Re:Norway switches off FM radio, but a station is defying go...
by ryandrake on Friday December 15, 2017 @02:42PM
(#15934425)
The radios from my various cars throughout the years are just as bad. My 1970s era radio turned on instantly and there was zero delay as I tuned through channels with a nice smooth analog dial. My 1990s era radio took about 500ms from power on to audio output. The "dial" had steps in it though and was not continuous, and there was a noticeable (again probably around 500ms) delay between when 'click' tactile feedback and when the station was successfully tuned. My current car takes 15 seconds just to boot (WTF), and then I have to navigate some horrible menu just to get to the radio controls. It's like these guys are actively trying to make things worse.
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Re:Norway switches off FM radio, but a station is defying go...
by userbinator on Friday December 15, 2017 @11:42PM
(#15937735)
Even the 1980s car radios with digital controls had no perceptible delay, despite containing microcontrollers with a tiny fraction of the speed and memory of the modern ones.
Maybe it's the whole "let's run Linux on it because we can" phenomenon. The microcontrollers in the old electronic radios didn't run an OS but interacted with the hardware directly. The number of instructions executed from sensing the dial change to updating the tuner and display would probably be less than 100. Now it's half a dozen layers of abstraction and millions of instructions to do the same thing, on a processor which is maybe "only" 1000x faster at most...