bsder

Dude, it's CHINA. Once developed, the manufacturer simply sold the LCDs to everybody.

Even now, there is nothing stopping you from going to the upstream LCD manufacturer and saying "Hi, Mr. LCD manufacturer. Here is a different driver chip, could you please take that nice LCD and use it with it?"

It all just takes cash. And not even a lot by manufacturing standards.

Chitu, IIRC, originally were open when they were using the initial color LCDs (off the shelf) and then the first iteration of monochrome ones (required NRE as nobody made 1920x1080 monochrom LCDs by then). And then everybody in the universe cloned them and Chitu got mad and Chitu made sure that the next iterations of monochrome LCDs had encrypted driver chips.

This isn't an unsolvable problem. It takes probably less than $100K (and probably less than $50K) in NRE to make a truly open-source monochrome LCD and driver chip. This is on the order of a plastic injection mold.

But everybody simply whines rather than banding together, coughing up the CASH, and actually FIXING the problem once and for all.

Sadly, this seems to be standard operating procedure in the world of open source.

> But: Natural stone has nowhere near the same magnitude of damage from the same level of exposure.

Is that true?

Or is it simply that before the "engineered" stone these kinds of countertops were sufficiently expensive that they were rare, and workers rarely had enough exposure to wind up in the hospital?

Agreed.

StackOverflow was dead man walking as soon as some HR idiot at Google weaponized Fake Internet Points via quarterly reviews needing "social contributions".

Before that, the ignorant punters would leave these kinds of sites alone. Since there was nothing to be gained, you either had to be an altruist or deranged to waste your time on answering questions on the site.

After Google weaponized Fake Internet Points and everybody copied Google, a zillion software programmers everywhere in the world suddenly wanted the shortest path to earn lots of Fake Internet Points rather than actually answering relevant questions.

THAT was the death of StackOverflow--everything else has been the denouement.

> Just buy an open source version from China

References and links?

There is currently no open source version of the high resolution monochrome LCDs. The LCDs and their drivers lock you into the Chitu ecosystem.

The problem, as Chitu figured out, is that as soon as you cough up the NRE to make the LCDs and make it publicly available, EVERYBODY will copy you and then there will be no profit left to sink the NRE that you just spent.

> If it is so important, why aren't all our gas wells extracting that helium?

Because the free market considers any supplier but the cheapest to be inefficient and drives them out of business. Robustness of the supply chain is always less profitable.

Whether helium or eggs or toilet paper, we keep getting shown the results of this lesson over and over. And people refuse to learn.

> It’s a miracle markets didn’t notice this “damned if you succeed damned if you don’t” type of inevitable checkmate

They learned from 2008 that Too Big Too Fail(tm) means the government bails you out.

This was the problem with not OBLITERATING the banks in 2008. Had the US government taken over the banks and wiped the investors, there would be more pushback right now.

As Boomers would say: Mayfly Attention Span.

Starcraft is EXQUISITELY optimized for e-gaming and streaming. That means short games and relatively small maps and relatively small numbers of units and "snowballing". Small advantages from a micro battle or macro organization multiply quickly into an inexorable avalanche. It's why Blizzard has to CONSTANTLY jiggle things to bump the meta around.

Supreme Commander, by contrast, tended toward larger maps. Your Tier 1 unit rarely could find the opponent before they were already laying out Tier 2 buildings. Battles had ebb and flow and RECLAIMING after a battle occurred meant that if you survived a battle, you now had material to rebuild and possibly more than the person who launched the attack. The game was more homeostatic than avalanche. But that doesn't tend to make good e-gaming or streaming fodder for ADHD teenagers.

And the interface differences are MASSIVE. I could go on for HOURS about why I LOATHE the Starcraft interface and love the Supreme Commander: Forged Alliance one (and similarly Beyond All Reason). But, that's a personal preference thing.

There is a PDF of "HOW TO SUCCEED IN MRBEAST PRODUCTION". You should read it. He is VERY clear what the goal is:

"Your goal here is to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. That’s the number one goal of this production company. It’s not to make the best produced videos. Not to make the funniest videos. Not to make the best looking videos. Not the highest quality videos.. It’s to make the best YOUTUBE videos possible. Everything we want will come if we strive for that. Sounds obvious but after 6 months in the weeds a lot of people tend to forget what we are actually trying to achieve here."

They could. But then you get clipping effects and sampling effects when you convert back and forth.

Better to upsample once (generally a non-lossy operation) and operate on single precision FP (24-bit mantissa and an exponent) at higher sampling from that point forward and then downsample once (generally a LOSSY operation).

Distributing music != recording music != processing music.

There ARE good reasons for recording and processing music at higher bitrates and sample sizes. Effects, especially those with positive feedback loops, can go more unstable and clip and lose information with fewer bits and samples.

There's just no good reason to DISTRIBUTE music at the higher rates.

If you can haul a 60 pound lump up 20 stories, this article is not for you.

Unions. Northeastern states expect that you will use union labor to build your projects or they will shut you down.

Pennsylvania, for example, was one of the few places to take Walmart to task for employing illegal labor.

Texas and Arizona are notoriously anti-union and anti-resident/pro-corporation.

This is why when I taught in college I NEVER gave out group assignments.

I'm not trying to test whether the best student knows the material; I'm trying to test whether all the students know the material.

As the person who regularly carried such groups when I was in high school and college, I was especially sensitive to this.

Matt is a creature of social media and has a lot of minions and sockpuppets. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