01:06 <Oksana> brolin_empey : Samsung Galaxy Note has interesting stylus capabilities (powered by Wacom?). Resistive touch screen is excellent for drawing (and for working in gloves), as well as for pressing tiny buttons (because large buttons on tiny display is good only for the simplest of tasks), such as a star

01:06 <Oksana> in Stellarium.

01:07 <Oksana> brolin_empey : Speaking of qwerty keyboard, I like square display and passport form factor of BlackBerry Passport, as well as its neat capacitive touch keyboard capabilities.

01:09 <Oksana> But... 1) extremely closed-source, hardware and software both; 2) not slider, and I am fan of sliders (qwerty and T9 both); 3) resistive touch keyboard could be even more fascinating (does capacitive touch keyboard work when gloves are worn?); 4) I miss e-ink keyboard which changes its appearance as

01:11 <Oksana> layout changes.

02:50 <brolin_empey> I wonder if houkime has a motherboard with noisy integrated audio. The Asus K8N had that problem whilst I still used it as my primary computer. Now I use it only as a server, which does not use audio.

02:56 <brolin_empey> Oksana: There are multiple types of capacitive touch panels. I am not an expert on the subject but you can use capacitive gloves or possibly use a type of capacitive touch panel (projected capacitive?) that works with ordinary gloves. The capacitive touch screen on the Galaxy Note 3 detects capacitance from bare fingers or the included stylus even if the fingers or stylus are not touching the screen.

03:03 <brolin_empey> Does a capacitive touch panel used for a trackpad work with ordinary gloves? I never tried.

03:10 <Joerg-Neo900> >>even if the fingers or stylus are not touching the screen<< is one of the biggest annoyances of C-TS. With R-TS I have a well-defined mechanical activation point when I apply a certain lof force on the screen surface with "srylus" (whatever pbject serves as stylus). The proximity triggering of C-TS drives me nuts

03:12 <Oksana> Agree. Proximity triggering of capacitive touch-screen could be used for moving the cursor around, but then "clicking the mouse" is not well-defined.

03:15 <brolin_empey> I thought that the required proximity can be very small with a capacitive switch or touch panel. At work we have a Samsung SyncMaster 2243WM model of LCD video monitor with capacitive switches/buttons on the front instead of normal push buttons; I do not remember accidentally activating the switches by having my bare skin close to the switch but I have mostly not used that model of video monitor for years. We still have one set up at a desk, though, so I

03:15 <brolin_empey> could try it at work tomorrow (Friday).

03:15 <Oksana> And I don't think anybody made integrated capacitive+resistive touch screen that can differentiate between "10 fingers hovering above screen", "one or two fingers pushing on the screen", possibly at the same time (could be fun for manipulating several objects at the same time, instead of being

03:17 <brolin_empey> We bought at least three of the SyncMaster 2243WM new in 2009, when it was current.

03:17 <Oksana> restricted to one-cursor metaphor)

03:20 <brolin_empey> Oksana: The multiplayer mode of the Amiga version of Lemmings uses two cursors at once because it uses two mice connected to the same computer, one mouse per player. ☺

03:23 <brolin_empey> I thought that the amount of capacitance increases as the proximity of the “stylus” to the capacitance touch panel increases?

03:24 <brolin_empey> I mean the capacitive touch panel.

03:27 <Joerg-Neo900> C-TS are basically the cheap variant of touch HID. Literally the only advantage is "scratch-proof"

03:29 <Joerg-Neo900> C-TS can and do suffer from "calibration" changes by environment conditions like air humidity and temperature. And all but the most expensive and high quality ones are susceptible to RF

03:29 <Joerg-Neo900> /AC interference

03:30 <Joerg-Neo900> so much fun¡ when your C-TS doesn't accept any input or cursur jumps around randomly and every now and then a phantom touch event, just because of the RF interference from USB charger plugged in to phone

03:32 <Joerg-Neo900> everybody wants capacitive touchscreen but nobody can provide sound reason _why_

03:33 <Joerg-Neo900> if it's only a prestige thing (Apple has it) then let's call our digitizer "HiperCapacity" no matter what's the technology it bases on

03:37 <Joerg-Neo900> I think a lot is mental projection: "it's fast, it's crisp, it has an easy to handle GUI. And Apple tells us it's a capacitive TS. So I want a C-TS too in my next device"

03:44 <brolin_empey> Apple also seems to have popularised the difficult to remove battery in mobile computers, which really sucks as a hardware design in my experience.

03:45 <brolin_empey> I mean the difficult to remove battery really sucks in my experience.

03:48 <Joerg-Neo900> a lot of design decisions made in embedded world are tradeoffs. Here about "removabe battery" vs "case thickness

03:48 <Joerg-Neo900> 2

03:48 <Joerg-Neo900> " damn

03:50 <brolin_empey> The Galaxy Note 4 and earlier have an easily removable battery yet still seem pretty thin, like around half as thick as the Nokia N900.

03:51 <Joerg-Neo900> sorry, probably I simplified the picture too much

03:52 <Joerg-Neo900> usually the tradeoff is between at least 4 parameters that are entangled with each other

03:53 <Joerg-Neo900> battery removability, case thickness, bat capacity, case sturdiness, whatnot else

03:55 <brolin_empey> Also, it seems that the feature phone world never adopted the difficult to remove battery but I may be mistaken because my sample size for that generalisation is very small because I only use smartphones, not feature phones.

