Dematerialization and Capitalism

[yogi]

Living in America I've become familiar with Capitalism, but have not heard about dematerialization until I read the linked article. The author somewhat tongue-in-cheek describes how the iPhone, smartphones in general, are saving the planet. It has to do with the the fact that the need to manufacture "stuff" has been reduced drastically by making things smarter and being competitive.

Consider the following items; calculator, camcorder, clock radio, mobile telephone, and tape recorder, compass, camera, barometer, altimeter, accelerometer, and GPS device, All of those things can be found in your average smartphone, and in the iPhones in particular. Because of that fact, they no longer have to be manufactured as individual items, and thereby we are using less resources and less energy to produce them. Using less to do more is dematerialization. Being able to put it all in a single package is high tech, and a byproduct of capitalism's competition.

So ... if you care about the condition of Mother Earth, buy a smartphone.

Or, just read the article. It's interesting: https://www.wired.com/story/iphone-envi ... nsumption/

[Kellemora]

There are a couple of little kinks I see in the combining of everything into a single device.

The first is, everyone always wants the latest and greatest Schmartz-Fonz, and the older ones get discarded, or passed down for a short time, but are quickly considered obsolete after a few years.
If your phone breaks, you've lost use of all those devices contained therein.

The second is, and I'll use some examples:
I have and use the GPS my son bought for me in 2003, it still works and is still legal to use in the car.
While as of July 1st of this year, in our state, NO CELL PHONES or MOBILE DEVICES can be used while driving.
They did not define MOBILE DEVICES which has a lot of folks up in arms over the new law.
We wanted a ban on cell phone usage while driving, but the way the new law is worded, it means anything in use by the driver, including a Ham Radio, or CB radio, etc. They don't realize the FCC says we can use our Ham Radios, and that overrides state laws, hi hi.
What this means is you cannot use the GPS in a Cell Phone while driving, period, no ifs ands or buts.

Another drawback is the battery life in a cell phone is very limited.
You cannot have it on all day listening to the radio while you run the calculations for your mathwork, or doing other work where you keep a radio on all day.
Most people who buy a radio, or clock radio, only replace them perhaps once every ten years or less, mine is over 15 years old and still works great.
Although I only use a little Flip-Fone, it has a few of those features in it. Most are a royal pain to get to or use.
I can't just glance at my phone to see what time it is like I could my old one. Besides it is much easier just to look at the watch on my left wrist. Which also gives me the name of the day and the numerical date, at a glance.

Although the picture quality of a cell phone has improved, it is still a far cry away from a real camera.

Now, if the GPS in my car ever burns out, the frau's Schmartz-Fone has a GPS, if she's with me to get me back home again. If my radio clonks out, I have ECHO to play some music for me. I have two desk calculators, and a PDA that has all of my passwords stored in it. I wouldn't use a cell phone to store my passwords, nor a PDA I carried around with me. My PDA is hidden in a secret compartment in my desk. In fact, most of the furniture in my house has secret compartments in it, some really secret and some not so secret, but not readily apparent either, hi hi.

You can replace a chain saw, circular saw, handsaw, etc. with a Cut's All, but a Cut's All is not efficient as individual tools.
I don't see a Schmartz-Fone as being an efficient way of doing most of the things you mentioned. And everyone will still have stand-alone devices for almost everything now added to Schmartz-Fonz which are replaced every couple of years.

I see no dematerialization taking place here, hi hi.

[yogi]

You are, and have been since I've known you, the exception to the rules. LOL

The article wasn't addressing people who have the same needs that you have. Dematerialization is a hands down benefit of the smartphone technology. Obviously, not everybody on the planet is going to benefit, but millions if not billilons of people have. There are a lot of disinterested people when it comes to environmental issues. None of the benefits of conserving resources and energy have a direct impact on their individual lives. It's not so hard to understand their point of view. That doesn't lessen the need to be aware of what our high tech industrial societies are doing to Mother Earth. It's something future generations will have to deal with, not us. Who cares if they think we were shortsighted and unconcerned about the future? This is the present, and we are here to make life better for us NOW, not to worry about what may or may not happen in the future.

Whether you agree with the viewpoint expressed in the article or not, smartphones are selling like hotcakes. There's a reason for that and it's not simply corporate greed and advertising.


