https://ccco.s3.amazonaws.com/kb_photos/290/2284_1964_Cadill...
It has excellent thermostat-controlled AC and heat, and it was very easily controllable using dedicated buttons without looking away from the road at all. I wish modern cars (cough, Tesla) would put a tenth the care into UX.
I still can't tell if my computer monitor is on or off because I don't know the weird LED flashing code it uses to communicate that (Holy crap! appliances use something like morse code to tell you important information about their state! How did they get so needlessly cryptic? If there's no picture, I have to check all the cables and push the power button a couple of times to see what happens.
Web programmers are as much to blame too. Show me a web video player that has play and pause buttons that always do what they say when they say it.
The only player which ever worked properly — even allowing the user to step through a video frame by frame — was part of Apple’s QuickTime framework.
Fun fact: QuickTime will be 26 years old in December.
Not to mention the damn spyware that's included with it...
If your answer to the question "why can't a billion dollar industry provide me with instantaneous channel switching?" is "because they are lazy", you are severely misguided (at the very least!). There are hundreds of extremely talented engineers working full-time on these problems. If the solution were as easy as you propose, the issues would be solved.
> zero boot time
That's not going to happen, ever, but I'll assume you meant "faster" boot times.
Probably. Keep in mind that your average set-top box likely goes through a more complex secure boot process than most electronic devices you would ever interact with. Why? Because if people can run arbitrary firmware on a set-top box, your cable company would lose a shit ton of money.
> instantaneous channel switching
You are bound by the latency required to demodulate a signal being broadcast from some satellite ~30,000 km away from the receiver, decrypt the resulting stream, and finally decode it, all on the fly so you get a nice, continuous, stutter-free full HD broadcast.
I am no expert, so there is probably way more stuff happening behind the scene that someone else could probably shed light on. The point of my comment was to demonstrate that things can sometimes be more complicated than they seem at first glance.
The answer is never "engineers are lazy". The answer is, the company doesn't give a flying fuck about this problem and will actually prevent engineers from working on solving it, because they can sell you a TV perfectly well with this problem still present, and there's other work for engineers that makes TVs easier to sell than actually delivering a quality product.
Decrypting and demodulating have be as fast as the data is coming, otherwise the delay would grow until you never saw the end of the show. So that's not the reason either.
Your TV doesn't have the information it needs to start displaying MPEG-2+ATSC A/53 video for as long as 700ms. It needs to buffer quite a bit of timing information and at least an I-picture frame before it can start displaying anything: http://www.bretl.com/mpeghtml/startbuf.HTM
Not only that - the overall standard has tight timing tolerances to keep video arriving at the encoder/transmitter in-sync with audio/video leaving the decoder in your TV. It's not like MP3 streaming where every client has its own buffer size and time to start playing depending on network conditions, bitrate, etc.
Having a reliable buffering process to keep receivers in-sync is a feature, not a bug.
You're sure this is engineering laziness? How much extra would you pay for a TV with faster channel changing?
Simple solution: just put 10x decoders/tuners for most recently used channels. I don't think it's really an engineering problem but more about cost-effectiviness, i.e. not enough consumers are willing to pay the premium.
However, even if the read-ahead tuner was perfectly predictive you'd still need to flip through channels fairly slowly, otherwise you'll outrun it - about a second a channel.
What some people do is make an audio file consisting of several seconds of silence, and do whatever is needed (call it "AAA.mp3", or put it first in a default playlist) to have it play while the player boots.
But yeah, it's really messed up that that should be considered acceptable.
https://www.ebay.com/itm/Vintage-Cookmatic-Radarange-Made-by...
As cool as my friends' new car's features are, I still love my Acura RSX. I can reach from the steering wheel to adjust anything on the console without taking my eyes off the road. No fuss, made for human hands, knobs and buttons.
Look at your car radio in a 90's car. You didn't need to look at it to figure out how to push the radio button, turn the volume, anything. You could even adjust the bass on the fly with a bass knob instead of navigating to your "eq" menu to do it.
Now, you've got to look away from the road, realize what "mode" your in, you can move the menu around to the "audio" section, then "fm", then select a channel. And of course, it's a touch screen so there's no tactile feedback. But at least it's got PRETTY ANIMATIONS!
My Toyota Corolla will blast audio out of the speakers as it boots but the volume knob doesn't respond till it completely boots up. So you may start the car and have 5-10 seconds of blasting radio that you can do nothing about. GREAT JOB GUYS. A volume knob that needs to boot.
This is what was considered not only acceptable, but a "Feature" in a modern vehicle with hundreds of millions of dollars in investment and NOBODY thought to see if the radio interface was actually... efficient? It's not like people interact with the radio/music console in a car on a regular basis...
Or my 2001 Jetta. It was one of the earlier cars with "climate control". What that actually means is that to set it to heat, you have to tap the "plus temp" button a literal 20-30 times to get it into "HI" to force heat on. And then the day warms up and on your drive home you want AC? Tap it 20-30 times on the "minus temp" button. There was no knob for AC temp. They gave you 1 degree precision on a car that couldn't guarantee 10 degree temperatures. Additionally, the volume control for the car had digital buttons. That's right. Enjoy pressing up/down 50 times. No ability to rapidly change volume. So when you switch radio stations or to casette/cd and the volume is highly different you have to sit there pressing the button over and over. But, even then, at least these were BUTTONS that you didn't have to look away from the road to use. They had little tactile notches on them so you could feel around for them.