I'm afraid that we've already got everything we need to make a much more comfortable society even with "just" the technology and resources we have now. That fact that we don't shows that something else is hard-wired into our biology: how to be complete and utter assholes.
I suspect even with completely free everything we'll still find ways to have taxes and rich and poor people.
and brains and talent and resources... for a fucking video game. I wonder if people a hundred years from now will laugh at us or hate us for the squandered resources?
I understand and I agree; I don't like where we are heading collectively. But what can I do about it? If I see a big rainstorm coming, do I complain about the fact I don't like being wet or do I get an umbrella?
Easy to say. When Grace was around she wasn't competing against Indian, Chinese, Brazilian and Russian university students being pumped out by the thousands every year.
Smart parenting. If I have kids, I'll pound it into their heads that technical stuff is for hobbies only. Unfortunately I fear we are heading back to the historical mean for the human race, laborers work garbage jobs with no future, you have the "gentry" and you have the rich families that control everything by blood line.
The gentry would be notaries, lawyers, accountants, managers, etc all jobs which could have been equally well replaced by outsourcing or automation but will never, ever be.
I'd also encourage them to become rentiers, buy a rental property ASAP.
Now that I'm 40 and am still struggling to find work in a dwindling technical area in Montreal, I see other people my age making millions for doing nothing of any real value I can see.
One guy opened an expensive all-hype hair salon. He has 5 expensive cars. All he does is maintain an image.
Real estate agents and notaries provide little to no actual service but have a legal framework to ensure their jobs. Optometrists are another case of something that could easily be replaced by automation but will never be.
Simply put, if you interact with a machine of any kind, you'll either be stuck in stagnating wages or in the perpetual education (at your expense!) treadmill.
I don't see my local landlords or business owners wearing diapers because they fear for their future.
I think you and your colleague are nothing but developmentally challenged overgrown teenagers. How can anyone give a flying fuck about any of this techno-shit past about 35 is beyond me. Look at the world and the people in it: is yet another way to make a 1 into a 0 changing anything for the better anywhere?
Yes, from what I understand if there's DC on a shutter for too long this chemically degrades the liquid crystal itself. So the TCON NEEDS to refresh the screen no matter what so it can run its inversion scheme.
Anyways you seem to know a thing or two about LCDs!
Why does it matter if you dump whole frames to the LCD? It's not like the cable is miles long or that transmitting a signal takes so much power compared to the backlight.
You'd just be adding a lot of complexity to arbitrarily refresh a bunch of pixels.
Oh and suddenly programmers are worried about *efficiency*? I doubt it! You'd just be adding complexity to the monitor. Right now a monitor is a 2 dimensional serial to parallel converter. It does the job just fine.
And I'd argue your assertion that pixels are addressed on a LCD. If you're not using it at its native resolution, what are you addressing? That's purely a concept on the computer side. It's actually the TCON in the monitor that does any "addressing", and it doesn't do anything more fancy than a shift register. It's not like you can go back on the line and say "oops, I wanted that pixel to be purple, not yellow, so please address it". By that time, it's too late. Next line!
It's tragic to hear the kind of nonsense people tell themselves. It's like a cyclist buying a car and saying "that's silly, why would a car have a speed?"
It's the same thing, dingus!
A monitor is just a high-speed serial device. Stuff comes in at some rate. The only reason CRTs had such tight timing requirements was because of the humongous amount of reactive power flowing in the deflection coils. You can just short them out but then all that reactive power becomes real (waste) heat. Lots of it. So people didn't do that.
Remember how old Multisync monitors used to click relays as they shifted to different horizontal frequencies? That was the monitor swapping in different capacitors to create the LC tank with the deflection coils. So they could swap the power around between the coil and the cap instead of dissipating it.
But that meant you better be ready to send me those pixels when I'm ready! I can't wait!