A side note vaguely related to the article is my discovery of a free app for my clever phone that has various tools built into it which use the resources of the mobile device. One of the things I can now do is use the phone as a level; both a surface level and a spirit level. It also has a Seismometer that plots the vibrations it senses. It can send a complete set of data for that graph to my e-mail account too. Perhaps the coolest and most unexpected function is the teslameter, or gausmeter. I waved this thing over my laptop and discovered there are hot spots I never knew about. Did the same to my studio monitor speakers, but I know they have a lot of gausing going on. I can pay for an altimeter and barometer if I wanted those functions too. The amazing part of all this is that the clever phone has all these sensors (and more) already built into it. No wonder the damned thing is so expensive.

And, a further side note, relates to an article I read about Ubuntu. They decided to extend their support for 32 bit operating systems up to spring of 2020. A lot of negative feedback was issued when they cut it off in April of this year. I thought of you when I read this. I know you are not an Ubuntu user to any great extent, but the loss of support of 32 bit machines is nearly universal. Your inventory of old computers will no longer receive updates. LOL

[Kellemora]

I don't think I still have a machine so old it is still 32 bit, hi hi.

Just so you know, the frau and I recycle nearly everything we can possibly recycle.
Much of it we use for our own purposes, rather than sending it to the recycling centers.
About the only thing you will find in our trash on collection day are items the recyclers won't accept.

From my office waste can, it is doubtful you will find even one sliver of paper in my trash.
I shred every piece of paper and light cardboard, such as snacks come in, and use this as mulch in the yard.
Plastic snack bags and wrappers all have a Recycling number on them. Most of them are #2.
We normally recycle plastics #1 through #6, some recyclers won't take #6, and none will take #7.
Because I sort the plastics by number, our recycler does pay us a little, not much because plastics are virtually worthless.
And of course, all metals, including steel and tin are recycled.
The only time we discard something like aluminum foil is if there is burned on foods or oils on them.

We make about 30 bucks a month making our trip down to the two recyclers. We go to two, because the one who takes everything doesn't pay as much for aluminum soda cans, which is the bulk of our recycling. The other guy only handles aluminum and non-ferrous metals, and he always pays a lot, sometimes double of what the other guy pays.
But they are only a block or two apart from each other, so it's not really out of our way to hit both.

In the opposite direction about 7 miles is a guy called Mighty Mac Electronics Recycling. He's the only one who pays a little for electronics. He has a crew who dismantles everything into their specific components. And over the years, he has grown and added equipment that can even separate the scrap parts they used to throw away themselves.
I'll have to tell you about their fancy equipment and separation tanks some day. It's amazing really.
He pays anywhere from ten to twenty bucks for an assembled, but old or worn out computer. It depends on what is in them really. Heck, I brought him a whole stack of things I've taken out of computers, all obsolete and useless. He looked through my big pile of junk and picked out four different things he paid me a buck each for, then the rest he tossed on a scale and gave me twenty cents a pound for. So I really like this guy, hi hi.

[Kellemora]

Forgot to add what he does with cell phones. They do not get disassembled, but the battery and SD cards are removed, and sometimes something else out of them. But then they are tossed into this grinding machine that grinds them up to like sand consistency, then that goes into the vats which separate the individual grains of dust from each other and moves them to other vats. Interesting operation he has there now.

[yogi]

It's hard to believe you don't have any 32 bit machines laying around. Heck, even I have one in the closet with Windows 3.1 on it. Now that I think about it, it's probably not even 32 bit. I'd have to look into it and see.

You have mentioned your interest in recycling in the past, but I never really knew how far you take it. I think you are doing a good thing for yourself and for the environment. It's a shame there are not more people like you doing likewise.

I've heard of people who grind up electronics. They typically are mining for gold which weighs in at over $1000 per ounce. It's got to take some fantastically expensive equipment to extract the gold in recycled electronics. Apparently it's worth the effort.

