Slashdot Mirror
Consumer Tech - Getting Worse w/ Each Generation?
"Two years ago I had analog cable-TV. I could program the box to change channels at arbitrary times and when I wasn't changing channels, it displayed the time. These programs could also be repeating ones. I was happy. Then digital cable-TV came out. It would only let me set non-repeating programs and they have to be for the beginning of a specific programme. This meant I could not program (for taping on my VCR) the whole of one programme and the end of another (that overlaps with the first). Say a movie overlaps with the first 10 minutes of a football game. If you feel it's much more important to get the whole of the movie and miss the beginning of the game...tough! You now have to miss the end of the movie. *sigh*
Then I moved house into a difference region of the same digital-TV company. Their digital-TV boxes are different yet again. I used to be able to configure how much in advance of a programme beginning that the on-screen dialog reminding me of the impending programme would appear. Now I have to accept the hard-coded interval whatever it is. What's really bad with this box is that if I want to see what's on tomorrow (actually any time after midnight) I have to do so whilst watching adverts for pay-per-view movies rather than the channel I was watching. :-(
Then this new box died and I was given a replacement that's a mark 2 model and this new box doesn't let me tape terrestrial channels whilst watching digital ones (a feature that UK readers will recognize). They're obviously trying to get me to rent a second digital-TV cable box (for £15 per month) by taking away this feature. :-("
No I don't agree, get a Tivo. It will solve all your problems above, and will show you how far consumer digital technology has come.
They're pretty cheap now too.
Don't forget the ultimate solution to a lot of life's problems: avoidance.
So in this particular case, sell your TV and get rid of your expensive TV susbscription. With the new found room, get yourself a book-shelf and go to your local library and get some books. With your new found money, save up for a year and go on vacation. Here in the states, a year's worth of satelite TV subscription savings will buy a week long road trip.
Reading books and going on vacation are a lot more interesting than watching a lot of TV. But maby that's just me - perhaps TV really is that good now days. I just don't care to find out, as TV had become sort of an adiction for me, and inorder to cure myself of it, I quit.
Moneyed corporations, non-working 'poor' and criminal prisoners are turning productive citizens into tax-slaves.
We first had normal cable television.. Had enough channels, it was nice, could record everything, etc.. Then we upgraded to digital cable, and what a mistake that was. We had to get a box for each television, and if you wanted to record something, and watch tv at the same time, tough.
We finally upgraded to satelite tv, which is where we're at now, and it's even worse.. If you wanna record something, you have to set the timer on the satelite, to change the channel.. That's nice and all, but 5 minutes before whatever you're recording starts, a big, ugly clock icon, flashes on the bottom left of the screen, with no way to turn it off..
The television guide they use, sucks. If you wanna see what's on two hours ahead of time, you get to wait through 3 minutes of downloading, while it updates the guide.. That's when it actually works.
RaGe
We're all just noise on the wires..
This doesn't have so much to do with technology as it does with policy and the lack of customer service in an industry with little or no competition. Since cable companies have monopolies in the areas they service (no one wants to see 10 seperate cable backbones running on the telephone poles) the cable companies get to dictate how their service is used.
What about Satellite service you say? Well, Satellite is limited in what they can offer, and how they can provide their service. Your cable company is very aware of what Satellite can provide, because they know that Satellite is their only real threat. Your cable company figures that as long as their service is one step above what Satellite can offer, you aren't going to take a 'downgrade'.
Thus, instead of working to provide a better user experience, they are trying to offer as little as possible, while maximizing their profits. How does it feel to be used?
I haven't lost my mind!
It is backed up on disk...somewhere...
Maybe it's a UK/US thing, but I have no idea what this guy's talking about.
You are a highly trained consumer. You believe them when they say "Digital cable is better". They eventually offer channels on digital cable you can't get on regular to force upgrades. They cross pollinate commercials so you can realize what you are missing because you don't get the apes on meth channel, which has a new series everybody will talk about at work the next morning while you think about last night's rerun of "Gilligan's Island".
