Yes, but also this wouldn’t be as much of a problem if Europe had invested more into renewables - switched more extensively from gas/oil heating to electric, been less NIMBY about renewables and wind turbines in particular, built more electrified rail.

This is Europe’s third oil/gas crisis in a decade. It should be seen as the new normal by now.

A walk in, for Americans? No, make it a drive-in.

NixOS is a distro with cool tech where you declaratively configure your entire OS and can regenerate it from a single file. There’s some other benefits too.

Nix is filled to the brim with drama and dysfunction, and has been for years. This is probably another case of people burning out trying to unfuck the dysfunctional city of the project, although it could also just be drama.

What this means is you either groan and ignore it, rant about it, or grab some popcorn.

The price has nothing to do with patents, it’s economy of scale - LCDs ship at a rate of billions per quarter, and are included in every device under the sun, whereas e-ink screens basically only ship in niche luxury devices (ereaders/enotes) that can be replaced by your phone and an ipad respectively. As a result, LCDs ship several orders of magnitude more screens, and reap the resulting economies of scale.

Yes, EInk corp has patents, but that doesn’t prove that the price is caused by the patents.

Currently, our best hope of seeing prices come down is 1) if the fast-multidye tech (i.e. the Gallery 3 thing) takes off enough to give e-notes mass market appeal (color drawing and comic book reading could be huge, maybe) and thus some extra economy of scale, or 2) if GoodDisplay’s DES screens get their PPI up to 300 and thus are able to compete in the ereader space against E-Ink’s MED.

DES = Display Electronic Slurry, AKA the cofferdam tech. It’s a different method of creating an e-ink screen that (apparently) doesn’t touch E-Ink’s patents, and it works by creating a grid of ditches to be filled up with the e-ink liquid and ink (where 1 ditch = 1 pixel). In contrast, E-Ink’s MED (=Microencapsulated Electrophoretic Display) produces self-contained microcapsules that have the liquid/ink sealed inside, and then the microcapsules are sprinkled onto the screen’s pixel grid like Hundreds And Thousands, and each microcapsule is substantially smaller than a pixel, and each pixel toggles several microcapsules. The microcapsules sometimes overlap the border of the pixel grid (since they’re a bunch of packed circles basically), which breaks up the straightness of the pixel grid and is what gives E-Ink screen their ‘grainy’ look where DES screens are more noticeably checkerboarding. This could potentially give MED a long-term aesthetic advantage, although that might turn out to be a non-issue for DES with sufficiently high PPI.

The advantage of DES is that because it skips a layer (the slurry is directly on the substrate, rather than in microcapsules on the substrate) it could potentially be higher-resolution(/PPI), and higher contrast. Also possibly cheaper, since it might be able to skip a manufacturing step of making the microcapsules. Maybe.