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Similar problem in an aeroplane, the Boeing 787 would fail if it had been powered on continuously for 248 days: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2015/may/01/us-aviation...

You don't really think it would be necessary to turn off your plane then turn it back on again, but here we are.

I've probably told this story before.

I was on a turboprop flight about to depart the airport when we come to a stop and the pilot says that they have a problem with one of the bits of avionics -- I think he said it was for navigation, and that a mechanic was being driven over to swap it out.

This isn't unexpected per se; my knowledge of avionics is that a lot of design goes into making things easy to change out. If you can just swap the chunk that's not working out the plane gets into the air much faster and the electronics can be examined at leisure.

So we're sitting there about fifteen minutes, and the pilot comes on and says "Well, the mechanic says we should try powering down the plane and powering it back up before we exchange it."

They do so. It seems to take a good bit of time, probably five minutes. The pilot comes on and says "Well, that didn't work, but the mechanic wants us to try one more time."

Once again, everything on the plane shuts down, we sit there in the darkness, and then the plane starts back up.

The pilot comes on and says "We're all good now, so we're going to leave the airport."

I felt a bit nervous the whole flight.

Ha, 248 days is the point at which a 32bit signed int wraps round if counting in milliseconds.

I believe it needs to be a 10ms tick.

And I thought the car analogy was bad. Imagine hearing that excuse at 30,000 ft. (or being the pilot and having to give it) as all the lights in the cabin go off and the actuators stop working (would the turbines stop firing?) "Have you tried restarting it? Maybe boot it in safe mode." Loved the bit at the end 'Operators will perform periodic power cycling at scheduled intervals until incorporating a software update.'

Sad that this story's "thought experiment" https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=16393740 from 8 days ago may be the future, not a joke. Sorry you couldn't drive to work, we're pushing an update to your car by the middle of the week.

Don't joke. On my first trip flying anywhere ever, on the first leg of the return trip, an AA flight from Austin to St. Louis, we had to abort takeoff while the front wheel was up because all of the on-board computer systems died simultaneously.

I've never been in more of a white-knuckle situation in my life, including the time a tire blew while landing at IAD. We then sat on tarmac for close to 3 more hours while they replaced the computers and we took off again in the same plane.

On ground standing still and at 30,000 ft height is probably the safest times for the generators to fail. Plenty of time to fix. Imagine this happening during take-off or landing?

Unfortunately physical controls are significantly more expensive to make - we're talking a whole extra dollar or five on the BOM price here, which turns into several times that at retail. Capacitative sensing is cheap and plastic membrane buttons are cheap. They're also easier to waterproof.

Touchscreens in vehicles just seem like an accident waiting to happen.

Finally someone mentions this, everyone seems amazed about Tesla’s big iPad, where you control everything in your car, I haven’t tested it yet, but for me having controls that require taking my eyes from the road sounds like a really bad idea, regular buttons give you touch feedback so you don’t need to look, why is everyone so obsessed with touchscreens?

Because not enough people have read Bret Victor's "A Brief Rant On The Future Of Interaction Design"

http://worrydream.com/ABriefRantOnTheFutureOfInteractionDesi...

The Design of Everyday Things already talked about this in the 80s, it's depressing how little his suggestions have been accepted.

I mean, in interaction design is certainly is. It's just that outside of the design world, not enough people realise that there is more to design than graphic design, and that there is more to design than just adding some pretty chrome at the end of the whole development phase.

Yeah, I have been wondering this for a long time already. Can it be that the new people fresh out of school is taking over the design departments everywhere and they grew up with iPhones?

Because they're cheap.

I had a discussion the other day with someone who designs large, moving machinery. His preference is for the actual controls to be physical switches and knobs that are easy to user and learn. He relegates touchscreens for setup & configuration.

> I don't want to slide my finger to determine heat intensity, and select which burner that applies to by pressing a soft button corresponding to the hotplate. Just give me a physical knob for each hotplate please. The UX there is excellent.

This drives me nuts as well. I'm the guy going to appliance stores and testing the knobs of every range just to see if they've managed to fuck up even that simple interface.

And some manufacturers have. :-(

You want to be able to turn the knob directly to max from 0, without having to go all the way around, but some have a stop in place so you can only turn it in one direction. Absolutely maddening.

> You want to be able to turn the knob directly to max from 0, without having to go all the way around, but some have a stop in place so you can only turn it in one direction. Absolutely maddening.

