5 ms·

TV boxes IME usually ship with less compute than they have to [in order to provide reasonable UX] ;)

• yjftsjthsd-h 3y ago
  Eh, the result may suck, but I don't think it's usually a hardware problem.
• adhesive_wombat 3y ago
  Anything to satisfy whichever law it is that says "lagginess remains constant".
  • actionfromafar 3y ago
    "Huh, this CPU is kind of snappy running native code now. What should we do?" "Let's move application development to Python then, I suppose." "Thanks, that fixed it." Probably what happened in my 55" smart TV dev team.
    • xnzakg 3y ago
      I would bet that instead of python it's JavaScript and a webapp pretending to be a native application.
      • treyd 3y ago
        If it's an LG TV this is literally true. They bought webOS specifically for this purpose. Meanwhile Roku invented a runtime/language (BrightScript) and mandated its use to at least enforce a minimum quality standard and throw away cruft.
        • pjmlp 3y ago
          WebOS supports Qt as well.
    • bitwize 3y ago
      Definitely happened on the OLPC. What's worse, they made a "throbber" effect by string substituting a different color into an SVG, and then reparsing the SVG, for each color it fades through. That's the kind of coding quality the OLPC project had. That's why it failed, and it probably also factored into why they disabled the view source button.
      • adhesive_wombat 3y ago
        In modern GTK you also have to string-substitute or otherwise construct CSS, pass in as a string and have it reparsed to change element styles. But at least it is native!
      • actionfromafar 3y ago
        It also failed because it took ages to release anything useful. It took years, and suddenly smartphones were upon us all, and OLPC shrunk from a special niche to a tiny niche.
• jeffparsons 3y ago
  And kiosks, like the McDonald's ordering kiosks. I wouldn't be surprised if they spend more on installation than on building the device itself!
  • b112 3y ago
    I haven't interacted with these much, but in all such things, eg TVs, others, I get peeved at the thought process. Typical dev time for a new UI from scratch is years. And price drop on parts and their availability will be different down the road. I wonder of people are running all tests, DEV work in KVM or other emulation stacks for DEV, but then not accurately locking clock rate, and limiting RAM during testing. Because I'd quit as a DEV, if I saw the fruits of my labours, turning out as complete crap and a laughing stock. I wouldn't want my name associated with laggy, crashy, frustrating junk. I'd want no part of it, no part of everyone hating my work. And further, how the hell does laggy crap get past the CTO? CEO? I've seen lag just trying to change the channel! I mean, outside of caring about customers every buying anything with your name again, there's the laughing stock factor. "Hi, I'm CEO of crappy corp" "Wow, you must be really proud of yourself, dumbass" I just don't get it. CEO bonuses aside, saving 10 cents on a part, over 10M units is still only $1M extra profit, and the CEO might see a tiny fraction, as a bonus, of that extra profit. I don't grok.
    • mschuster91 3y ago
      > I mean, outside of caring about customers every buying anything with your name again, there's the laughing stock factor. The problem is, there is no competition, everyone sucks and only builds to "it works somewhat" quality. Hence, no incentive for anyone to invest more money.
    • LtWorf 3y ago
      Most developers suck.
      • rowanG077 3y ago
        Even if it were true that is not the problem. Even sucky devs can crank out code that runs reasonably fast. It just depends on whether the company sees it as a required feature.
• Narishma 3y ago
  No, they're just bad at software.