Asklemmy

43760 readers

1099 users here now

A loosely moderated place to ask open-ended questions

Search asklemmy 🔍

If your post meets the following criteria, it's welcome here!

Open-ended question
Not offensive: at this point, we do not have the bandwidth to moderate overtly political discussions. Assume best intent and be excellent to each other.
Not regarding using or support for Lemmy: context, see the list of support communities and tools for finding communities below
Not ad nauseam inducing: please make sure it is a question that would be new to most members
An actual topic of discussion

Looking for support?

Looking for a community?

Lemmyverse: community search
sub.rehab: maps old subreddits to fediverse options, marks official as such
!lemmy411@lemmy.ca: a community for finding communities

~Icon~ ~by~ ~@Double_A@discuss.tchncs.de~

founded 5 years ago

MODERATORS

247

What's Some Tech That Was Better Than It Is Now? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by wuphysics87@lemmy.ml to c/asklemmy@lemmy.ml

322 comments fedilink hide all child comments

When you connect a new device to a 'smart' tv, you must pay homage to the manufacturer with a ritualistic dance. Plugging and unplugging the device. Turning them on and off in the correct sequence like entering a konami code.

Every time you want to switch devices, the tv must scan for them. And god forbid you lose power, or unplug something. You are granted the delight experience of doing it all over again.

I have fond memories of the days of just plugging something in, and pressing the input button. Instant gratification. It was a simpler time.

What is some other tech that used to be better?

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] vext01@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Oh man, remember when you just had to press the channel number on the remote.

Now you gotta use menus in a Smart TV that takes 2 seconds to process an input event.

[–] bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.de 3 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

Reminds me of the time I had to make an interface for a set top box by Deutsche Telekom. It was severely underpowered and I had to work with some very quirky browser. I think the browser was based on Internet Explorer.

It was super slow and couldn't handle anything asynchronous. Which meant that it would lock up for even the simplest operation. And they insisted on their buttons having button down animations. Which meant that I had to slow down the incredibly slow machine artificially so that you could see the animation. And it wasn't enough to slow it down just for the animation duration. You had to give it some extra time because it was so damn underpowered. I think in the end a button push took a whole second extra time.

And it was still faster than what they had produced themselves before that, even though their thing didn't have any animations.

The worst was that those machines actually did have a fancy hardware accelerated interface one could use. But for some reason they weren't ready yet for that. So everything I had done was just a placeholder anyways.