You have been bred in captivity just to upgrade, and when they take a feature away it is only for your own good.
And they know exactly where your breaking point is. They will remove features one by one, forcing you to watch what they want you to watch (why do you think so many channels start their shows at odd times?). Just before the point where you switch to another provider or give it up alltogether they'll blast you with 'new' features you've 'got' to have.
Don't bite the hand that feeds you, Consumer.
The cable companies did their math and tried to make it so that 80% of people could record something. All they'd have to do is oversimply things and cut features
. End result is that technology gets better for joe blows and plainly blows for the enthusiasts out there. The good news is that companies are finally starting to realize that enthusiasts can make a differnece (i.e. people who love their _____ energize others to buy ______).
The sad thing is that most of the problems you see with bad user interface are easily fixable, it's just that whoever designed the object your looking at thought that whatever incemental gain you'd gotten was worth the tradeoff.
Another example from the satellite TV issues. I used to have a Dish system. I liked the programming, but in terms of picture quality digital cable and dish are both way worse than old fashioned VHS or SVHS. The blocky compression they use is terrible for things like action movies or anything with a lot of little motion all over.
The remote was slow and dodgy. Push a button, and wait to see if the sat receiver saw it or not. You couldn't just hit up three times and go up three channels. And if you held it down, it would jump 20 channels, then stop for a minute at a time on one you did NOT want to watch.
Another example is this POS Intel server I'm working on. I put in a CDROM drive, forgot to turn off the master setting (on the primary IDE interface) same as the main hard drive it boots from. So the BIOS intelligently changes the boot priority to put the other IDE drives at the top of the list. I fix the problem with the CDROM and the machine won't boot. How am I supposed to know the problem is that my non-booting storage drives are now at the top of the list?
Freeping Creaturitus...
--- It is not the things we do which we regret the most, but the things which we don't do.
First of all, you can get rid of the digital cable. My girlfriend had it, and it's definitely not for people who like to tape, or switch channels during commercials. :( I can't see paying extra to effectively "degrade" my service. I don't have movie channels or access to pay-per-view without a converter box, but that just keeps my bill down. :)
:)
Also, if you're in the United States, you may be able to complain to the cable comissioner. I don't know how effective it will be, but as a taxpayer and customer of a regulated monopoly you have the right to complain.
I don't think that throwing away your TV is the answer. Just be more selective in the bills that you make for yourself.
It seems obvious to me that those bastards at General Instrument (or whatever they're called these days) that make the majority of set top boxes have absolutely zero knowledge of how to make a decent user interface. It's not just the cable company's boxes, apparently the satellite ones are terrible too. The biggest problem to me is that they are never responsive to the remote control. You can push a button three or four times but the thing is so slow repainting the godawful menus (with unwelcomed banner ads these days) that it seems to have no processor cycles left to pay attention to the remote's signal. The end result: you have to slowly press buttons, watching the screen repaint pixel by pixel before issuing the next command. I find it almost impossible to believe that they cannot put sufficient hardware in these things to repaint the menus within the span of a couple of frames.
And let's not even talk about the total lack of ability to remove channels from the lineup. I'm sure it has to do with the fact that companies want you to see just exactly you're missing by not paying for the $80/month plan, but this functionality has been present in TVs for decades now. Why is it that most of the set top boxes make you flip through channels that you either don't receive, don't pay for, or have zero interest in? Why in the love of christ should you have to slowly wait for 15 different pay-per-view channels scroll past when you use the channel up/down buttons? I could go on, but I don't think it would do any good.
All I know is that digital cable sucks crap. That damn menu is so slow I feel like I'm using my TRS-80. I want a big loud noise burst and instant response when I change channels to get away from commercials!
