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A "Bill of Lights" to Restrict LEDs on Gadgets?
PetManimal writes "Mike Elgan has had it with useless lights on gadgets and computers. He singles out the Palm Treo and the Dell XPS gaming laptops as being particularly bad with the use of unnecessary lights, and also cites the plethora of LEDs on desktop PCs and peripherals. 'My PC and other computing equipment make my office look like a jet cockpit. I have two LCD monitors, each of which has two indicator lights that flash even when the PC is turned off. The attached sound control has a light on it. My keyboard has multiple lights. The power cord has lights, the printer has lights, and the power button is illuminated. My cable modem and Linksys router flash like crazy all the time. Together, these useless lights create a visual cacophony of blinking, multicolored lights that make me feel like I'm taking part in a NASA stress test for astronaut candidates.' Elgan calls on manufacturers to respect his 'Gadget Bill of Lights' to restrict the use of nag lights and allow users to turn them off. He also says the industry should pay more attention to industrial design when creating new products."
Slashdot Poll: How many lit LEDs can you see?
Mother, do you think they'll like this sig?
Well the thing is, that there is this deep psycological connection between blinking lights and technology in our culture. In the old days, computers in movies often had excessive amounts of this. But even today, you see similar things in movies. If the lights are blinking, it must be doing something! I think it addresses some deep need of ours to see some physical changes taking place to explain a computation. Basically, it makes electronics less abstract.
I had to tape over the blue power LED on a Shuttle 51G system, as it was so bright I could see the reflections from it in another room. Kind of distracting when you are trying to go to sleep, see the light and wonder what light you left on elsewhere in the house. I understand the newer models are supposed to have a way do dim the LEDs. I used blue electrical tape so that I could still tell if the system thought it was on.
I like the lights, but not for mood. I want to know if my hard drive is getting hammered; if packets are flowing; if my DC adapter is getting power. Keep the lights!
Yea, it's not good enough to just talk on your headset in the theater... it has to fucking blink with that damn bright as hell blue light the entire time. I use to eat Milk-duds... now they're ammo. Cause I'm afraid of confrontation.
-AC
How about fix software so that whenever you have an interactive element (like a cancel button) it is never non-responsive?
"They who can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety" Franklin
Why can't we just have IR leds on *everything*. Then if you want to see the status you could put some special glasses on to see them?
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
You can turn the LEDs off on those dells, btw (as well as changing their colours should you want). And the dells can come with better specs than the macs, so it'd be a trade-off on performance as well.
I have a Treo and is has only one light. Blinking means message or missed call, lit means charging. All other times it is off. Seems like an appropriate use of a single indicator to me.
This is exceedingly relevant, and something that should interest most slashdot readers.
/. in and of itself. However, this article brings together two even more relevant issues: Computer/electronic gadget design, and communication design, of which interface design is a subset.
On the one hand, industrial design is a very interesting and geeky field. Discussion about good product design is worthy of
What makes an informational product good or bad is significantly driven by how effectively that device communicates its information to the user. Lights that don't tell you anything worthwhile are decorations, and it should be possible to disable them. Lights that tell you something you may not care about should be filterable as well.
Case in point: Our old DVD player (the one hooked up to an actual TV!) had an insanely bright blue display--bright enough to distract from the movie if it was near the screen. There was an option to dim or disable it, but the setting wasn't persistent. Every time you hit the power switch, it came back on at full brightness.
Smart product design should be the next wave of computing. Unfortunately, both hardware and software interfaces have been getting worse rather than better, as gee-whiz technology has expanded. Pointless flashing LEDs is just a symptom of it.
"People who do stupid things with hazardous materials often die." -- Jim Davidson on alt.folklore.urban
We joke about the blinking LEDs, but I for one would like to see more status LEDs on some of my (server) devices. Maybe I'm alone on this, but it would be kind of cool to have a bargraph LED display to show me the CPU average on the system, so I can get a feel for how hard the system is running by glancing at the front of the box. IIRC, the BeBox had this. (And there used to be a site that had a schematic to make your own blinkenlights module that used the serial port, and included a Linux kernel module to update the display.)
For work, we had a meeting with one of our vendors at their site, and they demo'd a new piece of hardware. When they eventually asked for comments/questions, I said "this needs more blinky lights." I'm not sure if they thought I was joking or not. But seriously, it would have been cool. :-)
The movie industry were inspired by the Connection Machine series of supercomputers. Every processor
in the computer had a LED that lit up when it was in use, and since there were thousands of processors,
there were thousands and thousands of lights.
Very large image
Vintage computer adverts: http://www.vintageadbrowser.com/computers-and-software-ads
Yup. It's a THREE STATE solution.
Switch DOWN for OFF.
