Posts by Stoneshop

Mouse button microswitches always get crap

Let's see. I bought a Logitech Trackman Marble FX, somewhere in the 1990's. So it's at least 20 years old, and it's quite likely over 25. No microswitch problems at all.

Re: Reduce, re-used, recycle

. And in a home during the colder months it probably won't save any energy at all, because the 100W of heat generated by the computer will instead have to be supplied by the the house heating system.

Only if it's heated electrically. With a gas-fueled central heating system you'd have to compare its efficiency to that of the generating plant, and when using a heat pump you get another factor into the calculation.

Given that the X201 still runs fast enough for what I need

Hear, hear.

8G RAM, 480G SSD, Debian. It does what I need it to do, and it does so well fast enough.

moonlighting as an artist...?

Did she have a spotlight aimed at her posterior?

Re: I don't think this does as much as people think

I imagine that the cars passing at normal speed would demonstrate to Google that there was no problem.

Depends on the ratio of slow-moving phones to fast-moving ones. Just a few fast ones passing the bunch of slow ones may well be fast bikies, mopeds or motorcycles, and not necessarily showing there's no jam

Re: Performance? Art?

Navigaitng a city where you don't know the finer layout of the road maze, while also needing to keep an eye (or three) out for other traffic of all shapes and sizes? Having a satnav at least tell you when to turn left or right, or, when you missed that or had to detour because of just any applicable reasons, recalculates and offers a new instruction? Very worthwhile.

(Older Garmin plus OpenStreetMaps plus Afrikaans voice)

I am all for anything that keeps me in the shop less time. Queuing at a till (whether self-serve or the human kind) is a drudge and the rigmarole of putting shopping in your trolley, only to then unpack and repack it all...

The larger supermarket chains over here have these scanners, which you can grab after presenting your loyalty card (which can be anonymous, in so far as they actually are). Their larger stores also have self-scan checkout tills where you can put your basket down, run each item past a built-in scanner, and put them in your duffel/backpack/bike pannier/cardboard box, containers that you may prefer for transport home but which aren't that well-suited to actual shopping.

Re: You are confusing EU with Europe

But concentration camps are a British invention

Nope. Cuban, actually. Tried out by General Valeriano Weyler in an attempt to stop guerrilleros mixing with non-combatants, and considered so successful that General Roberts deployed that tactic in the Boer wars a couple of years later.

Re: You are confusing EU with Europe

I'll grant you that, but he should have put Gordon Brown on a leash.

In the backyard of a farm.

In Cornwall. In the rain.

Re: Surprised they don't use *NIX

The driver presents the touchscreen to the WM as another HID, not unlike a touchpad, so it's not the WM that needs to care in detail what hardware the touchscreen runs on. And for instance Debian 9 comes with about 30 of them, for the diverse chippery involved.

There are two Thinkpad tablets here, an X41t running Mint, and an X61t running Debian. I know there was some wrangling to get an on-screen keyboard running in the X41 (but that was not about the touchscreen itself); the X61 just worked right away.

Re: Surprised they don't use *NIX

How does that work with nuclear power stations with a life measured in decades?

I'd expect the actual SCADA systems controlling the reactor would be run as a hot failover set of at least two and possibly three systems, so that apart from the actual failure resiliency you could upgrade one, then cut over to another. If you actually had to do so outside of a planned reactor downtime, that is.

If the reactor is cold you can even rip out the entire control system and bring in fresh hardware and software if necessary.

And the stuff that deals with what's outside the dome is roughly similar to what other process industries are using (non-nuclear power plants, refineries, etc.), are probably implemented the more or less same way, and will likely have the same life cycle management.

Re: OS Looks Like

There were some Philips touchscreen CRTs that had a foil over the screen front. It had a mesh structure that you could distinctly feel, with a raster size of about a mm. A serial port was used for touch data.

Some displays for the HP150 used a rather coarse IR grid in front of the CRT, with LEDs and IR photodiodes fitted in the bezel. You could select without even touching the actual screen.

where any given hardware node is as expendable as the next

Not true for POS systems, which are almost always tied to a specific location due to peripherals that are tied to a specific location if not bolted in place.

The best you can hope for is that problems are solvable with re-imaging, else it's screwdriver time.

To kill something, you just needed to touch it.

I know users that have that capability. Even without touch screens.

Re: Reg units

Belgium is metric; for those regions still using imperial you'd probably use Texas or Alaska. Wales and DRC are just magnitude modifiers for Belgium and thus allowed, though I'm not sure what the status of Wales as a measurement is going to be after tomorrow. Is it covered in the WA?

Paging the Jawa....

They're building new ones in India, but I doubt it can reach orbit. The Czech ones definitely can't.

Re: French TV

Oh wait, a convenient duck tells me that it's Dutch

What duck was that? Mine, as well as my memory, tells me it's indeed French. It's been broadcast on Dutch TV for sure but only for a short while, six episodes a week for four months, so about 100 episodes out of the 500 that were made originally.