The movement isn't part of the brand. It's not part of the signal. The case/dial/sometimes band are the brand. And if you couldn't tell them apart, they wouldn't be any good at signaling, the entire point of wearing them.
> So the only thing distinguishing one top brand from another was the name printed on the dial
Respectfully disagree.
Since the 60's (and one could argue, even long before that), watches are 1) fashion, and 2) male wealth-signaling fashion. That's it. Nothing more. And for males who subscribe to this wealth-signaling cult, they know from a long way away what watch brand is on that guy's wrist.
Okay, today's brands signal maybe a little differently than just wealth. Casio G-Shock watches aren't substantially different than their non-G-Shock counterparts in any significant way, but they cost way more. The G-Shock brand signals... I dunno, sportsy-ness? Maybe it is closer to a pure fashion brand here.
I think we've been in "The Brand Age" since the advent of advertising. There are plenty of products that have virtually no differentiation besides brand, and there (almost) always has been.
Which reminds me of another "there, problem solved!" pet peeve of mine. I call it the Default Trap.
In many cases (Norman Doors are an example), there are two or more equally valid ways to do something. By "equally valid", I mean there is no clear standard for whether it should operate one way or the other, and if you ask 100 people which way it should work (which no one ever does), you get something approaching 50%.
So the product manager or perhaps developer simply says "make it a setting", and everyone agrees and declares the problem solved.
But the problem is, you have to choose a default. And 90% of the time, no one is going to change that default, or even discover how to. So you have to be very correct about assuming which value is the best default - and at that point, it probably doesn't matter that you make it an option.
Almost all of the reports from people I know who have done ayahuasca have reported seeing "elves". It's not only common, they say it's not a "valid" trip unless you do, and even converse with them.
Though I don't know any reports of profound conversations.
It's funny. one of the most significant UI axioms I ever learned came from Bill Atkinson: "Always make the 'click zone' a little larger than the visual indication of the affordance." This becomes tricky or impossible for some things like touch-keypads, but for most things it makes the difference between frustrating and magical.
Apple seems to have forgotten its own innovations.
If I understand them correctly, Ebers-Moll equations are based on the exponential relationship between voltage and current in a BJT.
But tubes aren't current amplifiers, they're voltage amplifiers, like FETs.
You can look at the "characteristics curves" of tubes (plate curves and transconductance curves), which tell the story of current against plate-to-cathode voltages for fixed grid voltages.
Rob Robinette is a great guitar-amp resource; knows just about everything about Fender amps in particular. He has many mods to many common/not-so-common Fenders.
Just his list of 5E3 mods (Fender Deluxe) is awesome:
There are probably broad categories that I might find myself using, but for my own core collection of music (deeper than it is wide, mostly), it barely matters.
I should test OpenWRT with my new multi-AP test setup.
Many repeaters and pure (bridging) APs have an isolation problem for clients that switch between them. TP-Link, Netgear, and a few others suffer this problem.
What happens is that when a wifi client moves from one AP to another, the old AP doesn't update its device table, and the client becomes unreachable from other clients on the old AP. This only matters on networks that use a lot of LAN comms (Sonos, AirPlay, etc), but it makes certain APs (and extenders) unusable on those networks.