There is no such large power being bounced around inside an LCD, it's really just thousands of analog voltages being sent to a glass panel. It can wait a bit, the picture won't fade that quickly. Eventually the capacitor that is formed by the LCD shutter will leak, but that takes time.
What's "purely digital" about a LCD? You can have analog VGA inputs, which are digitized in the monitor, then sent over some ridiculously fast serial interface to column driver ICs on the glass... to be converted back to the analog voltages needed to control the LCD shutters.
Guess what? Your LCD monitor has thousands of D/A converters in it!
So for example, a relatively cheap monitor (like mine) 1680x1050, requires 1680x3=5040 columns to be driven in the actual glass. Each pixel has RGB, right? Well, those voltages have to come from somewhere!
www.intechopen.com/download/pdf/11273
Column drivers are the most amazing things I've seen in a while. They are bare dies about 2 x 11 mm with hundreds of pins, attached directly to the flex PCB that drives the glass. Each IC contains hundreds of digital-to-analog converters and opamps! It's crazy! There's usually 10 per panel, so each IC drives about 500 lines. You should see the flex PCBs, the traces are so fine you need a magnifying glass to resolve the traces.
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I'm afraid that we've already got everything we need to make a much more comfortable society even with "just" the technology and resources we have now. That fact that we don't shows that something else is hard-wired into our biology: how to be complete and utter assholes.
I suspect even with completely free everything we'll still find ways to have taxes and rich and poor people.
I think you mean a time domain reflectometer. A VNA would be a terrible choice.
and brains and talent and resources... for a fucking video game. I wonder if people a hundred years from now will laugh at us or hate us for the squandered resources?
I understand and I agree; I don't like where we are heading collectively. But what can I do about it? If I see a big rainstorm coming, do I complain about the fact I don't like being wet or do I get an umbrella?
Easy to say. When Grace was around she wasn't competing against Indian, Chinese, Brazilian and Russian university students being pumped out by the thousands every year.
I wish your comment made sense. What are you trying to say?
Pretty much, yes. Would you rather I tell my kids "be a poor peon to keep other people rich"?
You can do that if you want, but my eyes are opened now. I used to be idealistic too.
If you buy a rental property, it will generate passive revenues in ten years.
What will the code you wrote today do for you in ten years? Yeah, unless you own it, nothing.
You can keep investing your time and energy to make other people rich, that's fine, but why burden your children with your neuroses?
Smart parenting. If I have kids, I'll pound it into their heads that technical stuff is for hobbies only. Unfortunately I fear we are heading back to the historical mean for the human race, laborers work garbage jobs with no future, you have the "gentry" and you have the rich families that control everything by blood line.
The gentry would be notaries, lawyers, accountants, managers, etc all jobs which could have been equally well replaced by outsourcing or automation but will never, ever be.
I'd also encourage them to become rentiers, buy a rental property ASAP.
Now that I'm 40 and am still struggling to find work in a dwindling technical area in Montreal, I see other people my age making millions for doing nothing of any real value I can see.
One guy opened an expensive all-hype hair salon. He has 5 expensive cars. All he does is maintain an image.
Real estate agents and notaries provide little to no actual service but have a legal framework to ensure their jobs. Optometrists are another case of something that could easily be replaced by automation but will never be.
Simply put, if you interact with a machine of any kind, you'll either be stuck in stagnating wages or in the perpetual education (at your expense!) treadmill.
I don't see my local landlords or business owners wearing diapers because they fear for their future.
I bet the IT department is changing each other's diapers now! And updating their resumés....
I think you and your colleague are nothing but developmentally challenged overgrown teenagers. How can anyone give a flying fuck about any of this techno-shit past about 35 is beyond me. Look at the world and the people in it: is yet another way to make a 1 into a 0 changing anything for the better anywhere?
Yes, from what I understand if there's DC on a shutter for too long this chemically degrades the liquid crystal itself. So the TCON NEEDS to refresh the screen no matter what so it can run its inversion scheme.