04:04 <DocScrutinizer51> you're prolly right

04:05 <brolin_empey> Joerg-Neo900: Your mistyping while trying to quote text reminded me: Why do some early computer keyboards with a US/QWERTY layout, such as on the Commodore 64, have some differences in the shifted characters for the row of digits compared to a US/QWERTY IBM PS/2 keyboard layout? Is it because the early computer keyboard layouts are closer to a typewriter keyboard layout? I was born only in 1987 and have lived in Canada for all of my life so I always had

04:05 <brolin_empey> access to an IBM PC compatible and never seriously used a typewriter.

04:07 <brolin_empey> Well, the IBM PC was released one year before the Commodore 64 but the keyboard layout currently used on IBM PC compatibles is from the IBM PS/2, which was released in 1987.

04:09 <DocScrutinizer51> I have no idea. Prolly shift symbols on digit row never been standard in typewriters

04:37 <DocScrutinizer51> hehe, not always

04:53 <Joerg-Neo900> brolin_empey: re layout: you also should consider some of those early computer keyboards were neither meant as typewriter kbd (rather machine cockpit) and didn''t target a US-american customer base. Often they were sold international with just one layout that needed to match requirements of all regions

05:17 <brolin_empey> Joerg-Neo900: OK, good point.

05:37 <brolin_empey> I wonder what the first dedicated Web server was. The first public Web site was info.cern.ch hosted on the NeXT workstation of Tim Berners-Lee at CERN but this computer was not a dedicated server.

05:39 <brolin_empey> Maybe the early CERN (public) Web site was hosted on a dedicated server.

05:41 <DocScrutinizer51> well, prolly nobody could be arsed to evaluate'dedicated' status ever

05:42 <DocScrutinizer51> at that time computers were expensive and regularly been used for multiple purposes

05:44 <DocScrutinizer51> and nobody cared to tag a new label on a 'old' computer the moment the second last service except web server got moved to another iron

05:45 <DocScrutinizer51> how's that even relevant if the system also done email or whatever concurrently, or not?

05:46 <DocScrutinizer51> IIRC the NeXTcube been around 10k Deutschmark back when

05:47 <brolin_empey> I should have said “the first Web site hosted by a dedicated server computer” because “dedicated Web server” is ambiguous.

05:48 <DocScrutinizer51> cant follow

05:49 <brolin_empey> I mean a computer that is dedicated to acting as a server even if the computer is not server hardware because it is common to use desktop/client computer hardware as a server.

05:50 <DocScrutinizer51> I dont get it how you evaluate that criterion

05:51 <DocScrutinizer51> I prolly never seen any system that was a 'dedicated web server', always had sshd and/or ftp and/or email running too

05:53 <brolin_empey> TimBL’s workstation is obviously not a dedicated server because it is also the primary computer/client computer of TimBL. If, for example, CERN hosted an early form of their Web site on a dedicated server computer then that was probably the first Web site hosted by a dedicated server computer as opposed to the info.cern.ch Web site.

05:56 <DocScrutinizer51> again, I think such thing never existed. And even if it had existed for a short time, nobody bothered to keep track of such merely virtual 'change of status'

05:57 <brolin_empey> DocScrutinizer51: “dedicated Web server” was a short but bad way of saying “Web site hosted by a computer that is a dedicated server as opposed to a computer that is also the workstation/client computer of a person who probably uses the video console of the computer”.

06:00 <DocScrutinizer51> ooh, headless. well I think it took quite a few years. And then, many computers had only herkules or even tty interface

06:05 <brolin_empey> DocScrutinizer51: A dedicated server computer can still have a video console, such as the on-site server of my company, which uses a Socket-754 desktop motherboard (Asus K8N) from around 2004 but is still a dedicated server computer because usually no one uses the video console because the users all have their own client computer.

06:06 <DocScrutinizer51> for the sysops it makes absolutely no difference if the machine running httpd is multiuser or has a gfx graca or is located in a rack or on desktop

06:07 <DocScrutinizer51> so nobody kept track if some users used the hardware's graca or not

06:11 <brolin_empey> Yes but a service hosted by a workstation may have more downtime than a service hosted by a dedicated server due to the usage patterns.

06:11 <DocScrutinizer51> often a computer had several tty at that time, and users often used a free shared seat to og in - if special need then to the seat with beefy gfx support aka 'the computer's local terminal'

06:12 <DocScrutinizer51> aka 'console'

06:14 <brolin_empey> Yes, I know this stuff despite being born only in the 1980s.

06:15 <DocScrutinizer51> ok, maybe at time of invention of 'the web' this infra structure was't the most commonly found anymore

07:07 <DocScrutinizer51> maybe more interesting: the oldest still working domain / NS entry

07:10 <DocScrutinizer51> symbolics.com

07:11 <DocScrutinizer51> 1985-03-15

07:13 <DocScrutinizer51> 1986-03-03 hp.com #9

07:17 <Joerg-Neo900> I mean, 1 year and only 9 domains? most likely not

07:44 <brolin_empey> One of the dates in the WHOIS record for asus.com.tw is from 1984, even though Asus was not founded/incorporated/listed (?) until 1989 and even though the DNS was not publicly used until 1985.

07:47 <brolin_empey> “Record expires on 2027-05-31 (YYYY-MM-DD)

07:47 <brolin_empey> Record created on 1984-07-20 (YYYY-MM-DD)”

07:48 <DocScrutinizer51> well, errors