I dealt with a software engineer today. He was a very nice gentleman. In my humble opinion, he has been dealing far too long with software and is out-of-the-loop in dealing with hardware, however should not insist he is correct when he has no idea what he’s actually talking about. Here’s an example in dealing with a touchscreen that I have calibrated many times in an attempt to fix it.

This is how an LCD works (laptop screen, flat panel monitor, touch screen, etc). There are pixels, and they light up. That’s it. In a nutshell. These pixels turn their colors on and off, bright and dim, creating the 32 million colors you see today (most likely) and drawing a picture.

Here’s how this particular touchscreen works: There is a sensor that lays over he glass and recognizes where you put your finger by it’s X and Y coordinates (like a grid). Another example would be Battleship. (A5 – hit!) Now…the touchscreen sensor reads where your finger is, and the appropriate line is drawn by the pixels. The pixels directly reflect where the sensor thinks it’s being pushed.

Using logic, if you put your finger and draw a line and the line that is drawn doesn’t match where your finger is…what is wrong? That’s right, the sensor . You might not be technically inclined, but knowing what you do now, you could probably figure it out. This gentleman insisted the screen had “a dead pixel.” I tried to explain that a dead pixel will result in a little tiny block that stays black and doesn’t change color. He thought his case might be the case because he “read it in one of those blogs.”

No. Bad.