It’s just so much more convenient and paperless to have the manual right on the computer, which is why I had no idea for six months that my laptop had an IrDA port.
Of course it wasn’t on any of the papers describing my laptop, and I had to fuck with the help feature for quite a few minutes to find the lens for it, because it was so cutely and cleverly hidden on the actual laptop itself.
Jeebuz, I’m pretty freaking familiar with hardware design and sometimes the goddamned engineers confuse the shit out of me.
Now that you mention it, I bet my thinkpad also has that keyboard light thingie.
I do wonder when designers are going to make a CD- or DVD-Rom player that has an open/close button that’s not awkwardly positioned underneath the tray, so that you can neither see, nor reach it, without extreme fiddlyness.
From a tech support standpoint, its hard to say whether this would be a good idea or not.
Upside: Its easier to reboot the thing. (skip the dam-ned take the cable out, wait for 30 and plug it back in)
Downside: User will keep rebooting the thing accidentally.
Upside: Particularly stupid users will have to pay for techs more often, who will come out to their house and charge them 80$ to turn the modem around so the its not laying down and forcing the switch in the of position.
Downside: Poor techs would have to go through all 67 troubleshooting steps before getting to that point because corporate regulation demand they do every one of them, extensively document it, and get them all done in 5 minutes.
And here we have an example of ‘We’ve always made them this way.’
Sometimes it takes a swift kick in the ass for an engineer’s paradigm to shift that far.
It could be positioned like the button on my DSL router: small, recessed button on the rear of the router that’s actually fairly hard to hit unless you really intend to.