
How Often do you Re-Boot your TV?
Back in the Middle Ages, we would turn on our Cathode Ray Tube television receiver, and sound would come on nearly instantly. The picture would expand from a point at the center of the screen after a second or two. If it did not, your equipment was broken.
What happens now?
If you are lucky, a light will come on or change color to indicate that your remote ON command was received and is being considered. Within a minute, you may be treated to some combination of sound and/or picture. But occasionally, you get The Big Nothing. What’s happening? Let’s try turning TV and Cable Boxes on and off a few times. Nope, still Nothing. Next let’s pull plugs and replace them. This initiates The Re-Boot. The Re-boot is excruciatingly slow. Why is this?
Essentially, it’s because that modern, flat-screen TV has way more important business to attend to than merely showing you sound and picture. It runs an Operating System, connected to the Internet, perhaps spying on you while you sit there. I’ll bet Putin knows our viewing habits. The Operating System must load itself from permanent storage into high-speed memory, where it will then take charge of all the hardware under its control. It will figure out what is installed and what is not installed, whether it wants an upgrade right now, and whether you are deserving of any particular sound and/or picture. This all takes time. Considering that even an appliance processor can execute a million instructions per second, an amazing number of instructions must be required to light up that screen.
While processing those millions of instructions, a lot can go wrong. Maybe the tuner is supposed to tell the processor that a signal worth decoding is present, and maybe that information doesn’t come right away. Maybe the semi-literate prodigy who coded the instructions made a mistake. Maybe there are sunspots today.
If only we could turn back time and pretend it’s a new TV on a new day. That’s what pulling the plug and putting it back in does. Nice, eh? Some days I wish my LIFE had a Re-Boot procedure. But The Re-Boot takes time. Lots of time, especially for a culture trained to expect instant gratification. What a pain in the butt!
Why do we do this? Really, it’s just an indication of how young the cyber world is. We are at the dawn of software evolution. We haven’t bothered yet to devise robust sets of instructions with safeguards to prevent The Big Nothing. We know how — we just don’t care yet.
There is no need for this state of affairs. It’s just corporate laziness combined with public tolerance of sloppy work. Throw your TV out the window — no wait, that only rewards the manufacturer. Petition congress — no wait, that only makes TVs more expensive. OK, I give up! Let’s continue to Re-Boot our appliances, our computers, our wireless routers, and our cars (yes, I had to do that once to restore my dashboard display). At least until technology matures and Artificial Intelligence rules the land. No more Re-Boots, but you may be required to justify your channel choices.