homura1650

joined 10 months ago
[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (1 children)

The actual difference between a working new mouse and a failing double click mouse is in the button itself (mechanical parts are almost always the problem).

However, it is not some exotic failure mode. All mechanical switches have a "bounce", where the contact makes and breaks a few times before settling into the connected position. Switches are typically designed to make the actual contact spring loaded (which is the origin of the click sound you here). As they age, this mechanism degrades, making the bouncing problem worse.

However, this is a well understood problem that any electrical engineer should be familiar with. One solution is to install a filter capacitor. Now it takes longer to switch between the on and off state, so the inherent bounce in the switch is smoothed out to the point where you cannot detect it.

They probably did testing with a new switch, and decided that they didn't need to include any explicit debounce component, ignoring the fact that the switch would degrade over its lifetime.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago (3 children)

The annoying thing is that fixing the double click is stupidly easy. Years ago, I got frustrated with that exact problem (after a string of 3 mice that each lasted only a few months); so I opened one up and soldered on a random capacitor I had lieing around.

Capacitors like that cost literally less than a penny, and are no more complicated to install at production time than any other component already on the circuit board.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago (3 children)

I think what happened here is that something went wrong and messed up the permissions of some of the users files. MS help suggested that he login as an administrator and reatore the intended permissions.

I don't work with Windows boxes, but see a similar situation come up often enough on Linux boxes. Typically, the cause is that the user elevated to root (e.g. the administrator account) and did something that probably should have been done from their normal account. Now, root owns some user files and things are a big mess until you go back to root and restore the permissions.

It use to be that this type of thing was not an issue on single user machines, because the one user had full privileges. The industry has since settled on a model of a single user nachine where the user typically has limited privileges, but can elevate when needed. This protects against a lot of ways a user can accidentally destroy their system.

Having said that, my understanding of Windows is that in a typical single user setup, you can elevate a single program to admin privileges by right clicking and selecting "run as administrator", so the advice to login as an administrator may not have been nessasary.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 4 months ago (3 children)

Have you ever worked in a place where every function/field needed a comment? Most of those comments end up being "This is the , or this does ". Beyond, being useless, those comments are counter productive. The amount of screen space they take up (even if greyed out by the IDE) significantly hurts legability.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago)

In addition to the raw compute power, the HP laptop comes with a:

  • monitor
  • keyboard/trackpad
  • charger
  • windows 11
  • active cooling system
  • enclosure

I've been looking for a lapdock [0], and the absolute low-end of the market goes for over $200, which is already more expensive than the hp laptop despite spending no money on any actual compute components.

Granted, this is because lapdocks are a fairly niche product that are almost always either a luxury purchase (individual users) or a rounding error (datacenter users)

[0] Keyboard/monitor combo in a laptop form factor, but without a built in computer. It is intended to be used as an interface to an external computer (typically a smartphone or rackmounted server).

[–] [email protected] 2 points 4 months ago

Miniaturization is amazing. The limiting factor to how powerful we can make phones is not space to put in computational units (processors,ram,etc). It is the ability to deal with the heat they generate (and the related issue of rationing a limited amount of battery power)

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (6 children)

At a $188 price point. An additional 4GB of memory would probably add ~$10 to the cost, which is over a 5% increase. However, that is not the only component they cheaped out on. The linked unit also only has 64GB of storage, which they should probably increase to have a usable system ...

And soon you find that you just reinvented a mid-market device instead of the low-market device you were trying to sell.

4GB of ram is still plenty to have a functioning computer. It will not be as capable of a more powerful computer, but that comes with the territory of buying the low cost version of a product.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (4 children)

Blaise Pascal is famous for 2 things:

  1. Pascal's triangle. This describes how to expand expresions of the form (a+b)^n as well as to compute how many ways there are to pick k objects out of a set of n (ignoring order.

This triangle is computed by starting with 1 at the tip, then having each element be the some of its 2 parents (except the diagonal edges with only one parent, which remains as 1)

  1. Pascal's wager. This is a theological argument for a belief in god that goes "if you believe and god doesn't exist, nothing happens. If you don't believe and he does exist, you suffer for eternity. The logical choice is therefore to believe"

The natural conclusion is therefore to believe in all gods. If procelatizing happens in just the right way, and no one realizes people are talking about the same god, you end up with a triangle of polytheists, where the number of gods they believe in is given by Pascal's triangle.

Edit: gid -> god

[–] [email protected] -1 points 7 months ago (5 children)

"Treat others the way you want to be treated".

[–] [email protected] 11 points 7 months ago (1 children)

Around 2 years ago, I got an email from a products team asking me for urgent help extending a program in time to make a sale.

I looked over the program and wrote back sonething along the lines of "this program was written almost a decade ago by an unsupervisered highschool intern. Why TF are we still using it?".

Of course, I ended up helping them, because that highschool intern was me, and I ended up helping because no one else could figure out what highschool me was thinking.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 7 months ago

Java did have a Security Manager that can be used to prevent this sort of thing. The original thinking was that the Java runtime would essentially be an OS, and you could have different applets running within the runtime. This required a permission system where you could confine the permissions of parts of a Java program without confining the entire thing; which led to the Java security manager.

Having said that, the Java Security Manager, while an interesting idea, has never been good. The only place it has ever seen significant use was in webapps, where it earned Java the reputation for being insecure. Nowadays, Java webapps are ancient history due to the success of Javascript.

The security manager was depreciated in Java 17, and I believe removed entirely in Java 21.

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