This story’s going into your powerpoint deck, right? 
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this is what the terminal looks like, i bet https://i.pinimg.com/564x/51/e6/44/51e644251f6ebb25b7fcb21e71e63566--computer-terminal-green-characters.jpg
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The five minutes to destruction are typographically uninteresting. Ripley makes it to the escape shuttle with no sign of the alien. She even finds her not-dead cat along the way.
format c:
Trump doesn’t do Realpolitik.
Yes, acronyms…
As supreme head of interoffice training I have very strong views on this.
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Unbelievable that they think they have solved the problem now. Jesus christ, they have learnt nothing.
PACOM Alert and Feed the Moai Birds All Your Sushi And Follow The Vervets are often used together, so normally it’s used with the Vaporwave Aesthetic Panic button and Hall of Guf key chord.
Confirmation to add +bleeding dress to monitor, +jazz-hands around est. affected population size.
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which keystroke brings up the Fiji water bottle simulations
G*d, I know what you mean! I do not understand the logic at all.
I am similarly astounded by Elon Musk thinking it’s a good idea to do that with the Model 3.
All the “negative space” instrumentation-wise just gives me cabin fever 
– I’ve done a lot of open road driving, and I hate to say it, but the comfort of instrumentation in front of you not only makes more sense functionally, but it acts as a companion … having nothing in front of you just creates a feeling of isolation.
I’ve been checking myself on this, and I keep returning to “it’s the way I feel” – feeling and emotion is a large part of man-machine interaction (ergonomics). I think he made a huge error with the non-dashboard of the Model 3.
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Here’s my real suggestion for how it happened:
- Ten years ago, Hawaii contracts out for a system to send out (say) Amber alerts on mobile phones. They get a company that does a fairly basic job of it, and they add a the various alerts that can be sent to a database: “Amber Alert (CAE) Statewide”, “Amber Alert (CAE) - Kauai County Only”. To send the alerts, you have to access the database.
- On delivery, the client (the state) says that they need a feature for a mid-level office person to easily send the alert on the state’s intranet. The company has only a few days to turn it around, for no more money, so they simply create an internal web page that is populated by the database. Who cares, it’s just some Amber Alerts.
- Company is gone, but state decides it wants to send Tsunami warnings. Hew, look, you can just add a new entry to the database, give it a title and a message, and it will appear on the internal web page.
- Hey look, we can add a landslide warning too.
- We need to add a missile warning. We can just keep sticking these things in our database, because none of us are developers but it works great, and wasn’t it lucky that we thought to build such an extensible system?
- Over the course of the ten years, it gets brought up by mid-level people every so often what a shitty page it is, but it’s treated as a joke, because everyone knows it, and certainly there’s no money in the budget to hire another expensive group of contractors, because the system just works if you know what you’re doing.
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definitely agree with you there… reminds me of the latest trend in web design where everything is concealed within menus and drop downs for the sake of aesthetics
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My head hurts.
That’s exactly how institutional inertia turns something that was fit for purpose, once upon a time, into a dangerous liability that too many people rely on to do many more things than originally spec’d.
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Don’t forget FCA’s boneheaded shifter design that’s likely responsible for the death of Anton Yelchin.
http://autoweek.com/article/recalls/was-anton-yelchins-death-caused-recalled-shifter
Good design is good design. Changing it for the sake of change is a sure way for bad things to happen.
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I’m confused. Every automatic shifter in America has “R” above “D”, don’t they? On every car, you need to pull back from Neutral to get into Drive, and Reverse is federally mandated to be on the opposite side of Neutral. You could argue that all cars are backwards, but I think it would have been more confusing for Priuses (Prii?) to go the other way.
Conventional automatic:
Prius:
Leaf (ugh, what the hell is this UFO thing?):
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If the transmission controller for an automatic drive vehicle requires navigational instructions, you done goofed.
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I can tell you are not influential in popular desktop GUI design. That is a compliment, in case it wasn’t clear.
I can tell you are not influential in automotive cockpit design. (Also a compliment!)
The vast majority of cars ever built have had one of two types of gear shift lever. Either a straight linear pattern with (as you noted) Park and Reverse on one side of Neutral, and various Drive gears on the other side, or else a non-linear pattern, with the first Drive gear forward and to the left, additional forward drive gears proceeding back and forth to the right, and Reverse behind some kind of lockout gate, requiring extra pressure to defeat a stronger gate spring, or pushing the gear selector shaft down, or whatever.
Possibly because of non-stop crack smoking in the design department, Toyota and Nissan have seen fit to merge these two design patterns into a hideous anti-pattern that combines the worst features of both, making gear selection muscle memory developed for other vehicles non-transferable to these cars, and vice versa.
What makes this unforgivable is the fact that the designers were entirely unrestricted by mechanical issues (these cars are “shift by wire” and have no physical linkage) so ergonomics and style were the only considerations. And thus the designers went with lame style and dangerously bad ergonomics. And not just for a single model year! The Toyota Prius - which is a beautiful piece of automotive engineering for efficiency - has had a progressively worse user interface over time.
I have the bottom two you showed above (Leaf and Plug-In Prius)
Note the Park selection is a completely separate button, not part of the selector at all, on the Prius, and grafted on top of the selector on the Leaf.
Note the lack of linearity - nonlinear gear selection patterns have mostly been manual, historically, so the first Forward gear should be forward and to the left. But instead, that is Reverse!
Also note the Leaf has two separate functions toggled on a single position of the selector - Drive and Power/Eco torque curve selection. Wtf, Nissan?
I expect the next models to have tillers instead of steering wheels, only they will operate backwards from the way all other tillers historically have worked, and I expect the designers to win multiple awards from their industry.
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There was an “are you sure” dialogue. It unfortunately was the same for both the practice and real alerts, habituating operators into clicking through.
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