[Kellemora]

Well, I probably do, considering in the bottom of my office closet, under everything else, is an old 286 laptop, hi hi.
But I meant as far as the computers I have in my office that are up and running and in use.
My two oldest are a Compaq that I bought, and a mini-Dell that had Vista on it, and a SATA 80 gig drive, so I'm pretty sure they are 64 bit. I guess the Compaq could be 32 bit, it has Windows XP Home, and Debian on it, and maybe still has a partition with an early Ubuntu. But the power supply went out on it too about a month ago.

Other than my stand-alone accounting computer, not connected to anything. I have 5 on my other desk all accessible from this desk, 4 via the KVM and one uses another KVM but which means it has a separate keyboard and mouse on my desk. It's on the other KVM because that is what the Compaq was connected to when it was running.

You know, I might save a little on my electric bill if I turn these all off until I need the heat this winter, hi hi.
I basically only use the Silver Yogi for almost everything, and the iMicro for what I'm copying from. OK, and the old Windows XP machine to play a game of freecell before I start work.

[yogi]

Hardware-wise, I have two computers. I won't count the one that can also make phone calls for this discussion. LOL I guess the NAS is also a computer, but it truly is used as a server and doesn't compute much. The laptop was bought for those times when I travel. I don't need it to entertain myself other than to experiment with Linux on it. The only business I conduct here is monkey-business so that what I have in the tower is more than adequate. Some day I might get myself another monitor or two, which would be so that I can run some virtual machines without blocking the view of my typing these missives to you. Certain games would benefit from multiple monitors as well. I just can't get myself to warm up to the idea of having separate boxes to do separate tasks. KVM switches were nice back in the days when computers were slow, but none of that is necessary anymore. Same with backups. The NAS is my backup device and a few USB sticks is my insurance against ransomware. If my income was dependent upon my computers working, such as is your case, I would certainly have some redundancy configured for disaster recovery purposes. For now the USB sticks are good enough insurance for my purposes.

My Windows 98 system was on an old Compaq desktop computer. I cloned everything before I disposed of the Compaq and even tried to resurrect it in a virtual machine. The Virtual Box software didn't like the fact that my current processor doesn't match the one needed for Windows 98. Maybe VMware is different, but I'm not about to pay to find out. I also have disks so that I can install Vista on a compatible machine, but why would anybody want to do that? I actually was able to make a Vista virtual machine with Virtual box, but then Microsoft got their panties in a bunch and started badgering me to buy a license. I'd like to see Windows 98 run again, but I no longer have any floppy drives. It doesn't know what USB is either.

[Kellemora]

I have numerous old 5-1/4 floppy drives, but no computer recognizes them anymore.
I'm just glad I copied most of the floppies over to CDs, especially the ones with fonts I paid for.
But none of the programs will run anymore, not even if you say run in Win98 mode.

There are a couple of things I do which cannot be done in a separate workspace, or on a split-monitor on the same computer, because the mouse pointer is tied up by a running program making use of the pointer, like an auto-clicker.
So I can set computer B to running a task involving the mouse pointer, and then use the KVM switch to jump to computer A to do some other work while computer B is doing it's thing.

Since I do have two monitors on the Silver Yogi, which I normally keep mirrored unless I'm writing, then I use them in dual monitor mode and place a document on one screen, and the one I'm changing on the screen in my desk.
This is much better on ONE computer, because you can cut n paste from one document to the other, which you cannot do if you are using to separate computers without using a shared folder to do so.

I think I mentioned once that all of the proprietary fonts I purchased with a license to use them for commercial use, are all on 5-1/4 floppies, one font per floppy.
When I was able to do so, I copied each of those floppies to a CD using a separate folder for each font.
The folder was named with the name of the font, and the serial number from the license.
This way I could look up the license in my file drawer if necessary. I've never had to though.
Then I made yet another CD that only had my most used fonts on them, all in a single folder so I could load them into a computer quickly.
In the old days, a computer could hold only so many fonts, but now they would all fit, but who wants to scroll through a half a zillion fonts, hi hi. So I only keep my most used fonts, about 10 of them on the computer, plus ones that website use most often for the display so I don't get weird looking text on the screen from substitutions, hi hi.

[yogi]

I think my very first home computer had a 5 1/4" drive, external. Visions of loading Word Star from said disks are running through my mind as I type this. After that the drive size shrunk and I never had much data to preserve so that transferring to another format was no problem for me.

