linuxkerneldev

> e-ink displays have not really improved significantly in terms of resolution and refreshing speed.

When we started using E-Ink displays in 2010, we were getting 6" 800x600 panels. In 2017, we're using (standard, not top of the line) 1600x1200 6" panels with significantly better white. You can put the old and new panels side by side and see the difference. There's a wide variety of sizes. There's also the Spectra black,white+red displays which I haven't played with yet. http://www.theverge.com/2013/5/23/4358326/e-ink-spectra-colo...

Refresh speed. E-Ink panels don't need refresh. Update speed is a bit better. You can do animation. Yotaphone used that for mirroring the LCD on E-Ink. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NZoTfd7MzKs

We must give credit to Hollywood for making us look like saviors throughout the world. I was amazed that an educated Vietnamese engineer actually thought Rambo was based on a real life story. I didn't have the heart to tell him about the My Lai massacre so I just smiled and let it pass. But I regret it because I feel that once that engineer and perhaps even the rest of the world learn the reality of history, they may hate us more because we tried to push this savior facade. I fear the blowback that I'm pretty sure will eventually come.

> I meant the waveform data at offset 0x700000 on the internal storage of the Kobo devices

Waveform data is unique to each batch of panels and there are also tuning parameters for each batch of power management circuitry in a board. A Kobo with a 2015 panel will have different waveform data than a 2016 panel. More expensive panels contain the waveform in a flash on the panel which can be read by the host. Cheaper vendors will try to cut cost and just store the waveform in main flash. But that has caused some problem because end user accidentally flashes wrong firmware with a waveform that doesn't match the panel and bam, the panel quality is degraded, maybe even permanently.

> "tens of thousands of colors" rather than true color

My meaning by true color was color achieved through actual pigment pixels versus older E-Ink products like triton that achieved color through LCD-like RGB color filters on top of reflective/non-reflective pixels. The difference between the two is quite stark.

> remember the lawyers are fronting literally all of the cost here.

What does that tell us about the way our legal system works?

> Related question: what's the state of color e-ink displays?

They demonstrated true color in 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2V9iuTW3sA I would guess another 3 to 4 years to consumer availability.

> while reflex LCD, which the Boogie Board uses, is instant.

You're comparing two different things. Boogie board is not a display panel with a matrix that can be controlled electronically by software. There's no "pixels", which is why you can't use software to write to it or change the state of individual pixels. The cholesteric LCD being drawn on in boogie board is similar to the surface material in an etch-a-sketch.

> the most challenging bits to liberate will be the EPDC firmware

Could you clarify exactly what you mean by "EPDC firmware"?

afaik, it is already published so what needs to be "liberated"?

The devices you're talking about, eg: on your github, are the i.mx series of SoCs have an on-chip EPDC which is open source (the datasheets show all the registers) and the driver is also GPL. Eg: https://github.com/UDOOboard/Kernel_Unico/blob/master/driver...

In case you mean the .fw file used in that driver, that's a misnomer. There is no CPU inside the EPDC. That .fw file is a plain voltage waveform file that defines voltage vs time waveforms to get pixels to appropriate graylevels. "Liberating" that would be akin to "liberating" the content of a .wav file. ie: just use hexdump -C.

I can understand why they chose OLED to invest in. But I think longer term, due to the low power characteristic electrophoretic or interferometric would be much more exciting for mobile displays. I'm still waiting on the roll-able E-Ink display we were promised in 2013. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=94Ifhuc2bbQ

> when I see the photos of India, I see poverty, people starving, literally living in garbage

Lets take that sentence and s/India/Flint/. "When I see the photos of Flint, I see poverty, people starving, literally living in garbage". It isn't far off isn't it? So how would you feel if a person from China asked us, how are you able to fund NASA when you have your own citizens desperate in Flint? How are you able to fund NASA when you have growing illiteracy in many American cities? People believing the earth is flat. People killing each other in Chiraq. People asking us why we have the highest incarceration rate and effectively modern-slavery system in the world. Do you see how your question reflects more on us and our own culture?

I'm no LF fanboy, but the tone of this article doesn't really help any cause. I think the key question would be to ask what percentage of the funds LF receives are effectively used for FOSS purposes. If it turns out some of those funds are being wasted on having FOSS conferences in exotic places, followed by karaoke in Seoul with "Linux partners" then it'd be good to expose things like that. A cursory observation indicates most of LF's management aren't coders so that makes me worry whether this is a management-heavy "charity".

> the support engineer's response (that ends with blocking the user's device for good) _is_ a bona fide tantrum, worthy of textbooks.

I don't think that's a support engineer. I'm pretty sure that's Denis Grisak, the founder of Garadget. I find it fascinating that he used the phrase "only demonstrates your poor impulse control" to the customer while arguably his own response seems to suggest his own impulse control may require reinforcement.

> I'm confident that a tendency to violence does in fact decrease in certain societies.

Could you elaborate on which certain societies you mean? Thanks.

