On Fri, Oct 14, 2011 at 02:32:10PM -0000, The_BearBoat wrote:
>
>
> Good grief Ben! Why are you knocking a product that worked exactly as designed
> that was in a system that you admittedly did not understand?
Charlie... I've been trying to find a charitable explanation for your
bewildering assumptions, and I'm unable to come up with one. Perhaps
Upton Sinclair's quote is most apropos here:
It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary
depends on his not understanding it.
In any case, I'll try one more time - this time with footnotes to
explain things that I thought would be obvious.
I'm "knocking a product that worked exactly as designed" *because* it
was designed that way and works that way. If a knife was designed in
such a way that it cut you every time you used it, you would knock that
knife design. Does that illustration help you understand? A product that
causes problems or damage when used as designed is BADLY DESIGNED.
In addition, it was not installed "in a system that [I] admittedly did
not understand". I'm an electronics engineer with more than 20 years of
full-time live-aboard experience as well as years of working on boat
systems professionally. In addition, these days, I'm a professional
programmer and security analyst; without tooting my own horn too loudly,
I can say that I understand ease of use and good system design very,
very well. That's exactly why I can authoritatively state that the ACR
is a badly thought-out design, with poorly-considered failure modes.
> How can bypassing the ACR be considered difficult? You simply use an 11/16"
> wrench and move the conductor serving one of the batteries over to the other
> battery's terminal. If you can reach the ACR, this should take you about 1.5
> minutes max.
*SIGH*
You see, on my planet, functions that are vital to the operation of
important systems NEVER require "1.5 minutes max" with an 11/16" wrench:
they are available at the click of a big, robust, usually
brightly-colored, and always easily-tripped switch or lever. Things like
battery switches, emergency stop buttons, fire alarm pulls, cardiac
response kits - they all have that in common. We Earth people like them
that way; it simplifies the critical actions that we have to take when
there's a problem.
Primitive of us, I know, but we humans are only 5 million years old...
we'll get there eventually, but for now, we'll get by on being adorable
and cuddly.
> "They just seem to have done a very bad job with this one."
>
> Obviously, I could not disagree with you more!
Much more obviously, you're not disagreeing with _me_ - you can't, since
you totally misunderstood what I wrote. You, or anyone else, is welcome
to disagree with me... but first, you have to pass a comprehension test.
:)
--
Ben Okopnik
-=-=-=-=-=-
No comments:
Post a Comment