Switch MIDDLE for TEST ( all lights on )
Switch TOP for ON. ( Lights indicate appropriate state )
Technology -- No Place For Wimps! Grateful Dead and Jerry Garcia Chatroom -- http://www.wemissjerry.org
Last time I was in Germany I went to a really cool modern art museum in Frankfurt am Main. They had this one room, where a single wall that was probably 20' x 20' was completely covered by normal, household-style bulb lights. They were set to turn on, then turn off, probably once or twice a second. So much power was flowing through there to turn them on that you could hear it. You could also feel the heat generated by them from across the room. It was quite the sight, and would probably have given someone with epilepsy quite a seizure. Not quite the same as little blinky LED lights, I know.. but it's German and nerdy and fun.
I know for a fact that at least one large system vendor would cause the LEDs on the drives in their arrays to blink somewhat in unison when there were demos or customer benchmarks.
We had a set of scripts which we'd kick off at the start of the benchmark to make sure that the wall of disks looked busy. The salesmen would say stuff like "Look, you can see the parity writes being generated". When in fact the entire benchmark would complete in RAM. Hell, they could make the lights blink from left to right, right to left, top to bottom and various patterns. My favourite was the diagonal wave, but we couldn't credibly use it during a benchmark, though one engineer did try to claim once that it might be caused by the fibre channel layout.
The customers lapped it up. THAT's why there are LEDs all over the place.
Deleted
In case you didn't know, you might already be in possession of a device that allows you to see infrared light: if you take a digital camera (even a simple phonecam will do) and look at the front of a tv remote when you press one of the buttons, you'll see a bright light flashing that's invisible to the naked eye. It's a great way to see if you need to replace the batteries or if the remote has not survived that drop from the table...
I also wondered if it might not be possible to build a (relatively) cheap light banner using IR LEDs - it would be black to the human eye but show up clearly through the viewscreen in your digicam or phonecam.
-- Language is a virus from outer space.
How about an initiative on getting rid of that vestigial LED? Why have a dedicated indicator for a function that no has used since the days of Lotus 123. Think of the cost savings that would occur with the removal of the LEDs and related circuitry.
For that matter, does anyone really look at the Caps Lock indicator on the keyboard. Wouldn't an indicator on the monitor make more sense for trained typists?
> Big disk array full of drives, all blinking somewhat in unison, is what I'm trying to say.
-nod- I've got one of those 4-in-3 SATA drive enclosure bays, and each drive sled has a LED that changes from green to red when it's being accessed. I arranged the disks so that their offset in the raid 5 array is the same as their physical location in the chassis, so on long contiguous operations the LEDs blink rapidly in a circular sequence. It's worth twice what I paid.
25% Funny, 25% Insightful, 25% Informative, 25% Troll
Conveniently for you, you are not the first person to have faced this problem. People who wanted to crop slide photos (remember slide projectors and slide shows?) had the exact same issue: they needed tape that would block as much light as possible, because they were shining hundreds of watts of light through a little piece of film maybe 2 square inches in area, and they wanted the tape to completely block out part of it. And that is why they invented tape that is specifically designed to block as much light as possible from passing through it.
From what I can tell, there is also apparently, or was at one time, such a thing as black opaque paint meant to be applied to film. This was used for touching up negatives by hand. It doesn't seem to be very easy to get anymore.
All such work must be done by licensed data/telco electricians here in Australia. I'm looking at possibly A$300 for the job... (I'd rather spend the money on a new UPS or something.) It's quite annoying; I have friends more than qualified for the job, but their license has expired as they've moved "up" to desk positions. If anything should happen it could be an insurance nightmare so not quite willing to take the risk. Hence, the annoyance with a) builders/designers not putting phone points in the most obvious data rooms, and b) leds bright enough to light a disco. A simple switch to disable all leds would be greatly appreciated. Can't wait till I build my own place ... CAT5 everywhere!
ISO certified == THX certified
Stunned that no one linked to a recent Doonesbury strip about this:
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http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070506
Actually many (most?) good video cameras let you turn the cue light off. It's usually buried somewhere in the software controls, at least on my Panasonic.
... but I can imagine all sorts of good gaffes that you could capture with it.)
Makes for much more spontaneous interviews that way. But I'm sure it could be used for nefarious purposes also.
(Even more interesting, some high-end cameras for ENG have solid-state buffers, like 10 or 30s worth, available as an optional accessory -- whenever the camera is running, it's going through the buffer. You can set it so that when you press record, instead of going hot right then, it actually starts recording out of the back end of the buffer -- so you actually get a recording that begins 10 (or 30, or whatever) seconds before you started rolling. I think it's advertised as a way of making sure that you don't lose any of your shot to "pre-roll"