But John, you are preaching to the choir.
Roger (bass-baritone section)
-----Original Message-----
From: owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
[mailto:owner-olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of John A. Lind
Sent: Friday, April 12, 2002 10:35 PM
To: olympus@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx
Subject: RE: [OM] Electronic gismos, gimmicks, and other gotchas
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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