By law, cable companies must pass the analog cable signal over that same digital line. Here's an interesting test, get a coax-splitter, split the cable at the wall, run one end straight to your TV, run the other into your digital cable set-top box. then run the cable from your set top box into a second input on your tv as you normally would. Switching between the two inputs youll see they both work. The difference being, the analog signal looks far better, has no stupid advertisements, no crappy channel guide, and the channels change instantly. No need to wait for them to fill in like with digital cable. The catch is, some channels are only available with the digital decoder box. I hate my digital cable, P.O.S. doesnt even properly pass a dolby digital signal since it has no capable outputs. This way you get the option of both digital or far better analog, all for the price of digital cable. One more thing, if you are feeding the analog signal straight to your set, you dont have to use their crappy decoder box, and you can split it off to other TVs in your house.
This is the They-don't-make'm-like-they-used-to syndrome. Probably the best example of this is camera's. Cameras of 20 years ago sell today for nearly as much as they cost when they were sold! They depreciate slower than inflation! The cameras of today are fancy microchip powered wonders that are cheap, easy to break, plastic boxes. Funny thing is, these cameras generally only add auto-focus over the nikon,olympus and canon cameras of the 70's & 80's.
-Sean
This is a Five Minute Theory (ie, the result of no more than five minutes of thought), so it probably won't hold up to rigourous inspection. However, consider:
Ease of use for a given consumer technology follows a Bell-like curve, which is (obviously) the inverse of the amount of understanding required to make use of the tech. Take two ubiquitious examples, the car and the television; each began as a quite arcane invention that required dedication and money to use, and a fair amount of knowledge to maintain. As they progressed, each became much easier to use to the point of total simplicity for the most basic consumer models, requiring very little knowledge to operate.
At this point, featurization set in, and stuff that was previously only available in high-end, specialist models began to be included in the lower priced bracket. The most basic models continued to be usable with minimal knowledge, but increasingly included (often uneccessary) features that required some knowledge and study to use. As these features became more mainstream, knowledge of them was assumed, and became necessary for operation of the technology.
Maintainence of the technology also radically increased in difficulty as it progressed.
Heck, that's enough for a start. Feel free to take this and run with it, or ignore it completely, but it seems to work for most C20 tech...
|>
Here be Dragons
I'm lucky, because the company I was subscribing to for my pay TV went bust. (ITV Digital, for you UK people who'd know)
The reason I'm lucky is that not having it made me realise just what a waste of money it had been. There was only one channel that I watched regularly (or maybe two), and everything worth watching on it is shown six months later on a free channel anyway.
So now I'm back to just the free channels... and I couldn't be happier.
(Spudley Strikes Again!)
It's not just about cable TV - the same applies to almost any "user friendly" modern device of any significant complexity.
I have two video recorders. One was a very cheap own-brand from a large chain here in the UK. The other was a Sony Nicam box costing more than twice the price.
Cheap box:
* has an LCD screen on the remote so I can set the timer without turning the TV on (think "running late for work")
* will let me enter a timer event that begins earlier than the current time (e.g. five minutes ago)
* Has the traditional "zero stop" option on the counter
Sony Box:
* Requires me to use the OSD to set the timer, but only allows cursor keys and enter - I can't punch the time in on the numeric buttons directly
* All timers have to start in the future. So I can't enter a VideoPlus+ number for a programme that's already started. In fact it clears all the data if you put an "incorrect" time in, so you have to set all your timers to start at least two minutes into the future to account for the time it takes to enter the data, and the possibility of a rollover in the meantime
* It has a counter, but no "stop" facility. So I have to watch it counting down, then hit the stop key myself. Sounds simple, but in practice can quickly end up as a game of "Oh damn, too far. Forward. Hmmm.... what's that on TV... Oh damn, too far. Backwards...."
Yes, I sent a letter to Sony - just a request for them to pass some suggestions on to their UI design team. I got a reply which essentially said "We market a range of products with different capabilities, so you should have bought a more expensive one in order to get the things you want in a VCR". Which is fair enough, except that these are not the sort of things that are obvious until you've been using the device for a while.
Conclusion: I still mostly use the cheap VCR for recording, because it's so much easier to set up timers. The Sony gets used for playback of pre-recorded stuff, where stereo is more important.
I could, of course, give plenty of other examples. It's a general trend, and not just restricted to A/V equipment. It's more due to laziness on the part of the UI designers, or cutbacks from the management.