Steven Pinker's assertions in TBAOON are nice and intellectually attractive but ultimately, difficult to prove or disprove. Naseem Taleb had quite a strong reaction to it.

" "Pinker doesn’t have a clear idea of the difference between science and journalism, or the one between rigorous empiricism and anecdotal statements. Science is not about making claims about a sample, but using a sample to make general claims and discuss properties that apply outside the sample. "

Further here: https://medium.com/incerto/the-intellectual-yet-idiot-13211e...

Since at least a bit of that seemed like a personal attack on Pinker, that was then followed by personal attacks on Taleb by Pinker. He even wrote a quora post on it describing it as "The paper by Taleb that I saw was a mess: sloppy, inaccurate, and incoherent."

https://www.quora.com/Is-Nassim-Talebs-criticism-of-Steven-P...

I think our recent history with Trump, and the increasing friction with China suggest that perhaps the celebration of Pinker's ideas was a bit premature. As Taleb has shown us, a long period of peace doesn't mean that violence is declining or that we can presume that it will never reoccur with the magnitude and intensity we saw during earlier periods.

> as much as Hawaii (or even Alaska) is part of the United States of America.

Hawaii is a terrible analogy to use. Hawaii was annexed by military force on behalf of the American pineapple and sugar mafia (Dole, etc). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kingdom_of_Hawaii , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hawaiian_sovereignty_movement

As far as I can tell, Andaman and Nicobar islands are part of the fascinating historical migration route between India and South East Asia, and no military force was used by India to have ownership of those islands.

I admire the way Indians have dealt with those islands ( leaving them un-interfered with ) versus how my own culture dealt (and deals) with less technologically advanced populations.

> A large part of India is quite religious and Hinduism is the main religion

The article mentions:

Ahmed, a middle-class slaveholder in Uttar Pradesh in India, was eager to show me around the village where he was a member of the ruling elite. While I was grateful for the warm reception, I was visiting Ahmed’s community because of gross human-rights violations – bonded labour, child exploitation, and outbound human trafficking.

My understanding is that Ahmed is an Arabic name and I had been told that Arab people enslaved Indians and that this practice still goes on today. So I'm confused now. Are Hindus enslaving other Hindus?

Further, I'm wondering how this all relates to the article. The article doesn't mention religion at all so it is unclear to me whether you're saying Hinduism encourages slavery. I have Hindu friends who told me there is no such thing as "scripture" in Hinduism because there is no "god given" book like Torah, Bible or Quran. So I'm having difficulty understanding what's going on in India.

> From their perspective it probably would have felt like sinking into savagery.

This sentence is incongruous with the rest of your post. Why would you think such a thing?

This is a very good point. There seems to be no coverage of whether the actual perpetrator was ever caught.

We employ and compensate the police, admins and fund the judicial system, at least partly in order to serve as a deterrent to criminals. If our system has a high percentage of false positives or punishes innocent people then that reduces the efficacy of the system as a deterrent.

I'm reminded of this exchange between a journalist and a British justice minister where the minister seems incapable of understanding that punishing people who turned out to be innocent isn't an effective system.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_DrsVhzbLzU

> what's the economic return on proselytizing?

Interesting question. I did a quick check. It looks to be incredibly profitable, at least for main stream religious organizations (which tend to also be tax free).

The two top links for googling "profit of church" are:

Eg: From CNN:

" 1. The Vatican Bank has $8 billion in assets The Vatican Bank, which has about $8 billion in assets, has often been at the center of scandal and corruption since it was founded in 1942. Pope Benedict began the process of cleaning the bank up, and Francis has continued that work. " http://money.cnn.com/2015/09/24/news/pope-francis-visit-vati...

" THE Sydney Catholic archdiocese controls funds worth more than $1.2 billion and has regularly made multi-million dollar tax-free profits. The royal commission into child sex abuse heard the archdiocese banked surpluses of between $7.7 million and $44 million between 2004 and 2007, a period during which the Catholic church was aggressively defending a claim for $100,000 brought against it by former altar boy John Ellis. " http://www.theaustralian.com.au/news/latest-news/church-stil...

I believe John Oliver had an excellent analysis of how proselytizing tends to victimize the poorest section of society. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7y1xJAVZxXg

> E-ink displays are grayscale

Most, but not all. There are commercially available E-Ink color displays (using color filters) such as E-Ink Triton , http://www.eink.com/display_products_triton.html .

A year ago, E-Ink demonstrated pure color (pigment based) which gives you broad gamut color (more than color filter based displays) but I haven't seen them used in commercial products yet. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=N2V9iuTW3sA

The displays can update quickly, even do 10Hz-20Hz type animation. But that would defeat the purpose of using it for low-power by not updating it all.

> Has anyone hacked the boogie board? It is extremely cheap.

It's not a software controllable display. It uses a film concept similar to an etch-a-sketch and in the recording model, it uses a touchscreen to read the pen action, but there is no pixels/no matrix and no display that can be drawn to by software.

