The plate also makes it easier to clean as without it peoples handprints will be in a wider area. For wood doors its even better as wood can be time consuming to clean well.
The touchscreen frees you from the complexity that comes with giving switches alternative modes, and gives you the mass to have multiple copies of critical switches. Also multimode switches greatly increase the complexity and failure modes, so they need to be done so that if a switch is triggered in the wrong mode its recoverable (eg: the switch for aux radio power isn’t also the undock switch).
When you get to the point of having displays for the switches why not go full touchscreen and eliminate all of that cost and complexity of a bunch of tiny displays?
When you think about it from a first principals perspective, having multiple touchscreens is better than only having physical switches. When a switch is damaged/fails, you are out of luck. When a touchscreen is damaged/fails, you use the one next to it. On a rocket you do not have the mass or room to have more than 1 of all but the most critical of switches.
There have been quite a few missions that nearly caused death or mission failure directly due to a switch getting broken (Apollo 11, lander return engine-arm switch) or going faulty (Apollo 14 abort switch).
What really matters is that they have no single point of failure (touch screens can do everything switches can, an individual touch screen is not important, and switches can cover abort/return scenarios to protect the crew). For the software, it only matters that its been fully tested, including random bit flips and hardware failure.
From a cost savings perspective, its vastly cheaper to verify that 3 touchscreens are working correctly than the 600 switches they replace.
Physical switches since they are moving parts, have a high failure rate. Apollo 11 they broke an important switch donning their spacesuits. In Apollo 14 the Landers abort switch was falsely triggering so they had to hack the computer to ignore it.
Most of the cars I’ve owned have been recalled/needed to have some switch replaced in the first year or two of ownership. Jury is still out on touchscreen, but they seem to have lower mortality (it could be a simple numbers game, several dozen switches vs 1 touchscreen).
It probably does, but you always have issues where the task that feeds the watchdog works fine, but another does not (eg: GPU gets in an odd state).
In single core systems its somewhat solvable, but in multicore and if you want to include multiple chips in the crash domain it gets very hard with off the shelf chips.
Most LED lights use the UV+phosphor technique as its cheaper than doing RGB (If the LED is yellowish when switched off, its using this technique).
The best flicker-free lights are ones that have low ripple constant current power supplies (somewhat expensive). LED lamps intended for use around rotating machinery used to all be this way until someone figured out that if the PWM frequency was wildly unstable it would prevent the problems with strobe lights around spinning things at a fraction of the cost.
Yes. I think they have been slowly getting better.
Visual Studio has let you do hot code editing for over a decade now, they call it "Edit and Continue"[0]. Only works for some languages (C#, Visual Basic/C++). It also lets you modify the program state while stopped on a break-point with code of your devising.
Most browsers also let you adhoc compose and run code without modifying the underlying programs.
Thanks to hardware performance counters, profilers are now able to profile code with much less impact on performance (eg: no more adjusting timeouts due to profiler overhead). Network debuggers are getting better at decoding traffic and displaying it in a more human readable format (eg: automatic gzip decompression, stream reassembly, etc).