When I was a kid (a century or so ago(1)), and there was a Good Program coming on TV (there actually were some, occasionally — just like now), I can remember my Mom and I in the kitchen, making a snack or washing dishes, and watching the clock get toward “show time.” At some point in the anticipation process one of us would say, “time to warm up the TV.”(2)
TVs back then had tubes in them. Vacuum Tubes. Electronic components most of you of the younger persuasion wouldn’t believe and perhaps have never even heard of. They took a while to get up to working temperature after having power applied to them. The behavior of the circuits would be … mmm… variable, until the tubes — and hence, the TV — was up to operating temperature. You see, it really was warming up the TV.
Thank Goodness we don’t have to put up with such nonsense now, eh?
Oh… wait. Yes, we do. Only now it’s not a property of vacuum tubes, or the physics of the circuits; it’s a property of badly written software and poor design. Who back in the 20th would have believed that
1) one day in the 21st century TVs would be computers,
2) or that such computers would have to “boot up” before you could use them,
3) and that computers in the 21st century would also fit in your pockets and nevertheless be capable of running more than 2 billion instructions a second,
4) and that even at more than 2 billion software instructions a second you would still have to WAIT (in human-measurable time) for the TV to become ready to use because the software that runs the TV [didn’t need software to run a TV way back when!] is just so badly written and the overall layout of the electronics so poor that it takes several seconds for the TV to “boot up.” Piffle.
5) Or that, given such amazing hardware as chips the size of postage stamps that can execute billions of instructions a second, we would then use them so badly today?
It’s just a TV, fer Pete’s sake, and it has to run about 10 billion software instructions (i.e., 5 seconds, more or less) before it can show you a picture? Really?
Power on.
Blink…
Blink…
Blink…
Blink…
Blink…
“Video”
then come the ads and commercials galore (using my internet bandwidth as if they are the ones paying for it!)
I ask you… how is this an improvement?(3)
I submit that it’s no improvement at all, especially as the quality of the programming hasn’t really changed that much, just more of it(4).
What’s my point? Well, I have to ask why you video-addicts put up with it? Part of my point in all these postings, really: why do we put up with anything that doesn’t have to be that way, isn’t as good as it could possibly be, is only there by virtue of laziness, or false-profit hunting(5), or because the “consumer doesn’t know any better, so we can get away with it.” (The latter, especially, is a significant crime against the consumer, the species and the entire planet. [Ethical matters are like that: much farther reaching than might at first appear.] Unfortunately, there’s no court on the planet that would care to prosecute this thing. “It’s normal and accepted practice” the court will tell you. Piffle…)(6)
Well, how will the consumer ever learn if you don’t start raising the bar on quality? How will the manufacturer ever start raising the bar if the consumer doesn’t start demanding better by boycotting (or just ignoring) cheap and lazy and wasteful products?
Go for the quality. You spend far less money that way in the long run. The manufacturers will get the message.
It’s in your hands. 100%. Go to work.
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(1) Slight exaggeration, could you tell?
(2) Which also tells you that the TV was not on all the time. Only now and then. That, too, was a difference way back when.
(3) It really is bad software design. I could go into details, but that’s sort of out of the scope of this posting. I’ve been a software engineer (among other things) for several decades, even before the Business-Mentality take-over of the computer industry, and I can testify to it. Rotten software design. Rather than paying the extra couple of bucks for a Real Programmer, they [the ubiquitous they] hire some software technician — a tradesman — instead and all he can do is string together existing black boxes, with all the bugs and inefficiencies that necessitates. (This, by the way, is precisely why Microsoft Office components run so slowly and poorly and bug-ridden as they do, this sort of practice.) That’s the business mentality at work, where it used to be the Computer Visionaries at work. Real development in the computer industry has nearly ground to a halt, bogged down in its own weight and run by people who are not techies themselves.
(4) In actual fact the quality of “TV” programming has gone down. There are many arguments demonstrating this, but I’ll leave you with just this one factoid: when I was a kid television was generally written to a 6th grade educational level. (That’s why such programs as Star Trek and Twilight Zone had a hard time staying on the air — they were “too brainy”). Today, main-stream, prime-time television is written to the 4th grade level. (Interestingly, just a few years ago some one did an analysis of the words flying back and forth in Congress, and found that they, also, reflect about a 4th grade vocabulary. Scary, isn’t it?) Star Trek stays on the air now mostly by also having downgraded it’s level of education, vocabulary and “science.” [I have another posting or six around here about the foibles of Star Trek.] The current series Pickard however smacks of actually being well written (thank you!). But then it’s not on mainstream, prime-time television, is it?
(5) False profits. yes. [as opposed to false prophets, eh?]. Short term profits, at the expense of quality, are always false. They are short term only, borrowing from the future for garbage disposal, environmental toxicity, wastage of limited resources, or setting of arbitrarily low standards (the biggest crime here), and so on. The best long term profits come from treating the consumer in the best possible way, and always, always educating him to a better standard, and to a better quality of life, instead of to an unprecedented level of compulsive consumption. That way lies global disaster. Heading straight at us…
(6) There is also the case where the manufacturer truly doesn’t know any better, doesn’t know that the black boxes approach to software is cheap and lazy and lowest possible quality, or doesn’t know there’s a better way that doesn’t waste resources or end up producing far more garbage than it might have, or a way to prevent the product itself from becoming garbage. Sometimes they just really don’t know, but then you have to admit that’s not really a defense, because it also means they didn’t ask the right questions at each point in the development process. Flunk! Their eyes were on the profits, not on the product or the consumers. Double flunk!