I realize you told me why you do the keep-alive automated mouse clicks at some point in the past, but far be it from me to recall such trivia. I ran into a problem with my laptop forever going into the sleep mode and needed me to log in again after I ignored it for ten minutes or so. I was able to fix that by adjusting the power settings in the Windows Control Panel. The screen now turns off, but the lappie never goes to sleep or hibernate unless I explicitly tell it to. I've looked for similar settings in a couple of the Linux boxes I use. They do not seem to exist. I find it hard to believe that Windows can do something useful that Linux does not.

Speaking of Windows, I just got the weekly update for the Insiders Preview. It took 33 minutes to do a full update which is a speed record never before experienced on this equipment. I attribute that improvement to the expanded RAM and the SSD I recently put into the laptop. I'm really impressed with the response times now. Also, shutdown and power up are almost instantaneously performed. If I didn't have to log in it would be like the computer never shut off. Amazing. Now ... if I can only get it to play nice with other OS's I'd be a happy camper.

[Kellemora]

You must have just missed the settings in Linux.
We can control how long before the screen switches to a screensaver.
How long before the monitor shuts off.
How long before the computer goes to sleep, and you can have it sleep or hibernate, which sounds like the same thing, but it is not. Sleep will close the programs you had running, while Hibernate will remember the programs you had running and open back up right where you left off.
You can even select the computer to power-off if you want, after a sleep which closes the programs.

If you are using a laptop, you can select what you want it to do when you close the lid.
This ranges from do nothing, to hibernate, to sleep, or do a power-off after sleep if any programs are open.
Sometimes getting this to work right on a laptop can be a challenge, hi hi.
The idea is to save battery power, and going into hibernate still uses a little power, sleep uses less.
I think on laptops, you can hibernate and it saves the data and stuff on the screen, then powers-off, but not on desktops or a laptop on external power.

I do know more and more folks are using Windows and Linux through Wubi, which I don't like.
But apparently it gives Windows the control it wants.
When you boot up in Windows, you get the usual log-in screen for users, if you have more than one, but also this screen shows you Windows or Linux in two boxes. If you just click on a log-in name, it assumes Windows log-in.
At least on the laptop I saw someone using up at the burger joint last week.
Apparently the kids are finding a few things are much faster to do on Linux.
And I didn't even know Linux had things like SnapChat, which I thought was only on cell phones.
I didn't have an opportunity to talk to the kids, and they probably would have been offended if Old Gramps came up and started talking to them, hi hi.

[yogi]

I probably have seen the Linux version of power settings at some point in my past, but I've always left the defaults in place. Given that Linux is so "configurable" I am certain these power settings are in different places in different distributions. That may explain why I can't find them. The equivilant Windows settings are in the obvious place (Control Panel Power Settings) and I have no problem making the laptop and the desktop perform to my requirements.

Windows has had problems with hibernation, and to a lesser extent sleep, since around the era of Vista when laptops became popular. There have been patches, hot fixes, updates, and service packs issued to address the problem, but to this day my Windows 7 is only 50% likely to come out of hibernation properly. When hibernation takes place the desktop environment and all the associated processes are saved to the hard disk. It's a bit like making a snapshot image of the existing state of affairs. Sleep, on the other hand, only saves the kernel state. Thus it's a lot quicker to go into the sleep mode, but the price for that is that the computer never really shuts off. It does shut off completely in hibernation.

Microsoft has taken great strides to use the sleep mode to its advantage. It optimized it's OS code so that shutting down and booting up is simply a matter of saving the kernel state or retrieving it. The end results of their efforts is that my preview version of Windows now shuts down instantly and boots in under two seconds. You would think this is wonderful, but it's not.

Back on the old Toshiba laptop I had an MBR formatted hard drive. That's the system I could multi-boot anything from HDD or external memory. It's the system I've been lamenting ever since I bought the MSI laptop which is no longer MBR. I had a unique problem with that Toshiba. Windows 10 was the default system I worked with constantly and I would shut it down every day after each session. On the next boot, if I decided I wanted to boot into one of the Linux OS's instead of Windows I'd have to press F12 to get the BIOS boot device selection menu. I could pick the HDD or USB or CD or whatever from that menu and boot right up. Well, that was not happening at one point., I was getting an S4 boot message instead of the menu. From there it went right into Windows. This S4 error was due to the fact that when I shut down Windows it went into the "sleep" mode which kept BIOS alive. So BIOS just continued from where it was when Windows went to sleep and did not give me a choice of boot devices.

