Two things, mainly. They do a lot of the production steps in-house, as opposed to having a web of subcontractors (who have their own subcontractors)for each component. But the big thing is just efficiency of scale. Building and launching 100 rockets per year doesn't cost 100 times more than one launch per year.
All 3 books in the first uplift series work fine as stand-alone stories. But book 1 (Sundiver) does kinda read like a prequel to the rest of the series. The inciting incident of Startide Rising is what sets everything else in motion for all subsequent books, and Sundiver takes place before that. But it does have a bunch of world building that is helpful context for the other books (and is still a fun story).
I recommend you read Startide Rising first, then circle back to Sundiver if you are enjoying the world and the author's style.
The actual information released in "the Twitter files" showed the opposite of what musky's pet propagandists said it did.
You seem to actually admit that what happened was identifying posts that violated the terms and conditions of private companies. No demands or threats were issued.Does the government have no right to speak truth?
If a government agency notices a lethal hazard in your town that doesn't technically violate the law, should they be prohibited from telling you and your neighbors about the danger?
such as, the lab leak hypothesis... once completely censored as "misinformation", but now a viable theory
It was never completely censored. Evidenced by the fact that you, me, and everyone else heard about it.
People got called names for promoting it without good evidence. People also got called names for pointing out that the evidence was super weak. Y'know, what passes for "debate" these days.
Carjackers (especially young carjackers) kill cooperating victims on the regular around here. My car isn't worth a human life, but my car isn't what's being threatened in a carjacking.
I also hear that ALSA has some support for multiple applications per device nowadays, though I understand it is much less pleasant to use than a fully featured sound server.
FYI
Many older sound chips had hardware support for mixing multiple streams, and so the alsa drivers for those happily allowed multiple apps to open and write to the /dev/snd/whatever device. Life was good and people got used to doing it this way.
Nowadays (since like 2000 lol), sound chips generally expect a single pre-mixed stream. So the sound device for those is exclusive open. The libalsa devs made it possible to have the first app to open the sound device act as the sound server for every other app that tries to open it later. But it was complicated and fragile and just a bad idea in retrospect.
Then the problem is that it's abandoned, not that it has stagnated
By all means, feel free to start working on it!
All the people who developed Xorg for 20+ years decided that creating and working on Wayland was a better use of their time. But I'm sure you know better...
The problem isn't that Xorg is spaghetti code (it's pretty good for a large C project, imho). The problem is that the X11 protocol was designed to expose the capabilities of 1980s display hardware.
Stagnation here specifically does mean that nobody is making bug fixes or security patches anymore. Xorg is abandoned, kaput, a former software project.
The new architecture allows developers to fix one thing without accidentally breaking 3 others.
Two things, mainly. They do a lot of the production steps in-house, as opposed to having a web of subcontractors (who have their own subcontractors)for each component. But the big thing is just efficiency of scale. Building and launching 100 rockets per year doesn't cost 100 times more than one launch per year.