It’s the temperature, a lot of chemistry doesn’t work at higher temperatures because everything is too unstable. There is simply too much energy messing things up. This is why having a surface temperature that allows for liquid water to be present is such a good indicator for life. A lot of chemistry for life as we know it works at liquid water temperatures and water does play a big part as well.
The pressure would be less of an issue, there is plenty of life on Earth that thrives at huge pressures.
I’m pretty sure life on Earth evolved at the surface (or even in the atmosphere, it is thought lightning plays a part) and only adapted to use the vents later on. I’m not sure life could get started at those volcanic vents.
I really don’t see how. Yes there is life at undersea volcanic vents on Earth, but they don’t live like in the vent itself. It’s where the temperature gets lower there is life.
As far as I know nothing can survive boiling temperatures for long and Venus has been way above boiling for millions of years. There are extremophiles that survive a little above boiling, but 400+ degrees I really don’t see how.
There is a chance in the atmosphere where there are parts with reasonable temperatures and pressures. But there is also a lot of acids floating around, which is sorta incompatible with life. If some photosynthetic life was present in the atmosphere, floating around and living on sunlight, we would have seen it by now. There would be seasonal blooms, similar to plankton in the oceans on Earth.
It’s cool to think about and I remember reading old sci-fi with Venus as a forest planet, since it’s so like Earth in a lot of ways. But in reality it’s dead dead.
Same for Mars I feel like. We might find indications life once lived there, which would be a huge deal. But as far as actual current life, I think chances are slim to none.
That’s one way of detecting exoplanets, but not the most common one.
There are a couple of ways we can detect exoplanets:
We can see a wobble in the position of the star, as the star and the planet orbit around their common center of mass, which is offset from the center of mass of the star due to the mass of the planet.
Another way is to observe the light from a star, as the planet passes in front of the star some of the light gets blocked by the planet. By measuring the time and amount of light blocked, we can tell a lot about what is doing the blocking. The benefit of this method is some light passes through the atmosphere of the planet (if it has a significant atmosphere), by analyzing the spectrum we can tell what the atmosphere is made from.
We can also literally see a planet by direct observation, by blocking out the light of the central star, we can see light bouncing off the planet and observe that directly. This is hard, but has been done with several exoplanets.
The Milky Way galaxy is “only” 100.000 light years across, so any planets we see around stars in our galaxy we would only see about at most 100.000 years in the past. So it would be very unlikely there would be detectable life now, where there wasn’t 100.000 years ago. And even if there were, it wouldn’t be complex life.
The most distant exoplanet we’ve found to date is 27.710 light years away, so we see that planet as it was 27.710 years ago. We’ve had humans running round for at least a 100.000 year on Earth, so if there are any aliens on that planet we would see them.
Almost forgot the mandatory XKCD reference: xkcd.com/1342/
Remember Venus is a Earth like planet and even relatively close to the habitable zone (depending on your definitions and error bars). Just because it’s a planet like Earth, doesn’t mean it would support life.
Not really I’m afraid. ReactOS is focused on implementing the old APIs which allows software that used those APIs to function.
But my experience with old proprietary software from that era is that they were trying to do something which was hard at the time. So they wrote their software with lots of clever tricks and hacks, to make the thing do the thing. This can be as simple as manually invoking interrupts and using undocumented APIs, to setting up non protected memory and communicating with the hardware directly.
I’ve seen cases where the software would only run with a specific version of Windows 95 and only with specific chipsets. Even changing the cpu from an Intel to a Cyrix for example could cause issues.
I was involved as an intern with a project to fix something like this a long time ago. We chose to simply reverse engineer the hardware interface, put in a custom controller to handle it and write modern software. It took a lot of doing and we lost some features, but the original system was beyond saving.
As time went on more and more hardware abstraction is applied, so I would hope this issue would be fixed in the future. But the whole of the 90s and early 2000s is a big issue.
I imagine a real life remake of Aladdin where a thief kidnaps a rich girl and gets her hooked on opium. They lay in the drug house on a filthy carpet, out of their minds on drugs. A flee infested monkey eats scraps off the floor and yells at them. The thief forces the girl into slavery, always chasing the next high. Until the thief tries to blackmail the girl’s father. But the father’s business partner finds out and under brutal shariah law the girl gets beheaded. The thief is locked up and goes insane inside the dungeon, he talks to a blueish rock vaguely shaped like a man until he dies from dysentery.
Nothing to lose is maybe not correct. I’ve been in kinda the same situation before and chose not to open source my app. This was years ago, when I stopped with the project the number of active users had already been declining for years. Somebody contacted me to take it over, but I feel like he wasn’t serious about it. He just wanted to keep it running and be the owner, but not do any of the things needed to get it back on track.
There are a couple of reasons maybe not to open source it:
No code is perfect and people can get really self aware about that. I know I have had imposter syndrome in the past where I thought my code was shit, but people always complemented me on the result. Opening up the code can lead to people seeing how shit it really is and call you out on it. The code is probably fine, but it’s a legit fear.
With open source people expect you to provide a way to report issues and respond to those publicly, with many people adding their 2 cents and big discussions. If you don’t see it the same as they do, or your solution isn’t what they expected or you simply aren’t fast enough, it’s a problem. We’ve all seen flame wars and stubborn developers on open source projects, the drama factor is real.
Forks. Simultaneous the strongest and weakest part of modern open source software. On the one hand it’s awesome we can make multiple versions if the needs diverge or the original devs abandon the project. But on the other hand, it leaves you with very little control over the project. One case I’ve seen one dev worked on a project almost every Sunday as a hobby, the project was popular and had a tight community which grew a bit big. The amount of open issues grew and bigger tasks just didn’t fit in the original dev’s schedule. One of the community members was a good dev who just got laid off and had some extra time. So he forked the project and spent some weeks working on it fulltime, fixing a lot and expanding the project. The original dev wasn’t happy, it was his hobby and the community fragmented over people using the new version and the original version. Everybody was upset and the original dev called it quits and said talk to the new dev. The new dev however got a new job and also abandoned the project, with nobody left to pick up the pieces. The community was already fractured and people stopped using it.
Of course these are only some examples and people feel different about different things. But I can understand reasons not to open source stuff. I also haven’t mentioned the many many reasons why it’s a good thing to open source stuff, they exist and are valid as well.
We need a picture of the entire pcb. The ribbon cable (technically a flex pcb, not a ribbon cable) is totally custom and not something you can put a signal on. The little green pcb looks like the driver, so we would need pics of that and maybe figure out where you can input some kind of signal.
These kinds of displays can be really hard te re-use. Often their driver is just a simple blob (chip on board) which would be completely custom. This can be made cheaply to order with as few as 500 units. So mass produced readers often use completely custom stuff to get down to a really low price. Unfortunately this means it’s not possible te repurpose the screens later.
Spi is the norm for hobby displays because they are made to be driven easily. There is a driver chip that receives the spi signal and drives the display. With an actual product this often isn’t the case and the screen gets driven directly.