I did a lot of head scratching and tech forum searching, but could not find a similar problem. Eventually it dawned on me to go to the Windows Insider Preview Feedback site (duh) to see if they had an answer. They did. In fact a genuine honest to goodness Microsoft engineer explained to me that there are two ways to "shut down" Windows 10. The way I was using was very common and obvious, but it didn't really shut down cold. It went to sleep instead. To shut down cold I had to use an optional menu that I've been ignoring up to that point. That optional shut down turns the OS off cold and the next boot would give me the device selection menu if I wanted it. That's one of those How-To instructions that are not written anywhere. You are just supposed to know intuitively what to do.

So, that's how I learned about sleep, hibernate, and shut down power settings. Now, if you could, point me to the exact place in Linux that I can adjust such settings. I'll be eternally grateful to you until the end of time.

[Kellemora]

On a Desktop system, almost all Linux Distro's are the same.
As a user of Linux Mint, you click on System, then Preferences, Power Management, or you can go to Screensaver, and select Power Management from there.
On Debian, you click on System, then Preferences, Look and Feel, Screensaver, and select Power Management from there.

Now if you are on a Laptop, I would suggest installing TLP, it is much more robust than APM and offers many more features.
I jumped to grab a link that explains TLP and all the available settings. Scroll Down to TLP Features. I'll bet it's a whole lot more than Windows offers! I have it installed on my little netbook and it made a big difference in both battery life, and what happens when I close the lid. It's probably been two years since I've used my netbook so I'll probably need to install an updated OS on it, hi hi.

https://www.2daygeek.com/tlp-increase-o ... tery-life/

[yogi]

Thank you for the hint about where to find the power management in Linux. Yes, I have seen it in the past, but have not had a need to adjust it until recently. Linux offers to "suspend" something after a certain period of time. I looked at three versions of Linux and only two offer to do nothing.

Windows offers a "sleep" mode or a "hibernate" mode, and I know what both of those do. I don't know exactly what "suspend' means. The problem I'm facing is not actually controlling when the computer shuts down but what happens when it wakes up after that. When I sleep in Windows I just return to the desktop as it was. In Linux I must log in first. I'm trying to avoid that logging in after suspension/sleeping.

I can see why you are attracted to TLP; it's got to be the most complicated power management I've ever seen. LOL Well, at least it is not simple setting it up. It may be easy to use. I don't think I'll be using it in my routine Linux explorations. Windows offered quite a selection of power options in the Control Panel of Windows 7. The settings for Windows 10 have been greatly simplified, but the Control Panel is still available for old timers like me.

[Kellemora]

Of course TLP is complicated, it adds a setting for nearly everything not found in APM, plus includes APM as well.
But this is what makes Linux more controllable by it's users.

Some people are happy with two settings ON and OFF.
Other people want to Select a Screensaver, a Background, and have controls for both of those, like how long before the screensaver kicks in, and how long before the monitor goes to sleep, etc.
A few people like to have their hard drives power down, or other devices power down.
So, more and more controls get added to appease those folks.

Since the advent of laptops, they've added things like Hibernate, and Suspend, plus added more options for each of those.

Take Hibernate for example. Some folks want their computer to come out of Hibernation exactly where they left off.
Others, who may walk away from their computer, want it to Lock after so many minutes in Hibernation. Others want it to lock right away, and require a log-in before coming out of Hibernation, which is now the default.
So, if you want to come out of Hibernation right where you left off, tell it not to Lock, keep log-in active.
Not really wise on a laptop though, which is why the default is to lock on hibernation.

I don't use either Hibernation or Suspend, I have mine set to do a complete shut-down when I close the lid.

