> what's wrong with red?
>
Here's some of the "discussion" that ensued.  An interesting combination
of standards, "common sense", typical usage, and urban legend:

> [see] http://eetd.lbl.gov/Controls/publications/1621Note.pdf
>
=====

> I have also heard (but could not find a reference to substantiate)
> that in Germany for service providers the color RED denotes that
> the equipment is on fire ! This is fairly consistent with the
> "emergency condition" mentioned below.

=====

> Red indicators are used in some industries for specific purposes,
> so its probably best if general purpose equipment avoids its use
> in case our equipment is installed with or near other equipment
> in those industries.  When ethernet first became popular, the
> blinking red LEDs on many ethernet adapters in the 1980's led
> to complaints from some industries.
>
> For example, the US Military and the telephone industry are very
> particular about the use of red indicators on their equipment.
>
> http://hfetag.dtic.mil/docs-hfs/mil-std-1472f.pdf
>
>> a. FLASHING RED shall be used only to denote emergency conditions
>>  which require operator action to be taken without delay, or to
>>  avert impending personnel injury, equipment damage, or both.
>
>> b. RED shall be used to alert an operator that the system or any
>>  portion of the system is inoperative, or that a successful mission
>>  is not possible until appropriate corrective or override action
>>  is taken...
>
> Telcordia GR-2914 has a similar requirements, but they don't have
> free copies of their standards on the web.

=====


> The theory is to make it easy for craft to take the appropriate action:
> red == replace, yellow == test, green == good.  There is no doubt
> some Telcordia GR on this, but I don't know which one

=====

> We heard a rumor about some rule in the EU that banned a red LED unless
> bodily harm was imminent, but were never able to find the source.
>
> We spoke with a number of Cisco people in EMEA that thought this must 
> be
> a joke, and also had one of our compliance engineers look into it - no
> one found anything.
[but this is not so different from the Mil-Spec listed above for
  flashing red]

=====

> I belive it was NEMA standards - red lights mean "ALARM" so a tech can
> quickly identify a device having problems.

Someone also mentioned that typical red/green dual-color LEDs are
particularly difficult to distinguish for the 7% of males who are
color-blind...

BillW
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