First a look back into history. In the mid to later 1900s the elevator companies started installing touch call buttons that would light up and call the elevators to the floor. After several incidents of elevators taking passengers to a burning floor the touch buttons soon came into not being acceptable…
Now several times at night on this site my computer would do very strange things including starting apps or even going to sites not desired. As well unable to open PDF files. Have observed that very small flying bugs attracted to the touch screen causes where ever bug touched and activates that item. Comes to mind the old saw that with enough monkeys one could write a Shakespear play.
Has anyone else ever had this happen ? Am going to have to the computer doctor.
Balt you are completely correct. As well just flying against the screen causes problems. Makes one wonder if all the I- pads, touch screen phones, etc could have this problem especially outdoors.
Not a computer expert by any means, but if your touch screen is sensitive to the point bugs landing on it can trigger apps or functions there’s something wrong with that touch screen.
I’ve heard of and had personal experience with touch screens loosing sensitivity, but this is the first time I’ve heard of a hyper-sensitive one.
This is highly interesting, because those bugs shouldn’t have enough self-capacitance to get the screen controller to identify contact. What you’ve got may be engineers with more obsessivity than common sense.
One of the reasons modern phone screens ‘work well’ at all is that they have very sophisticated and very fast processors doing very complex calculations on multiple points with multiple pressures to determine where the ‘center’ of a touch of something big and blunt and ridged like a fingertip is. The sensors in some current iPhones are capable of resolving enough fingerprint detail to be used as biometrics. If you ever wondered how a phone can work with a cracked screen – think about why the phone gets a little hot while it does; it’s making what may be hundreds of thousands of calculations in realtime about where all the shifting crack stresses are, and separating them from the pattern of expected touches…
However, if you are a lazy engineer, you might be tempted to have your controller look for nice, clean, precise touches … like those you might get from a thin stylus or point … unassociated with permanent details; in fact, starting quickly and then sustaining at a reasonably fixed level from ‘nothing’, just what an engineer might think is an ideal touch signal for precise locating without all that deconvolution.
In my opinion, that screen is set up waaaaaaaaay more sensitive than it should be, and a good touchscreen driver configuration utility would drop at least some of the achievable lower ‘differentiable pressure levels’ precisely so things like June
The problem with engineers, not all mind you, but just enough to be an annoyance, is they tend to design things with an eye to impressing each other, not with an eye to practicality in the everyday world with everyday users.
I have to confess that I almost never see that motivation in actual engineering, and the real-world practicality problem may be better attributed to very different sources.
Part of the problem is the “first law of engineering” which I was first introduced to about a week into freshman year in college, and which I still remember with a sense of youthful righteous indignance: the idea that any engineering project has to be cost-effective (or cost-conscious, which is a somewhat different thing) before any actual work on it is undertaken, and that cost is the final determinant of any solution. Here is the root of a great deal of engineering evil, including (but not limited to) all those designs like the rod bolts in the T-head Mercer engine, or short watertight bulkheads on big Atlantic liners, or [insert your favorite GE locomotive canard here], where a little skimping to reduce perceived cost leads to great trouble. Another source of woe is the kind of tunnel vision that comes when you solve exactly the problems in an insufficiently-developed model – or that are best addressed with your ‘favorite’ theory or the proprietary technology your company wants to flog or the approaches your education or your mentor may have saddled you with as ‘technology moves on’.
The elevator touch buttons are an example of this. One can easily appreciate the various ‘very-real-world’ problems of any kind of mechanical switch with a lubricated travel, environmental sealing, and make-and-break contacts in elevator service. How logical – to a '50s engineer – it would be to provide a switch that has no moving parts at all! And there are problems with many of the ways to impl
OK, I “get” the problem with a heat-activated elevator button where the elevator will get called to the floor with a fire on it. But the points in that paragraph are going “woosh” right over my head.
I don’t know much of the context of the SPV-2000 apart from it being a revised RDC based on the Metroliner carbody that was unsuccessful in service, it being claimed that fine snow got into the “works” in its intended use in the Northeast for service supplementing the Northeast Corridor electric trains?
Was the problem that they didn’t supply a second Diesel to supply the hotel power, where the hotel power went out if the main engine quit, or that they did supply such an “APU”, which had a habit of breaking down? Both solutions, a separate hotel power unit as well as getting that power off the main engine, have found their way into railroad passenger service.
As to gearing the two axles together, yes, the RDC (as I believe, the Colorado Railcars DMU, which was not so much unsuccessful as that it never found a market) drove only the inboard axle. Connecting both axles adds more mechanism to maintain, and it also requires maintaining the wheels on the two axles to within 1 mm in diameter, not an unusual condition in railroading judging by the long history of coupled-axle steam locomotives?