Oh, you asked for the difference between Hibernate and Suspend. Hibernate saves your state to the HD. Suspend just stops everything with no save to the HD. If I remember correctly. Never used it.
The purpose of Suspend was because in a work environment, a client may come in while you are working on another clients data, and you close your laptop so they cannot see what you are doing. When they leave, you open the lid and continue with where you left off. There is no battery saving feature of the suspend mode other than shutting off the display while the lid is closed. Before the Suspend mode was added, folks usually kept their Lid Closed feature set to Do Nothing which really zapped the batteries fast, because even the display would stay on and the HDs spun up.

[yogi]

I must really be the odd ball. I never close the lid on my laptop unless I'm leaving the house with it, or tearing it apart to void my warranty. LOL I don't care what it does when the lid is closed because I always have the A/C plugged in. About once a month I unplug it to discharge the battery as much as possible. They say it's not necessary in this MSI machine, but I do it anyway. Likewise, screen savers were invented to preserve CRT monitors. Ever since the world went to LCD and LED, screensavers became obsolete. A lock screen is useful, and somewhat different in function than a screensaver. Locking became imperative on mobile devices. They make life difficult for anybody who does not own the particular mobile device and know the PIN, or whatever secret code is needed to unlock. My clever phone has an option to disable the lock screen while I am holding onto it, i.e., while it senses motion. This is a great compromise between utility and security.

More and more Linux distros are focusing on the mobile device market. They seem to have this crazy dream of taking over from the big three. As a result of this fantasy when my Linux desktop goes into lock mode, which is every time unless I changed the default settings, I must log in again. I, sitting here alone, with no chance of anyone stealing my laptop, have no need for a lock screen. I do, however, appreciate the screen shutting off and the HDD powering down. There are very few choices in the preferences you showed me, none of which address shutting down the hard drive. I'm not one to confuse flexibility with unnecessary complications. The three Linux distros I talk about above have very little in terms of power management. They treat the lock screen as a separate setting which must be discovered after one discovers the preferences which you were so kind enough to point out. Then, I had to use my intuition to impute exactly what turning it off does.

I think you are correct about Linux's "suspend" being the same as everybody else's sleep mode. Beats me why they have to call it something different.

[Kellemora]

I'm going to disagree with you here Yogi.
When I go to the hospital for something, almost all of the monitors where you log-in at, rather than going through a check-in person, they all have the hospital logo burned into the screen from sitting with only that on until someone uses it.
They didn't start making the screens go black until they too noticed their logo became a permanent burn on the screens.

Here is a note by Samsung regarding same.
"You can leave your monitor on 24/7 if you want to as long as the image you display changes regularly or you use a screen saver. LCD monitors are subject to image burn in, so you don't want to leave a stationary image on your screen for long periods of time.
Also, note that the life expectancy of the backlights on LCD TFT monitors is 20,000 hours with 90% confidence. If you let your monitor run 24/7, you will reach that 20,000 hour life expectancy in about 2.25 years. If you run it only 10 hours a day, you'll reach the 20,000 hour life expectancy in about 5.5 years."

Some brands of LCD monitors have 30,000 to 50,000 hour backlights.
Then we also have LED monitors which do not use backlights, since the LEDs provide the light.
But they too dim over time. But will always come on at 100% brightness.

I went back to using LCD monitors, because almost every LED monitor I had, always had an LED stuck on all the time, sometimes a lot more than one. Ironically, on two of the LED monitors I had that had LEDs stuck on, they were almost always green. On one monitor that had three stuck on, two were green, one was red. I also assume the green ones were really a blue and a yellow stuck on, and/or the absence of red.

When working with images, like restoring old photographs and the like. I find working on an LCD much easier and a crisper picture than I ever got on the LED monitors. I also did not get the eyestrain from LCD as I did from LED either.

The way an LCD works, you would think it would be impossible to get any type of burn in at all.
While LED monitors seem like they would be much more prone to burn in.
None of my LED monitors lasted very long either.

[yogi]

It's not unusual for us to disagree, nor is it unusual for us to have opposite experiences given the same circumstances.

I have an NEC LCD monitor purchased when Windows 7 was first released. That would be exactly ten years ago at the end of this month, July 2019. The monitor stays on 24/7 unless there is a power outage or I'm doing some maintenance. Of course it's not at full brightness all that time, but I can safely say the screen is lit at least 8 hours a day for a guess-timated 29,000 hours of show time. I don't have the best eyes a human ever had, but it looks the same today as it did the first time I turned it on. I never used a screen saver and nothing noticeable is burned into the backlighting. The monitor cost as much or more than the Silver Yogi, for which I am well pleased.

