Everything with a battery should have an off switch

However, I suspect this has also made it easier to write and (kinda sorta) maintain larger and more complex systems. Like the phenomenon where you widen a road to ease traffic congestion and it works for a while but then encourages more traffic. The reduced cost of creating and maintaining complexity may have encouraged it overall.

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As an aside, can I quote you, like, on my blog?

> in my line of work I have to be able to walk engineers I work with from the gate-level silicon all the way up to cloud and AI. Without any false modesty, I think I have a fairly good idea of how modern computer architecture works. Yet, I will be the first to tell you that I have no idea how any of these systems work in full. In fact, no one does. Not the best of kernel developers nor the best of chip designers. To claim that you can somehow inventory every possible problem in a computerized system and then provide a graceful exit from that or useful info is either ignorant or arrogant or both.

I got this fancy tire gauge+filler. It uses a couple coin batteries. They live around 6 months with it "off". I use it a couple times a year, so basically every time I go to use it it is dead. Removing the batteries requires disassembly. A year or so ago I soldered in a couple AA batteries in place of the coin batteries, it's been good so far, but I'm waiting to see.

On the other hand, I have a Mitutoyo caliper, which also uses a couple coin batteries. I sometimes forget to turn it off when I put it back in the case, and so far, over 6+ months, it hasn't run the batteries out.

So it CAN be done. Both devices are basicaally the same: LCD display and they measure a sensor.

Back when I was in HS, I had a Casio calculator watch, but it ate through batteries (3-6 months IIRC). The bracket for the strap broke, so I just taped it up in my locker. Soldered it to a D battery, and never had to replace it again. :-)

They were bad enough, but then Visual Studio 2013 HAD THEM TOO.

That was triply bad: ugly, took more screen width than Mixed Case, and perhaps worst of all, to a programmer they looked like errors.

Most of the languages we work with are case sensitive, so FILE and File look like two different things. It was a constant irritant.

The chief designer for VS2013 had a blog post about the new design, and naturally in the comments there were a lot of complaints about the uppercase menus.

The designer eventually replied: "Thanks for your feedback. We decided to keep the uppercase menus because we want more energy in this part of the interface."

More energy. I am not making this up.

They eventually came to their senses, and the next releases of Office and Visual Studio went back to conventional Mixed Case menus, just like every Windows app has used since the beginning.

(Note: my use of uppercase at the top of this message is not for emphasis or shouting, it's for illustrative purposes.)