Former Reddfugee, found a new home on feddit.de. Server errors made me switch to discuss.tchncs.de. Now finally @ home on feddit.org.

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Cake day: June 21st, 2024

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  • Surface are basically a tablet (=all hardware and weight in the monitor). You can get them with a cover that contains a keyboard but it is still top heavy (think of a normal cover for a tablet, but slightly more sturdy because of the keyboard).

    There’s also a surface book that more or lees is like a laptop - from the looks of it. The bottom part with the keyboard is heavier, but only contains the keyboard, an USB hub and additional batteries. It’s till top heavy with it, as you can “detach the screen” and still have a fully functional “PC tablet”.







  • Basically it means to not have a special designed hardware for task X but to do much of it in software which gives you more flexibility. And also let’s you configure and use X a bit more flexible.

    E.g. software defined networking: If you run several virtual machines on a server, you may define the whole network between them virtually in software instead of doing it on the hardware side. Sure, you still need an ethernet card in your server to connect it to other servers and the internet, but all load balancing, switches, firewalls, VLANs, etc. between the virtual machines (or containers) on your server are virtualized in software - or maybe eben between servers.

    Same goes for e.g. Software Defined Radio. In the early days you had dedicated hardware to control the mobile network and the antennas and such. Today you “just” have the antenna and a transceiver that is capable of producing and receiving a wide range of signals and modulations. All encoding, decoding and interpretation the signals is done in software. If your hardware is capable enough, the upgrade from e.g. 4G to 5G may only be a software update for all base stations.