Anyways you seem to know a thing or two about LCDs!
6502! Just kidding.
Why does it matter if you dump whole frames to the LCD? It's not like the cable is miles long or that transmitting a signal takes so much power compared to the backlight.
You'd just be adding a lot of complexity to arbitrarily refresh a bunch of pixels.
Oh and suddenly programmers are worried about *efficiency*? I doubt it! You'd just be adding complexity to the monitor. Right now a monitor is a 2 dimensional serial to parallel converter. It does the job just fine.
And I'd argue your assertion that pixels are addressed on a LCD. If you're not using it at its native resolution, what are you addressing? That's purely a concept on the computer side. It's actually the TCON in the monitor that does any "addressing", and it doesn't do anything more fancy than a shift register. It's not like you can go back on the line and say "oops, I wanted that pixel to be purple, not yellow, so please address it". By that time, it's too late. Next line!
It's tragic to hear the kind of nonsense people tell themselves. It's like a cyclist buying a car and saying "that's silly, why would a car have a speed?"
It's the same thing, dingus!
A monitor is just a high-speed serial device. Stuff comes in at some rate. The only reason CRTs had such tight timing requirements was because of the humongous amount of reactive power flowing in the deflection coils. You can just short them out but then all that reactive power becomes real (waste) heat. Lots of it. So people didn't do that.
Remember how old Multisync monitors used to click relays as they shifted to different horizontal frequencies? That was the monitor swapping in different capacitors to create the LC tank with the deflection coils. So they could swap the power around between the coil and the cap instead of dissipating it.
But that meant you better be ready to send me those pixels when I'm ready! I can't wait!
There is no such large power being bounced around inside an LCD, it's really just thousands of analog voltages being sent to a glass panel. It can wait a bit, the picture won't fade that quickly. Eventually the capacitor that is formed by the LCD shutter will leak, but that takes time.
What's "purely digital" about a LCD? You can have analog VGA inputs, which are digitized in the monitor, then sent over some ridiculously fast serial interface to column driver ICs on the glass... to be converted back to the analog voltages needed to control the LCD shutters.
Guess what? Your LCD monitor has thousands of D/A converters in it!
So for example, a relatively cheap monitor (like mine) 1680x1050, requires 1680x3=5040 columns to be driven in the actual glass. Each pixel has RGB, right? Well, those voltages have to come from somewhere!
www.intechopen.com/download/pdf/11273
Column drivers are the most amazing things I've seen in a while. They are bare dies about 2 x 11 mm with hundreds of pins, attached directly to the flex PCB that drives the glass. Each IC contains hundreds of digital-to-analog converters and opamps! It's crazy! There's usually 10 per panel, so each IC drives about 500 lines. You should see the flex PCBs, the traces are so fine you need a magnifying glass to resolve the traces.
http://oi59.tinypic.com/whmc74...
This is as close as I can get this morning. Yes, those traces are so fine they just look like a green patch.
I'd say that means a LCD monitor is more analog than digital, but that's just me.
So what's so strange about a serial device needing synchronization signals anyways?
Since my carbon fiber bike is 12 years old at this point.
Can I still play Skate or Die on my C64?
for lurid dreaming?
Makes as much sense as megabytes of keyboards.
Geez, was this Don Lancaster's printer? It makes sense though, Postscript has to do a lot of math.
http://www.tinaja.com/post01.s...
This is England. They'll be sentenced to funny walks and an ASBO.
Don't forget the page wideners. For some reason, those always cracked me up. Don't know why.
http://www.ebay.ca/itm/NICE-So...
That should do the job, and it'll keep its resale value. Skip the ultra cost-reduced thingies you see at walmart.
People don't remember Sony's MP3 devices which were groundbreaking,
I'm pretty sure you mean MiniDisc, and yes, for a while, I was a *god* walking the Earth with my MZ-1.
If you deliver astronauts to IIS, it's not just his head that will explode.