At first I was thinking, "Well, when there's a stop in place, that's usually because that plate has one of those turn-briefly-to-11-and-let-the-knob-spring-back-to-10-in-order-to-activate-the-outer-area-of-the-plate" but then I realised how terrible of an interface that is, too! It took me years to figure out, and I have taught it to so many people since, who wish they knew about it earlier...

But what is more important than going from 0 to max, in my opinion, is being able to go in the opposite direction. When I'm holding a pot full of boiling water in one hand and stirring something with my other hand, I want to be able to turn off the plate really quickly.

Doesn't the stop make it easier to go back to 0? Sure you have to turn it more, but you don't have to worry about accidentally going past 0 and leaving the stove on.

That's another advantage of the mechanical knob: a large detent at "zero". Provides both tactile and acoustic feedback. So, no worries of turning past zero.

Exactly, you solve the safety issue with a "groove", so it snaps to 0, and so you get tactile feedback that you did hit 0. Boom, done. No need for annoying stops.

Unless, of course, you view the increase in force required to turb past zero as a sort of soft stop.

This safety feature is far more important than being able to go all the way to max instantly.

But it could definitely be a one-way catch for quick turn-off:

___ _____

0 \_| Max

With the traditional analog controls, the knob is adjusting the spring tension of a thermostat via a screw, so going "below" 0 doesn't really make sense (it would be "more off than off"), and likewise in the other direction too.

Microwaves are the fucking worst. My workplace recently got and LG with hidden capacitative buttons, which don't work half the time, and require various combinations of holding and tapping in unintuitive orders to set anything. A shame because its magnetron is one of those nice inverter-based ones, but I'll be damned if I can figure out how to set the power.

I would pay thousands for a high-powered inverter microwave with two physical dials: power (measured in WATTS, thank you, not percentage), and time.

You can get microwave ovens with knobs, although the power won't be in watts because they don't bother calibrating the power output that closely (and it varies slightly with line voltage and use.)

The only such ones I've found have been under 1000 W, which is too low for me. I appreciate the speed of 1200 W or more models, but those inevitably cheap out on the UI.

Commercial models have a dial and high power, but I haven't found such a one where you can control the power, which is a must for oatmeal and such.

http://www.samsung.com/uk/microwaves/microwave-commercial-cm...

Large and not cheap, but it's 1500W and has 5 power levels.

Thanks for the link. I seem to have cast my net too narrow, as Google turns up this: https://www.webstaurantstore.com/14351/commercial-microwaves... which has quite a few high-powered with dual dial controls (though it's not clear which are inverter-based). Some have instead two columns of buttons, one for power, one for time, which is a design I hadn't considered which does also seem easy to use.

I've found Sharp to have the most intuitive UI, and would probably never buy any other brand. Unfortunately, I'm stuck with a GE microwave built in to my apartment kitchen, but Sharp was what I was used to for many years. You enter a time, you hit "start" or "timer" and it counts down. Other brands seem to have UI designed by Martians - I could write a book on the ways they are screwed up.

The ikea-branded range hood above our stove has touch controls and they drive me nuts. The vapors of the stove deposit on the control surface and cause the “buttons” to malfunction. Sometimes it will switch on full blast by itself and sometimes it will refuse to turn on. The workaround is to wipe down the control surface regularly.

Oh, and every 6 months it crashes and I have to unplug and replug it to make it work again.

You've bought the wrong hood then. IKEA has models with nice clunky physical switches.

> At one point my GPS/stereo touchscreen hit some bug, and the only way to "fix" it was to pull over at a rest stop and power cycle my truck (turn off, then back on again :facepalm: ).

be glad you even have this option.

in my car, sometimes android auto freezes in a way that it will never recover from. this would be a minor annoyance if I could just reboot the thing while driving (and why not? it shouldn't hook into anything essential), but I can't do that. worse still, I can't even hard reset it by power cycling the whole car. the damn thing goes into sleep mode or something and maintains the broken state. only way to fix it is to turn the car off and then wait n minutes for the system to finally shut down.

This is what I don't get about the obsession people have with Tesla, in particular the Model 3. The interface in those cars is inferior and distracting. When I'm driving I need an interface I can operate from muscle memory.

The controls in my 1985 Saab C900 is almost ideal. Everything important at eye height. Direct manipulation analog controls with an immediate and tactile result.

Computers should be here to assist and get out of the way. Wiz-bang fancy too often takes precedence over pragmatism here.

You might be surprised to learn that Tesla has steering-wheel buttons, like other cars.

