would be 10:00 UTC, but indicate the local offset.

Sure, but roughly speaking you know that 14:00 local time is probably okay for a business call, whereas 2:00 local time is probably not. You can get that information in a standardized way and the minor deviations due to local preferences and culture can be looked up or learned if needed. In contrast, with the other system there is no standard way of getting that information, except for using a search engine, Wikipedia, etc. The information not encoded anymore in the time zone, because there is no timezone.

Also, consider this: every software program would have to interpret per country what “tomorrow” means. I mean, when I’m postponing something with a button until tomorrow morning, I sure want to sleep in between. I don’t want tomorrow morning to be whenever it’s 8:00 hours in my country, which can be right after dinner. That means yet again that we need to have a separate source giving us the context of what the local time means, which is already encoded in the current system with time zones.

Not to mention the fact that it’s plain weird to go to a new calendar day in the middle of the day. “Let’s meet the 2nd of January!” That date could span an afternoon, the night and the morning after. That feels just plain weird and is not compatible with how we’re used to treat time. Which country will get the luxury of having midnight when it’s actually night?

Until you’re talking with someone from another country and you have no shared concept of time. Or you’re going abroad and you have to relearn what the numbers mean to fit the schedule. In the current system the numbers mean roughly the same in any country you visit.

Because time relates to the position sun and tells us something about what period of the day it is in that timezone. Your proposal would strip off that information, which means that you would have to look up in a different system what the business hours are in another country, when it’s night, etc. That means that you’re basically reinventing timezones by putting them in a separate system, which defeats the purposes and makes it more complicated than it already is.

Sure, time differences might be a bit cumbersome, but timezones have a name and can be converted from one to another. Also, most digital calendars (for meetings, etc) have timezone support and work perfectly fine when involving people from multiple timezones. To find a good moment to meet, you will still have to keep the time difference in mind, but in the current system you can at least take it into account just by looking at the time difference.

You can’t expect any country to take the international court seriously if you don’t do it yourself. The logic that you’ve just used is exactly the kind of logic that countries would use that don’t want to be held accountable for their actions that go against international law.

Maybe to make the article seem shorter, so you’re more inclined to keep reading. Once you’re halfway through, you’re more likely to want to read the rest. Both halves are probably filled with ads, so the longer you stick around, the better.

For general usage, it doesn’t really matter. Distrobox is inspired on toolbox and provides some added functionality and configurability, like init scripts and the ability to run different distros, as well as creating desktop shortcuts on your host system. If you don’t need all of that, I’d stick with toolbox, as it’s preinstalled and works well.

Is there information available about the noise levels of the case? I only see noise levels mentioned for the active cooler.

Average none, though 2.5 Gbps is getting more and more common and WiFi is catching up too. You could max out multiple slower devices at the same time without hitting the limit of your uplink. I don’t have a use case for that, so I’d only upgrade from my current 1 Gbps to higher speeds if the price is comparable. That doesn’t mean that others don’t have a use case for it.