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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."
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
> 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
Stunned that no one linked to a recent Doonesbury strip about this:
. gif
http://images.ucomics.com/comics/db/2007/db070506