@AvengerOfBoredom: Christ! Not again!

@AvengerOfBoredom: You don't need to post anything ever again.

@Anonymous: Now, now. Only my elf is allowed to be a maverick, all the word means is different.

@Anonymous: Now that's just rude. I don't come to your realm and tell you to stop trolling the trade trolls for the lols.

@Anonymous: I doubt that, tho its amusing someone actually remembered me.

So much pedantry all up in this thread.

@tahrey: Sorry...
* because having

@Anonymous: Which bits? As far as I know pretty much everything we recognise as a control in a car has come about in an evolutionary fashion.

Steering wheel instead of tiller
Sitting on one side with the controls in front, rather than them (and sometimes the driver) being central
Pedals for control of speed (and clutch in manual) instead of levers
Gears and parking brake controlled by lever rather than pedals and the like, and usually in the middle of the cabin instead of somewhere more obstructive like the footwell or steering column.
Signals and wipers on steering column stalks instead of a row of buttons on the dash
Lights being either an easily found chunky control on the dash, separate from all the other dashmount ones, or on the signal stalk. Similarly the hazard flashers set apart (these are usually the worst, along with the rear screen heater - they just get shoved any old where... my last car had them right by my friggin' KNEE, but that was unusual in its stupidity).
Heater controls usually - unless you've been a bit mad and gone for iDrive or some kind of other climate control that's operated via a screen - three knobs in a row, or one/two knobs and a slider, that go through about 270 degrees clockwise from bottom left, with position indicating setting.

All of the above being operable without having to look at them, the haptic feedback alone tells you everything you need to know.

Now shove a driver who's learnt those, even just the very basics in the space of a day or two, into the cockpit of the Model T or DeDion I mentioned, they'd be completely and utterly fucked. EG The Ford's pedals were just straight rod linkages to the transmission's brake bands, with no attempt made at abstracting the interface to the user. It was like the classic-style Unix of cars

40 or so years of development had passed before anything resembling what we know as standard layout was formed & started to gain popularity - in part because it was easier, simpl…

@Anonymous: And what of motorcycles? You can learn the rudiments of riding a manual shift one of those in less than a day, sufficient enough for most countries to consider you fit to be let out on the road after proving you can handle it and being given a certificate. But they're even more messed up than cars are.

Hand throttle, separate brakes - one right next to the throttle, the other foot controlled, but the one you operate with your foot works on the same wheel that the hand throttle supplies power to. Hand clutch. A pedal for gears, sequential but usually in a non-intuitive layout. A requirement to countersteer above about 15mph. Lights and signals operated by thumbswitches, and not self-cancelling. Clocks often too low down to be easily read without completely taking your eyes off the road. Needs manual intervention to keep it upright when parking otherwise it falls over.

@Jiakko: Sorry dude, I thought I was still sticking to the oldtimey tabPC vs fresh new slablet plan :p

@tahrey: Interesting (to me at least) aside: I just had a nice chat with a colleague of another department, having stuck my head into her office for some random bit of banal business, about the old days of computing (I think she was losing her shit at the printer not working or something).

Turns out she's an old hand from the days where you'd compose your program on lined paper, give it to someone in a cardpunch typing pool, and then stacked it up in a queue to be batch-processed. All the stats for her university dissertation were worked out that way, using Fortran programs of her own devising, and debugged on a more or less trial-and-error basis given how turnaround was in the order of 48 hours.

According to her, the Sinclair ZX81 was an absolute godsend, as you didn't have to leave the room, and it would flag up syntax errors as soon as you pressed Enter at the end of a line of BASIC (presumably even shit-slow BASIC is much faster than waiting two days to find out if your programmed-in-a-more-sophisticated-language job even RAN successfully).

She's someone's mother as well - because she taught her kids how to program with the Spectrum bought to replace the '81.

So I'm pretty sure by this point "even my mum can use it" is an outright crap way of judging the user friendliness of a device. Mothers can understand WASHING MACHINES for cryin' out loud, which is something I don't think I'll ever fully manage.

whilst i'm on this particular roll:

no unix = no linux = no OLPC or android.
also... = no apache servers = a vast swathe of the internet would be running on different software.
regardless of what you think of those, it would make quite a difference to the computerin' landscape.

thankyou and goodnight

@remeranAuthor: I think that was covered by Marketing, of which Brand Identity is a huge and intrinsic part.

(something that about half the current rash of advertisers making Youtube bumper videos don't seem to understand, as they fail to get their product and company name into the first five seconds, ie the bit that plays whilst you're still waiting for "skip to video" to appear)

@Anonymous: That's why you abstract the controls at the user end from what they actually do at the oily end (e.g. the action performed by pulling the clutch lever/pushing the pedal is essentially the exact opposite of doing the same to the brake lever/pedal; but pushing the throttle pedal achieves the same at the engine end in a car as twisting the grip does on a bike), to whatever extent as becomes necessary.

A fixie bike pretty much has a zero-level, as it doesn't need any. Something like that saucer would presumably be controlled by a system similar to that of the F117A or F22, where the pilot doesn't so much fly the craft as tell it what he would like to do next, and the computer responsible for keeping it in the air figures out what to do.

One of them I could see being controlled by a mostly-autopilot touchscreen console like in Star Trek.

@newalexandria: You're really gonna have to explain that one, because AFAICT you're just making stuff up.

I get the idea of putting the soap and conditioner in, and setting the temperature, half load button, etc. It's the turny-button thing with all the letters on and incomprehensible program names that I can't figure out (and hell, I've even started to gain a basic understanding of clothes tags).

With my own, I just put it on the program I got told to use and let it whiz. An "ipad" style machine would be quite welcome. Except it would actually have to be simpler rather than being just as complex in a fisher-price coat, and cost half as much because of the lost (and irrelevant) functionality rather than twice as much.

I mean, if you go down to a coin-op laundrette, you don't have all those things to bother about. One program fits all.

Hmmmm.... I wonder if it's possible to install a Maytag in a private residence, if anywhere's selling off their old ones?

@Anonymous: are you 5? OS X is a unix fork, and jobs is a hack

@Anonymous: It's based on UNIX, yes. But what sets it apart from any ol' boring UNIX workstation from the '90s is the GUI and the other things on top of the UNIX layer, inherited from NeXT Corp, of course. Steve was very fond of object oriented programming, but not in the C++ way. There's a reason the preferred Apple programming language is Obj-C, not C++.

@tahrey: all your friendzone are belong to her

@Anonymous: yeh i know but it seemed appropriate

@Anonymous: I might have to research this further, but wasn't NeXTSTEP itself a flavour of BSD?

And sorry, my brain wasn't set for "comparing noughties-era OSX with 90s-era UNIX" (Solaris etc - uggghhhh), but instead with things like the Ubuntu UI, or at least moderately contemporary KDE / Gnome / etc, which hold their own fairly well despite having X hidden somewhere at their core, on top of Linux or some other fairly recent Unix-a-like the same as Apple use.

I haven't a problem with the typical post-millennial Linux GUI... it's just the way the whole system works in an even more user-hostile way than MacOS itself that twists my cherries. Once it's abstracted far enough away, with decent design on top of it, it's fine. EG, Android works just swell.

@Anonymous: that's not explaining. dismissing you as a troll who's run out of steam. bye now.