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Comment Cheap (Score 2) 66

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.

Comment Dongles (Score 1) 66

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.

Comment SteamDeck (Score 1) 66

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.

Comment Open source drivers (Score 4, Informative) 66

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.

Comment Re:You're addressing a very important detail (Score 2) 102

Nuclear Fission isn't cost effective ... _unless_ you price in the full eco-balance of electricity production. Then the numbers look significantly different and fission could just be a real thing once again. At least until renewables and energy storage have gained significant portions of the energy mix.

No. This is nonsense. Nuclear fuel production has a massive ecological impact. Nuclear only looks good when compared to coal. Stop doing that.

Comment Re:Dooooom! (Score 4, Informative) 40

The funny bit is that the climate models contained in the 1990 IPPC report have been spot on (after 35 years, we are right in the middle of their prediction range), and all subsequent climate models were underestimating the effects. Apparently exactly those politicians you accuse of hysteria for personal gain were in fact pressuring climate scientist to modify their models and give less hysterical predictions - and they have been wrong, because they systematically underestimated the change.

But that's no wonder. While the amount of money spend on climate science is about 5 billion dollar a year, just the amount of subsidies given to oil, gas and coal is about 500 billion dollars a year, and no industry wants to lose half a trillion.

Comment Um, I dunno... (Score 1) 140

I'm by no means an expert, but I doubt the ability of modern universities to teach community in any meaningful, successful way. This seems like a course correction that's way too late, enacted by the same people responsible for the original problem.

They already tried that -- our ultra-woke (or whatever they're calling it these days) hard left sociology largely came from universities. They've already created a social community. One that did not work. How are the same people going to now teach a society that DOES work?

It feels like universities are a dead concept, they just don't know it yet. The required changes to renew relevance have become too large to be practical.

Comment Re: Oversold? and? (Score 1, Troll) 140

You can thank student loans for that. Earlier generations got their schooling subsidized, but now people have to get loans to pay for it themselves instead. Colleges therefore could raise tuition. Then a bipartisan effort in Congress was launched to make sure we couldn't discharge those loans through bankruptcy like you can gambling or other personal debts, which was led by Joseph R Biden. I think we know how that turned out, forgiveness for a few of the worst abused players, and blaming inability to keep his campaign promises related to partial forgiveness for all buyers blamed on Congress while he went around them to fund genocide in Gaza.

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