I remember that several Xorg developers alleged that Paypal robbed Xorg. I think Xorg never got anything back. https://ubuntuforums.org/archive/index.php/t-1417033.html

I recall reading a bible quote or might have been another religious book. It said, when a powerless man breaks the law, a crime has been committed, but when a powerful man breaks the law, the law was unclear.

I agree, I didn't intend to imply that it was in anyway historically accurate. However, it does communicate some of how the EIC operated at that time.

> I am very scared of the future (which is already here) of mega corps

Mega corps, to me are just continuations of previous entities like the Dutch and Anglo East India Companies which in their heyday exhibited much of the same activities (trying to control journalists, controlling politicians/legislators, moving perpetrators of crimes around in their organizations). Yes, I've been watching Taboo, a very interesting TV series about the Anglo East India Company. Then before them, were the large religious organizations. Some even to this day, still exhibit this pattern of investigating victims to find dirt or investigating journalists for the same reason. Example from last week, http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3462087/Catholic-Chu...

This $27.8 billion dollar valuation tells me that somewhere along the line, my job and lifestyle have caused me to detach from a significant chunk of society. I've never used Snap or their platform. I don't even really know what the benefit of their service. I am curious if I'm in the minority or if there's lots of developers like me who aren't able to comprehend these valuations.

> People expect ethics and morals from people. Startups are run by people.

I agree with your sentiment. That said, would you expect ethics and morals from a CEO that organized a Sally Hemings[1]-Thomas Jefferson party? Would you expect ethics and morals from a CEO that used to joke about urinating on women? Which is why I would avoid interaction with that startup.

[1] Sally Hemings was the 14 year old black slave girl that the 44 year old Thomas Jefferson had 6 kids with.

[2] http://valleywag.gawker.com/fuck-bitches-get-leid-the-sleazy...

[3] http://www.salon.com/2014/05/29/6_leaked_emails_that_ruined_...

> you say that's a negative?

Yes, I perceive that as negative compared to someone who did not exhibit that mistake. I'm not saying that's a no-hire or an extreme negative. I'm trying to communicate that is an indicator of a possible issue, that means it needs to be looked at further to see if there's a pattern of misreading body language.

> Once you've committed a crime, even a serious crime, you should be unemployable and starve on the street? It's a serious question.

I understand and respect the question you've asked. I want to make sure we separate genuinely serious crimes like murder/rape from crimes that are perceived as serious but in my subjective opinion are harmless like drug use. If someone had been convicted of using or even selling cannabis, I would not perceive that as a negative. If someone had been convicted of murder, I would perceive that as unemployable in my team. The reason being is that I could not consider exposing my team to that risk. I can see that even here, there's some gray areas. For example, if the murder was in self-defense or an act of revenge, and there had been a long period of healthy behavior, then perhaps this could be mitigating factors. I would not want anyone to be unemployable or to starve. There are jobs that are less team oriented that might be suitable, or where the risk can be more tightly controlled.

> we don't support people who say they made a mistake and are seeking help.

> you only end up with really good liars in charge.

There's a difference between someone realizing they've made a mistake and openly admitting it without needing external pressure / evidence versus someone just "handling" more evidence of wrong-doing coming up.

In this case, at a cursory glance, it looks more like someone was accused of a negative type of behavior, the person never acknowledged it or resolved it for a long period, then suddenly a series of events followed by video evidence came-up, only then the person acknowledges it and issues an apology and demands/expects to be forgiven. If that's what's happened in this case, then I'm not sure that forgiving them / supporting their subsequent activities is safe since it would be more like enablement, ie: just enabling the person to continue.

If on the other hand, the perpetrator acknowledged not just this specific issue that had video evidence, but also acknowledged other issues/faults and gave a plan of action for how they were changing their behavior (more than I'm getting help now), then it would be something positive.

> Should Hans Reiser be given a second chance because he's good at file systems?

I'm not sure I'm able to follow your analogy. Hans murdered his Russian mail-order bride who was getting a divorce from him. There's a pretty big difference from a convicted murderer to an alleged sexual harasser.

If someone came to me and told me that they'd been convicted of murder, I could not in good conscience hire them and expose my team members to that risk. There would be no further discussion.

If someone came to me and told me that they'd been accused of sexual harassment and had left that job, I'd inquire and try to understand the details. There is much more gray area. If someone had physically assaulted another person, I'd immediately say no-hire. If someone had made untoward sexual remarks and was unapologetic for it, no-hire. If someone had said they misread someone else's body language and made a pass was apologetic for it, then negative, but not an immediate no-hire.

> Maybe in 1987?

(Edit: this is in reference to the grandparent post which mentions selling heroin to infants )

Nestle still does the milk formula trick at hospitals and maternity courses, where try to get babies addicted to milk formula. They even have "pre-conception courses".

http://www.nestle-baby.ca/en/preconception

Notice, the WHO breastmilk popup on that page. This was put up after the boycott-nestle campaign.

http://www.babymilkaction.org/nestlefree