walden

Linux Mint

… or maybe it was Ubuntu, but it didn’t last long so I don’t really count it. Linux Mint stuck for a number of years.

Why not now? Do you use the computer for school or work?

Linux is very easy to try, without even installing it. You can load Linux Mint on a USB thumb drive, then the hardest part is setting your BIOS to boot from it.

The survey in question is in regards to personal computers, so it depends on how the question was asked, and how people answered it. If people consider their Steam Deck to be a personal computer that runs Linux, I suppose they could answer that way. But, I don’t think that’s very likely.

Good question. It’s an actual survey (not analytics data) which asks specifically about PCs, not handhelds. https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

Survey data isn’t always the best data. Linux users might be more likely to take the survey in the first place, for example, while Windows users might not care to.

It’s recommended to not begin boarding until it’s finished, but one person moving around, gusts of wind, etc. don’t bother it.

I’ve been trying to think through how it would determine longitude based on rotation of the earth and I agree, that’s not really possible. I wonder what other tricks it uses to find the initial location.

This sounds pretty fancy.

Commercial aircraft get their location from multiple places including GPS, ground based facilities (VOR’s), IRS, etc. IRS is what I’m used to calling it, but it’s the same as INS, which is what this article is talking about.

It determines location by keeping track of rotation, acceleration, etc. It’s often called “dead reckoning” because it just gives the best guess, and you don’t know how accurate it is. There are multiple of these devices on each aircraft, and they compare their locations to the other sources and if one is drifting way further than the rest, it gets ignored. That’s a very basic explanation because how it really works is way above my knowledge level.

It’s very cool how these devices find their location, though. When you first boot the system up, it spends about 5 minutes measuring the rotation of the Earth. For this reason, you can’t reset it when in motion. Based on what it feels it can determine your exact location on the surface of the earth.