I'm aware of this, and aware that they can be configured to control things that the touch screen also controls. But some steering wheel buttons are not enough.

Honestly, a giant attention sucking touch screen in the centre of the car is the opposite of the direction manufacturers should be going.

The power cycling the car to get the stereo to work isn't limited to Fords unfortunately. I have a "dumb" smart radio and the BT is so bad between my Google phone and the car that I've had numerous glitches some that require power cycling the car, which is insane. I honestly cannot believe something that works flawlessly in nearly every other situation is so screwing in the car, what I wouldn't give to have my aux connector in again.

I work in embedded software, and Bluetooth is the worst. Hardware and software are crawling with bugs. I like to say it's the most unreliable technology in wide use.

What you see is after all the workarounds that some poor application developers had to implement.

That's what happens when you try to design a unifying interface for everything.

Frankly I'm amazed Bluetooth works as well as it does.

WiFi is an example of an almost everything interface that mostly works, though. But it's a different approach because it leaves application interfaces variable, so less big design up front. Its main functionality gap is, of course, low power and very low cost hardware.

That said, I still don't understand why Bluetooth is still flaky after over 20 years of opportunity to improve it.

> WiFi is an example of an almost everything interface

And the gap between almost everything and everything is huge.

I like the phrase I heard a few years ago from friends that played MMOs: “92 is halfway to 100”. Diminishing returns is a painful thing.

> what I wouldn't give to have my aux connector in again.

Your head unit probably has an aux connector in the back, either 1/8" or RCA input as part of video input. You can run a long 1/8" male-male wire from there out to the bottom of the dashboard (what I did on my most recent swap, can't lose the cable this way), or run a 1/8" male-female to an accessory knock-out cover or cut out part of the dashboard. I paid for a higher-quality Kenwood unit, and the Bluetooth, while actually managing to connect (not always the case in my experience, even for factory units), does have problems with interference that sometimes cause sound to drop out for 1-2 seconds. This is as bad as the worst CD-skip-on-hitting-pothole. Bluetooth IMO is complete garbage for car audio.

The Bluetooth in my car worked reasonable well for a couple of years until one day it stopped working entirely. Thankfully it has an aux connector (and I'll never buy a phone without a 3.5mm jack).

> Bluetooth IMO is complete garbage for car audio.

Amen. I get a lot of stuttering and random disconnections that drive me insane. Also that's a terrific tip regarding the aux input. Definitely gonna check that out.

Especially with vehicles, I wonder if the designers actually use their creations at all, or they do but ignore all the problems and simply replace it with a smug feeling of having designed something so complex.

I have an old car. All electromechanical controls with obvious functions and very pleasant tactile feedback. I don't have to take my eyes off the road to manipulate any of them. IMHO that's how driving should be.

Re: power cycling, I noticed a similar problem when I reviewed Ford/MS’s SYNC system 10 years ago: if I pressed the phone button without a phone linked, I would be locked out of the sound system until I turned the engine off and on again. What?

See point 8: http://blog.tyrannyofthemouse.com/2008/07/setting-sync-strai...

Close all windows and open them again. Oh my..

EDIT: http://wdell.com/humor/stalledcar.html

Sometimes the reason manufacturers are going digital is not just to be "smart", albeit it is a nice selling point for them to state it that way. Its actually sometimes cheaper to use digital parts instead of physical parts for certain components.

When you talk about stovetops, the tradeoff between price points on a unit from physical / digital controls is generally if it uses a built in thermostat or not, and the need for more advanced features (built in timers, etc). Its fairly common for kitchens to use purely manual driven knobs that open on/off gas valves on the economy scale since they are reliable and work. For home use stoves, since it also doesn't go through as much abuse compare to a kitchen stove, manufacturers will veer towards digital controls to offer more features and selling points.

My ranges have knobs but my oven is controlled by a seemingly simple set of 4 buttons and a 4 digit disply on a basic circuit board. Just at that vey low level of computerization, the cost to fix a problem goes from $10 to $300.

Car “infotainment” systems are the worst. I drive a VW and the touch screen is maddening. Transition animations are too long and involved, which is frustrating because 99% of the time I just need to force connect Bluetooth and that button combination is muscle memory by now. But every time I have to wait for the stupid interface to do this 3D flip. Oh, and if I skip ahead in Spotify with the on-screen controls, it doesn’t pull the new track data until the next track plays automatically, so it’s always out-of-sync.