I give up. That’s five times the Forum software has jittered and gone off the page without warning, eliminating everything I’ve typed in. I’ll do it in word processing and paste it in. Once again, why doesn’t Kalmbach return the simple little box that says ‘do you want to navigate away from this page? Content may be lost’? that they still use in other places in their pages?
I almost always compose the post in WORD and copy/paste it in here, but that requires editing the post to reformat the spacing to normal between the paragraphs. When I first copy/paste into the forum composition box, the formatting is correct, but when I post, it widens out the spacing to four lines.
Let’s try this, not that much of it still is fully coherent as started…
I’ve typed a reply so many times I don’t even remember my own point clearly. One point is that the engineers got so ‘attached’ to the idea of a zero-mechanical-movement solution that they produced a solution that – in addition to producing precisely the wrong effect in fires – required a great deal of expensive additional equipment and points of failure ‘behind the wall’, all implemented with the ‘60s equivalent of fancy relays and flat-packs and perhaps not easy for even skilled repair people to diagnose and repair without FRUs. Not to mention the things that are wrong with the user haptics, especially when the little light in the button burns out and it’s impossible for a user
OK Overmod, whatever you say, but that thing I said about engineers trying to impress each other, and mind you I’m not saying they’re all guilty of this, I got from a magazine article years ago about VCRs, of all things, and just “WHY are they so damn complicated and WHY are they loaded with features I’ll never use?”
I’ve assumed that things haven’t changed, times change, products change, people don’t. I work on copiers, and those things are loaded with features that most people will never use. All they want to do is walk up, insert the original, and hit the start button. By the way, NEVER hit the start button, you’ll kill the micro-switch under it eventually.
At least Dilbert doesn’t try to design products no layman can figure out.
AHA! You’re out of the range of engineers here – you’re into product placement and design for marketing. And here there is a great range of the sort of thing you’re describing … and worse.
We all know about creeping featurism, usually without either a good sense of coherent design or proper understanding of either UI (the layout and action of the physical controls) and IxD (the experience you have as you use the controls to accomplish things or acquire touch familiarity - we call the expanded version of that ‘haptic familiarity’, and a good example of it in action is in one of the Government movies on ‘how to fly bombers’ for the B-26 Widowmaker – I saw it on one of the old TV programs, probably Wings, but I’ll bet it’s now on Youtube.)
In product development, you probably have heard of planned product obsolescence ( a term I learned as a child from reading Vance Packard). You also probably know about things like design patents, ‘look and feel’, and the lovely Japanese practice of rolling out functionality in incompatible phases, stereo sound on VCRs being the canonical example I used to use.
“Engineers” are only the downtrodden handmaidens of these kinds of ‘design’ (just as they are for wacky modern ‘architecture’ of the Frank Gehry type). Combined with this is an increasing tendency toward ugly, flat, or trendy design from goofy people like Jonny Ive, and a general sloppiness (perhaps related to a lack of intellectual interest or rigor in common courtesy and communication evidenced in part by disregard for spelling or intelligent
Now that I think about it, I believe that article I read was in “Playboy.” Mind you I only used to buy that mag for the articles.
Funny you should mention the B-26. The Martin “Marauder” (not the Douglas A-26 “Invader” that was later re-classified as a B-26) disappeared pretty quickly after WW2. Tricky to fly, difficult and expensive to maintain, once the need for it was gone so was the B-26. The B-25 on the other hand, easy to fly and maintain and economical to operate lasted in Air Force use until the late 1950’s, so there’s a lot to be said for “keepin’ it simple.”
The A-26 lasted into the 1960’s and saw some VietNam useage.
And to keep this railroad-related, remember that great Burt Lancaster film “The Train?” Those twin engine bombers that work over the railyards are A-26’s.
Overmod & Firelock- Our new copier, purchased last year, for the Mining Dept. at college here in Northern Saskatchewan, is worth every penny and then some. It is simple, easy and I swear it will make you a cappuccino if you’re nice to it. Did a nice job publishing those RR merger maps from Kalmbach in color, but don’t tell anyone. So someone is doing something incredibly right.
Outside of that I understood maybe half of what Overmod has stated and I’m a Mining Engineer and a P.Geo. Sheesh.
Miningman, that new copier will make you a cappuccino? That’s great!
Just do your friendly local copier repair technician a favor and don’t let anyone try to make a grilled cheese sandwich by trying to run the bread and cheese through the fusing unit. I’ve dealt with that situation. It wasn’t pretty.
And don’t let anyone try to heat up their morning doughnuts but putting them on the copy glass and running the scanning lamp. Dealt with that too.
