[OT] Re: D mention on developer.apple.com

[Walter Bright via Digitalmars-d]

On 9/26/2014 11:34 AM, Steven Schveighoffer wrote:
> It's really funny how the simplest easiest things, if they solve a common
> nuisance problem, are treated like amazing inventions. We have a similar
> situation for one product in our company. We make walk-in cooler controls. After
> installing our controls, we started getting calls that the coolers were iced up.
> The problem usually turned out to be that a person who was loading the cooler
> shut off the evaporator fans (the fans that blow air across the refrigerant
> coils), and forgot to turn them back on. This results in refrigerant running
> through the coils, but since air is a great insulator, it did not consume any
> heat from the cooler. Condensation builds up on the coils and turns into ice,
> which is an even better insulator :)
>
> Now, the people doing this had been doing this long before we installed our
> controls. If you want to know why, just look up wind chill :)
>
> The solution we came up with was simple and stupid: add a button that shut off
> the fans for 10 minutes.
>
> That one feature is raved about time and again by all our customers. It's the
> dumbest thing, but it makes things so much more pleasant that people now
> complain if the controller needs service because they "can't live without the
> shutdown button!"
>
> And to think we put it in to save service calls :)

It's really fun when us engineers can make improvements like that!