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RE: [OM] Electronic gismos, gimmicks, and other gotchas

Subject: RE: [OM] Electronic gismos, gimmicks, and other gotchas
From: "John A. Lind" <jlind@xxxxxxxxxxxx>
Date: Fri, 12 Apr 2002 21:35:15 -0500
At 15:34 4/12/02, you wrote:
Ha. You're letting your Engineering side and experience show now. Your Marketing side would say all of those multiple choice options are necessary to stimulate sales even if not necessary to take pictures. It takes a lot of camera knowledge to know which mode to use for some of the Wunderbricks. Most people only use one or two of the modes because it's too much work to understand the whole mess.

And these are many of the same ones who haven't managed to figure out how to program their VCR yet! It is interesting to watch Wunderziegel owners pressing all the buttons and twisting all the knobs to get their camera into just the right mode so it will automagically do what they want it to. Wait a minute . . . if it's so automagic, why is all the button pushing and knob turning required? Why doesn't it *know* what magical mode it needs to be in without human intervention? If it weren't so sad, it would be hilarious.

The disase some of these users have is gadgetitis.

I think all meters require some mental interpretation to be successfully
used. There is elegance in simplicity.  /jnm

This is "Design Elegance:" does what it needs to, reliably, repeatably, very predicatbly, with the fewest possible parts, and will continue doing so for at least 10 years before any detectable degradation occurs, probably many more.

Machines to simple tasks with few decision criteria (no more than two, perhaps three) very well. Complex ones with many decision criteria to be evaluated are machine nightmares. The permutations and combinations of criteria and their individual levels explode exponentially as their number increases. The human brain is almost always much, much better organized for doing this much, much faster. It's the reason humans in average physical condition can walk up and down stairs without even consciously thinking about it. Try to devise a robot that can do it . . . and successfully negotiate *any* staircase it might encounter (not to mention being able to sense and recognize one in its surroundings).

Yes, there are aircraft that can land themselves and the systems for it are incredibly complex, but there's a *reason* a human pilot is *still* in the cockpit . . . to override and sieze control *if* a situation is encountered that the aircraft designers failed to imagine when it was created (imagining them all, an infinite set of possibilities, is impossible).

-- John
[who doesn't have a pager, cell phone or PDA!!]


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