In my perfect world, the TV would have an ethernet port, optional DHCP server, and a web browser. Everything else (video, hi-fi, microwave, fridge...) would have a built in web server. Instant network control. Instant full-screen setup pages. No more need to set the clock on the hi-fi using multi-function buttons in a special mode on a 4 digit 7 seg display.
Plus I could ssh into my network to set the video from work when I forgot in the morning.
succulent succotash!
i think he really meant to say - succinct
This guy is talking about DIGITAL!!
The only box you can get to decode the digital signal from you cable company usually only comes from the cable company itself.
Like he said he probally couldn't have gone out and bought one himself because they kept changing the box.
To make a long story short (and believe me, it is a long, convoluted story, mostly involving the cable guys trying to get me to shell out $40.00 a piece for three cable drops, of their own cable, after I had already spent $60.00 on new RG6), use digital splitters (ie - 2.4 GHz "sattelite" splitters) with ONLY the number of drops you need - don't try to get a splitter with more drops than you need because that open connector WILL cause signal loss, "ring"-ing in the circuit (think of coax as a capacitor in an LC tank circuit - oscillation becomes an issue). You need the digital splitter because the standard runs at that frequency - some boxes can drop down to an analog mode to get the info, but it is sketchy, and sometimes fails. Also, use RG6, not RG59 (anybody want to buy a 200 foot spool, cheap?) cable. I would also recommend AGAINST crimping your own connectors unless you know absolutely what you are doing, or you have done it before.
The gist of the matter is digital is very picky when it comes to signals - too much db loss, excess noise, wrong or marginal cable/connectors - it just doesn't work. It also won't work if you have too many splitters (each splitter introduces a drop in db). Also realize there are splitters which pass power from the cable company (something like 12-15 VDC), and some splitters don't take this into account, or have legs of the splitter which pass power, and others that don't! The power is typically provided for inline signal amplifiers, so if you have or think you may need such devices in the future, be sure to get the proper splitter. Also be aware that splitters may be "asymetrical" in their electrical characteristics/ratings (ie, db loss may be less in one direction than the other) when it comes to the inputs and the outputs - this can be important for digital setups, especially cable broadband - so keep it in mind and do some research.
My advice if you are splitting or installing new for digital cable: 2.4 GHz digital splitters only, 100 foot runs, RG6 cabling (preferably with pre-attached factory molded connectors) - believe me, this will save money and time in the end.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
This same thing has happened with home phones.
What was once as simple as "mem -> 3" has become "menu -> phonelist -> down -> down -> on". And forget it if you want to use something like a calling-card with pre-programmed numbers. I can't seem to find a phone that will let you dial a number from memory once you've already done so or even if it's already on the line.
When I was at school I had my calling card # programmed into mem-1, my long-distance # home in mem-2 and my best friend long-distance # into mem-3. When I called home, mem-1, wait 2 seconds, mem-2.
Now the best I've seen is the ability to program 20 numbers (WHY NOT 25 DAMN YOU ALL TO HELL!) with the ability to add pauses. Great - 10-digit dialing in my area so I'm screwed...not to mention that if I wanted to setup something like that I'd have to program all those numbers for each person I was calling. That just sucks.
It seems that in their whiz-bang attempt to wow us with technology, they've lost sight of what was once functionally sound. For crissakes - the phones still have a 12-key keypad, a speaker, a microphone and a long history of efficient design. Why throw all of that away?
sedawkgrep
Is that a salami in my pants or am I just happy to be me?
Anytime you add features, you make the usability more complex. Hence, cheap and old things are easier to use.
Think of some of your household items: the broom does one thing, does it well, and any idiot can run it (smart people may have difficulty, after all it's too simple). Or the toilet: a well-developed user interface, with one-click technology (does Amazon.com know about this?).
Now you consider the modern cell phone/pager/web browser/remote control. It's got so many blasted features that when you try to call your Grandmother, there's a high likelihood you'll download dirty pictures to her TV instead. Cripes! Where will it all end?
Give me my freedom, and I'll take care of my own security, thank you.