The importance that tangible products play in my life – especially in a day and age of downloadable commodities.

Where I work we spend a lot of money on hardware and software to keep things going. When I say hardware and software I am speaking of much more than just computers in the building network so folks can check email and surf the interweb. I work at a broadcast facility and we broadcast, over the air using the first real wireless technology, 5 television channels and 5 radio channels so you can imagine the amount of gadgets needed to do that, there are A LOT. Anyway in this day and age we have satellite receivers that are hardware devices that have firmware in them and are running software. We have an HD switcher on the television side that is controlled with a software GUI, or graphical user interface for those who may not know what that means. We did not even purchase the big fancy piece of hardware in that case, saving to the tune of about 20-25 grand if I remember correctly. On the radio side we have installed some cutting edge audio boards that also have software and firmware that run on an almost infinitely upgraded bit of ubiquitous hardware. The march of technology is just AMAZING and if you think it is crazy on the consumer side, times that by 100 and you begin to understand how that march of technology is impacting the broadcasters, or content distributors as some have started referring to themselves as now. To me it seems even the name is loosing its tangibility.


I have been at my place of employment for over 11 years, when I started we did not even broadcast the one channel of television we produced in stereo so you can imagine the changes that have taken place over that time to meet the digital conversion mandated by our government. It was mandated to by the way, this transition was not the broadcaster’s idea, a story for another day for sure. Anyway over that time we have spent literally millions of dollars towards upgrading our facility to make the conversion to digital, which we have done in radio and television. So as the technology has matured more and more gadgets that I would never have thought could be improved have indeed been improved. Things that used to take hours to adjust and align now are completed with a bit of software that is gathering telemetry data from key points and using those metrics to perform the adjustments automatically in almost real time. Those things are weird for me to watch but I do see the advantages, better, faster and more accurate, for example performing an alignment on the TV modulator in the transmitter used to take a few hours and would have to be performed on a regular basis. A software system now has tentacles into the transmitter and it monitors every aspect of the signal specification and automatically adjusts it keep the signal perfect all the time. AMAZING. No more use of a tangible device (the electronic geek’s tweaker) to keep the system operating at peak efficiency, some intangible piece of software running in the background on a Linux kernel does it for us.


That kind of leads me into the reason on got to thinking about this topic in the first place. We are working a project that requires electronic files to manipulated, these files are quite large and the hardware and software are very specific. Although it is possible to purchase both the hardware and software together, we were able to save some money by buying the hardware separately. The hardware is basically a server that has sixteen 2.6gig processors in it and 32gig of ram. Quite a machine when you think about it, the cumulative amount of processing is about 42gig – that number itself is truly incredible when you think about it, I remember vividly my first 486 computer that was running at a blazing 20megahetz and that was less than 20 years ago. Anyway the software is made by a company and I purchased it through a separate company that represents the manufacturer for sales of their product. I was told by my representative that I needed to tell him which components of the software I wanted and he would provide me a license key that would enable those functions, cool I thought. Then I am informed that I will have to go to a web site and download the software, at first I did not think much of it. After a few days I began to think more about that and the more I thought about it the more I wondered how can that be. Here is a software application that costs over 15 thousand dollars and I do not get anything tangible for that money, other than the bill that is mailed to us. I am old fashioned to some degree, I still like working on transmitters that have tubes, I still like and old Simpson 260 analog multimeter and when somebody gets 15k from me I want something I can touch. It is funny in another way to because this software and the other infrastructure we are putting in place will be replacing our use of tapes and moving all of our content to video and audio files. So the very purpose of this project is to do away with the tangible real time program delivery method of a tape machine and shifting it to an intangible computer file based system and for some reason I am mad about the software we are going to use to do it not being tangible. Something is wrong with me I know, recognizing the problem is always to first step to solving the problem but……….

So anyway I call my vendor and tell him about my dilemma and tell him before I pay the bill I need something tangible for my money. Now my vendor is a great guy and I have known him for a long time, over the course of our professional relationship we have developed a fantastic personal relationship as well so I did not feel uncomfortable telling him I wanted a disk. Now that I think about that I would have done that even if we did not get along. So he starts by laughing at me and then kind of makes a joke out of it, promising a customized disk with our logo and maybe even the license key printed on it. He also implied that maybe he would print out the manual as well for me, yes it does not even come with a printed manual just a small PDF file. He also started accusing me of being anti-green, the system is like that to save the resources of the planet, he said ( I am paraphrasing but that is what I heard) on and on he went on that tangent. What is the right answer, tangible products for 15k or not? The real question for me was “why do I really care” if I get a disk or not and what difference will it make in the long run. Well I came to the conclusion that my buddy was right, it is more ecologically sound to not waste the resources on a plastic compact disk that haunt the planet in a land fill for the next 23,456 years. As far as the manual I do print those out because I have found as I get older it is harder for me to read manuals from the computer screen. I am a geek and one of my hobbies is to read technical manuals, leave me alone, it helps me relax. So just like my music library at home – gone are the CD’s (tangible real time hardware) and in are the music files in MP3’s (intangible, non linear, file based ether ware). You know after reading through this I realized it may have sounded like I am against the march of new technologies, the exact opposite is true, I love it, all the things we can do with technology are truly amazing and has turned out to be what I do, how lucky am I to get to do the hobby I love at work and get paid for it.

What are you doing for the environment?