Comment Re: Sherman act? (Score 1) 90
I'm not saying that they can't do it, it's that they can't legally do it.
I'm not saying that they can't do it, it's that they can't legally do it.
Ugh. Acrobat actually craps itself on forms now. The check boxes keep disappearing during scrolling, and I have the latest reader.
"The amount of raw materials used is significantly higher meaning the ecological impact is greater."
It isn't and that's also not how it works
No they did not. This story is about how they didn't. Learn to read, coward.
This isn't about a trademark. It's about a patented specification.
This is true. And the Republicans are the party of Nazis.
However I suspect it would be a bit more than $10 today.
A bit, but not much. (random example off AliExpress, that use this synaptic chip)
Worse yet, such a setup would most certainly add latency to an application, gaming, that is sensitive already to any delays. Gaming is what drives the 120Hz and above refresh rates...
There's no real reason why latency should be more than a couple of "scan-lines" (well, at least the DSC's equivalent horizontal-lines, if the signal needs conversion between compression variants). And there's a big incentive: less on-chip built-in RAM - it's litteraly cheaper to make the chip only keep the most recent relevant data and immediately start streaming out the HDMI 2.1 signal as soon as possible, rather than keeping multiple entire frames.
It is a toothless threat, but not because of the courts, pah. The Democrats always defend the new normal, no matter how bad it is. Nothing bad ever gets rolled back.
I fear that most DisplayPort to HDMI 2.1 dongles are not active adapters but instead passive physical connection switches.
Most, but not all. I litterally have a DisplayProt to HDMI + DVI + VGA combo dongle on my workstation at home.
But they tend to by a tiny bit more expensive (think 10 bucks instead of 1 bucks on AliExpress. Or 50 bucks at your local TV shop), because they require a dedicated chip inside the dongle.
Although to my frustration it has never worked the other way around with a HDMI ports being simply physical convertible to a DisplayPort.
Depends on the device. Can happen in some professional projectors: some enterprise-grade projectors can litteraly support "any protocol over any wiring with enough pins", i.e.: the presence of a HDMI, DP, DVI or VGA connector on a given port is mainly a convenience. This is so you could reuse wathever cabling is embed in the walls, you don't need to tear down the walls and redo the cabling (which could get expensive in a large conference room). This is also the reason you could find ultra cheap passive VGA-to-HDMI cables on AliExpress/eBay/Amazon for the last segment between the VGA port built into the lectern of some old university lecture room and the laptop outputting the HDMI that the projector is actually configured to fetch from the VGA cabling embed in the walls.
You can use DisplayPort instead. Is it possible to convert DP to HDMI 2.1?
Yes, that's litteraly how the SteamDeck handles this.
The SteamDeck can output DisplayPort on its USB-C connector (similar to tons of laptops and some smartphones), and the SeamDeck's Dock has a dedicated hardware chip that does the translation into HDMI signal.
This way no need to tweak any support into opensource GPL'd drivers inside the SteamDeck and then risking running afoul of HDMI's licensing restrictions.
cheaper to just pay the license fee
The problem is that unlike Nintendo, Sony and Microsoft, Valve isn't selling a closed box with proprietary blob.
Their hardware runs Linux with a close-to-upstream kernel(*).
Among other, they are using the FOSS stack: Linux kernel driver, user space Mesa libraries, etc.
All this is GPL meaning that the code is released (or at least pull requests with the latest are wainting to be eventually upstreamed)
And the HDMI's licencing currently prohibits making that code available (or conversly, GPL means that every body should be able to read and modify the code that does HDMI 2.1 shit even people who haven't paid the license).
(*): except for the dock. The Steam Deck's dock has a dedicated chip that does the USB-C DisplayPort to HDMI conversion, so no need to tweak anything on the drivers running inside the SteamDeck.
Where do you think cars are going? You already have to wait for permission to use your car as it boots up. And then there's the data tracking built into the vehicle which is relayed to third parties. This will only be the next step in people being given permission to use something they thought they purchased.
The eventual goal is to have people rent their PC or phone and all the software they use.
It's also a way to get around the prohibition on setting different prices for SNAP recipients. For example you can buy over the net from Costco with SNAP on Instacart but not directly. And the prices are higher there than on their site.
Nuclear Fission isn't cost effective
No. This is nonsense. Nuclear fuel production has a massive ecological impact. Nuclear only looks good when compared to coal. Stop doing that.
That's IMHO really overplaying it. I don't want to downplay food production effort difficulty, but saying "because we've never done it we can't" is like saying "Because we've never built a 5-meter-tall statue of a puffin made of glued-together Elvis dolls, we can't". We absolutely can, it's just a question of whether one thinks the investment is worth it. And I'm not talking out my arse, I have a degree in horticulture with a specialty in greenhouse cultivation. So much of the "keep the plants alive" systems we already do on Earth - you just need to get them there in an affordable manner.
The primary consumables are water and fertilizer. Nobody seriously is proposing building a colony that can't produce its own water. As for fertilizer, that would start off as an import, but a much smaller import than the food mass. On Earth, open-loop fert systems are fairly common, but they're slowly losing ground to closed-loop where you just maintain the EC, filter the returning solution, and every now and then due a nutrient-level test on the solution and individually adjust whatever nutrient might be lacking vs. the others.
We can consume lots of growing medium, like disposable rock wool cubes and the like, but we can also not do that. For example, it's perfectly fine to grow plants in clean sand / fine gravel - just clean it and sterilize it between uses. Something like pumice is better, though it slowly breaks down between uses. But you don't have to use anything special.
If you do LED lights, you may get a decade or so out of them. You can reduce shipping mass for replacement by going with designs that let you replace just the light boards from them (Mechatronix has lights like this for example), no need to resend e.g. the heavy heat sink, etc.
There's a million random things you use or that can wear out, from cleaning solutions to solution pumps to climate computers and and on and on. But they're not a meaningful import-mass, at least compared to food. Really, the big thing is fert. But regenerating fertilizer from waste (plant waste, human waste) should not be - industrially - immensely complicated. For the metals, burn to oxides / hydroxides, dissolve in acid, fractionally crystallize. You'll always lose some from the system, but we're not talking large amounts. For nitrates, Haber-Bosch is nothing exotic to adapt, and you have easy feedstocks (mining is complex, sucking in gases isn't).
Promising costs nothing, it's the delivering that kills you.