[raggi]

Yep, I work on low level networking software professionally and this post is largely meaningless dribble and is probably motivated by grandstanding.

It’s like an engineer who says “how does a screen show black” and then says “nope” to every response. It’s maybe a way to make people think, but beyond that the negativity and grandstanding of it is ultimately a turn off for many receivers which eventually either then has them bully others this way or deters them from the field, depending on how it affects them. There are far better teaching methods that work better for everyone and teach faster and result in higher accuracy and retention.

[kstrauser]

I thought you were probably exaggerating, but yes. I've never heard anyone make anything resembling any of those claims.

What I have said is something to the effect that if TCP isn't reliable over a given path, there's not a whole lot I can do about it as an application engineer short of making my own ad hoc, informally-specified, bug-ridden, slow implementation of half of TCP inside my own app, which I'm not going to do.

> 14. Weird networks that are not transparent to standard protocols are an aberration. I can safely ignore them.

I certainly can and will. If you wanna run an RFC 2549 network, I'm going to spend approximately 0 seconds making my app support it. If you want to do something weird, you make it work. I'm going to optimize for the other 99.99999% of customers.

[yazzku]

The author probably doesn't understand the answers very well themselves.

[randomdata]

Doesn't the author basically admit that when he prompts someone else to write "falsehoods programmers believe about TCP"? After all, if the author did have the understanding himself he could do it himself.

The reset of the writing just laments the pain of using products that make incorrect assumptions – continuing in same lamenting from the quoted segment he includes. It almost has nothing to do with TCP at all, so it is not clear where the parent comment here got the idea that it was trying to teach something about it.

[cubano]

Uhhh....how does the screen show black?

[ahoka]

The screen knows what color it displays at all times. It knows this because it knows what it doesn't. By subtracting what it does from what it doesn’t, or what it doesn’t from what it does (whichever is greater), it obtains a difference, or deviation. The controller board uses deviations to generate corrective commands to drive the display from a state where it does not display black to a state where it does, and arriving at a state where it displays black, it now doesn't display anything.

[speff]

For the uninitiated: The Missile Knows Where It Is[1]

[1]: https://youtu.be/bZe5J8SVCYQ

[yetihehe]

There is also version for those already initiated [1].

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_LjN3UclYzU

[appendix-rock]

I’ve just broken out in a rash. Thanks.

[shermantanktop]

Each of the pixels is actually a little shining eye which watches your every move. When the pixel’s eyelid closes, that pixel turns black. That’s why they call it putting a display “to sleep.”

[Waterluvian]

I like your explanation, but to be fair, it depends.

Some displays are implemented with dual-eyelid technology for the blackest of blacks. Naturally, like all genius engineering, we see this in nature: cats.

[foota]

It depends afaict. OLED screens have a per-pixel light, and they turn off pixels to make black. LCDs have a single large backlight and pixels that the light shines through and they can change color (but not turn off) so in that case they turn as opaque as possible, but don't completely block the light.

[Ekaros]

There is also things like microled. Which means that there is bunch of small(bigger than multiple pixels) lights that turn on and off as needed.

[thayne]

And in a CRT the electron beam turns off when scanning over a pixel.

[account42]

Black pixels in an OLED still reflect some light so their are not completely black either.

[Groxx]

What, you've never heard of a "black light" before? They just turn on the black sub-pixels.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklight

[GuB-42]

He said it, it is ultimately a turn off.

[oneshtein]

In case of a LCD, black pixel is turned ON to block backlight. It's clearly visible on monochrome LCD screens.

In case of e-paper, black pigment is attracted to the outer part of the screen.