Fair enough
lehnerus2000, when I said the dials and knobs can be positioned anywhere, I meant that they are physically positioned anywhere before you buy...so if you drive one car, then get into another, everything aside from the wheel and pedals is different. Yes, it is a physical product, but it is still a user interface. The first thing you learn in a UI class is that UI's aren't only relegated to the digital world. We're going round and round and going off topic, though....even if it is an interesting debate.
Fair enough.
I've never heard of a production car that allows you to reposition the accessories (not without visiting the workshop).
I have seen pictures of concept cars that are reconfigurable (to a limited extent).
Car analogies (almost always) fail when applied to computers.
I never meant to suggest that UIs were limited to electronic devices.
Dodgy UIs have contributed to various disasters (e.g. Three Mile Island).
From Wikipedia:"
The mechanical failures were compounded by the initial failure of plant operators to recognize the situation as a loss-of-coolant accident due to inadequate training and human factors, such as human-computer interaction design oversights relating to ambiguous control room indicators in the power plant's user interface. In particular, a hidden indicator light led to an operator manually overriding the automatic emergency cooling system of the reactor because the operator mistakenly believed that there was too much coolant water present in the reactor and causing the steam pressure release."
My point is that
physical UIs are constrained (e.g. materials, space/volume, regulations, weight).
Virtual UIs (OS GUIs) have almost no restrictions (e.g. only host system performance matters - processing and storage capability).
These reasons are why airliners use computer displays, instead of (or in addition to) traditional gauges/lights.
Linux demonstrates that there are no real reasons why an OS can't support multiple UIs.
That causes other problems though.
Since Linux GUIs aren't developed by multi-billion dollar companies (in general).
MS has no real excuses, for its inability to provide options, other than they think there will be no ROI.
Rewarding "Customer Loyalty", is considered "bad" business practice these days.
You have all these devices and I only have the mikes!