I'll back peddle and go along with Samsung to say they have an image burn in problem with their monitors. I'll keep that in mind the next time I'm in the market for a new monitor.

Laptops are using the same technology as desktops when it comes to monitors. I am way more concerned about what happens on the laptop because of the battery power supply. I don't think I've kept a laptop long enough to burn out even the cheapest of monitors, so that might have some baring on my observations. LOL My concerns are more with the power management software than with the mechanics of LCD/LED displays. I don't need that software very often, but when it's not there it is irksome.

[Kellemora]

We had a cash register with a digital display, don't know if it was LCD or LED, probably LCD.
As it got old, the numeral zero on the right, which was on 24/7, left a dark image of the zero.
Near the end we always had to look twice to see if the final digit was a 3, 4, 5, or 6 and not an 8, because of the outline of the zero.
The cost to replace the display was fairly high, so about 3 or 4 months before that register died, he did something to show 3 decimal places instead of only two, and we put a piece of adhesive tape over the last digit.
I often wondered how often one of the employees charged a customer 7 cents too much, and/or gave them back 7 cents too much change, hi hi.

The frau has had a couple of eInk Kindles for a long time, and the display never shuts off, yet no burn in of anything on them. So either they fixed the problem or the power is much lower than on earlier devices.

I have an old ViewSonic LCD monitor that gets a little bit dimmer each year, but still works. It's over on my accounting computer. Finally got rid of the HEAVY flat screen monitor

Most of the time when you read about LCD vs LED monitors, both are actually LCD monitors, but one is backlit using CFL lamps, and the other using LED's instead of CFL.
I think the LED monitor I was referring to in my earlier comments is actually called an OLED instead of LED.

This is another one of those areas where they use the wrong terminology to describe what they are selling!
If a monitor is really an LCD, and an LCD can have either CFL or LED backlighting, it should NEVER be sold as an LED monitor, simply because it is NOT an LED monitor it is a LCD monitor. An LED monitor would not need backlighting!

So I guess since calling LCD monitors with LED backlighting as LED, they had to come up with another name for LED monitors, which is where OLED came from. Crazy. It's like places calling 2 dimensional images 3D. What are the going to call true 3D now that 3D has been misused.

OK, off my soapbox, hi hi.

[yogi]

There are several popular terms used to describe the technology behind the monitor screen. The nomenclature runs along the lines of calling software Linux. Well, it's Linux, but is it really? LOL

I think you have the right ideas if not a technically accurate perception of solid state monitor screens. LED's are by definition sources of light, i.e., Light Emitting Diodes. They tend to be round so that there are spaces between the individual diodes. That empty space may or may not have backlighting. The 'O' in OLED stands for Organic, and are coated with an organic compound as opposed to the original LED's you and I grew up with. The coating on an OLED allows the device to be made smaller which increases pixel density and improves definition of the images it produces. It's for that reason OLED technology is preferred for high definition monitors.

LCD's are made from liquid crystals, duh. They are pretty much transparent but the opacity can be modified by changing the polarity of the crystal solution. Since the change in opacity is relatively slight, it requires some back lighting in order to create sufficient contrast between the two states. As you pointed out the backlighting has a finite lifetime. That is what creates the burned in image on LCD displays.

I'd venture to guess that well over half the people who stare at LED/LCD screens all day have no clue about the differences. All they know is they can see an image but don't know, or care, why. Thus there is potential for corruption of the words used to describe what is going on. Technically there is a huge difference between LED and LCD, but in popular usage they are all the same. Incorrect popular usage of a technical term does not change the underlying technology, but it does greatly improve the understanding by the general public. Is it wrong to improve that understanding by corrupting the terms? I think not.

Your 2 moving to 3 decimal point display reminds me of a trivial fact I learned many years ago. There was a time when computers could only calculate accurate numbers out to 9 decimal places. This was a problem for banks because they needed something like 11 significant decimals in order to keep the books balanced. I guess that could be done now and days, but it impressed the hell out of me that 9 decimals is not enough for banks to balance my checking account.