361–370 of 451 posts
To call this rose-tinted glasses when considering how things worked in 1983 is a massive understatement. A counterexample: in 1983, enter two search terms, one of them slightly misspelled or misremembered, hit f3: "no results", spend 10 minutes trying to find the needle in the haystack, give up and physically search for the thing yourself. Enter two search terms slightly incorrectly now: no of the time it will know e…
Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.
Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.
My favorite "the world is terrible" curmudgeon observation is how awful hotel TVs (and hotel TV remotes) are. Every single hotel room TV I've had the displeasure of using in the last N years takes more than 20 seconds to turn on after multiple button-presses, starts out on a terrible in-house channel at high volume regardless of the last-watched channel+volume, takes multiple seconds to change channels, and has no re…
However, in most cases, at least in mid-range rooms, the TV is barely bigger than my laptop so it just doesn't make sense to use it.
Kind of related: does anyone else notice how long it takes to change channels on the TV these days? It used to be instantaneous when cable first came out and at some point it became this laggy experience where you'll press buttons on the remote and the channel takes forever to change. I hate it and it's one of the reasons I don't have cable any more.
When working on digital settop boxes a decade or 2 ago, channel change latency was one of the toughest problems. Eventually we (collectively, the whole industry) gave up and settled for 1 second as acceptable. Channel surfing quietly went away. When your i-frame only comes so often, there's not a whole lot you can do. Nowadays, that problem is solved by reducing actual live content to a strict minimum; everything els…
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I just recorded a two minute video me of me trying to do this. Maybe it will help you understand why people like Gravis (and myself) are frustrated. The video is at http://paste.stevelosh.com/1983.webm but it's a little blurry, so I'll narrate it. (There's a less blurry mkv at http://paste.stevelosh.com/1983.mkv for those that want it.) I go to `maps.google.com`. The page loads a search box, with my cursor focused in…
You know, the back button works in Google Maps and does exactly what you might think it does: take you back to the state you were just in . After you accidentally lost your route, you could have just used a built in feature of your browser to get yourself back to where you were. EDIT: The rest of your post was entirely accurate. Google Maps is a slow, stuttery mess on literally every platform I've ever used it on rec…
Reading through the comments it would seem that the article is a false alarm. The count of upvotes dictates the opposite. My opinion is that the baseline for what we achieve as good (and quick) service has been slowly lift up by the industry. At the same time specific design practices were implemented to ease our frustration about slow service, and "feel" at least that the service is quick.
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That's a weird system, certainly not the standard way of doing things on a traditional cable TV system.
I think it's pretty normal these days. The cable companies sell the data on what people watch, where the rewind, pause, fast forward, etc...
To call this rose-tinted glasses when considering how things worked in 1983 is a massive understatement. A counterexample: in 1983, enter two search terms, one of them slightly misspelled or misremembered, hit f3: "no results", spend 10 minutes trying to find the needle in the haystack, give up and physically search for the thing yourself. Enter two search terms slightly incorrectly now: no of the time it will know e…
Check out this specific part of his postings: https://i.imgur.com/Roz80Nd.png
The main idea I got from his rant was that we have mostly lost the efficiencies that a keyboard can provide.
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The central reason is that modern video codecs use I-frames and P-frames (sometimes also B-frames; even though as far as I am aware, these are not used for TV broadcasts); see https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Video_compression... I-frames are only sent, say, once or twice a second. When a channel is switched, the TV has to wait for the next I-frame, since P-frames (and B-frames) only encode the difference t…
> When a channel is switched, the TV has to wait for the next I-frame, since P-frames (and B-frames) only encode the difference to the previous I-frame (or to the previous and next I-frame in the case of B-frames). You can apply the encoded difference to a grey (or black!) screen, the way (IIRC) VLC does in such cases. This means that the user immediately gets a hint of what's happening onscreen, especially since the…
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The tuning chip costs maybe 50 cents or something. Just have 3 or 4 of them and pretune the next few channels.
> The tuning chip costs maybe 50 cents or something. Just have 3 or 4 of them and pretune the next few channels. That's 50 cents the shareholders can pocket, and everyone has already inured themselves to the slower experience. Isn't progress great?
BOM costs make or break mass market hardware products. You don't just add 50 cents of BOM to a mass market item without a real good reason.
