One Of Them Computing Machines

I don’t consider myself age-ist, I have plenty of friends who are old. I mean I even work for some one who is in their sixties. But, you know, with some older folks, they reach a point, well, when maybe it is time for them to retire. You notice small things, they forget little details and eventually that leads to bigger details. They are out of touch with the jargon of their industry or they start tacking on -machine after a device name, like a computer-machine or a fax-machine (oh wait, scratch that last one).

Normally I don’t think of the NY Times as an old newspaper , I mean, yeah the paper itself is old, but the writers don’t tend to show too much of their age in their writing. Well, I felt that way up until today. I was reading an article from yesterday’s paper by Bill Carter titled “NBC to Offer Downloads of Its Shows.” Presumably Bill deals with either television news or computers (and a quick search shows him to be a TV guy). True, it is an older technology, but there have been quite a few innovations to it in the last 10 years. I don’t expect Bill to know about all of them, but there is a pretty big one that I am guessing he is relatively familiar with- Time Shifting.

According to Wikipedia: “Time shifting is the recording of programming to a storage medium to be viewed or listened to at a time more convenient to the consumer.” Now maybe we are getting a little technical there, basically time shifting is what you do with a Digital Video Recorder (a DVR). Not the most complicated of ideas or anything, right? Well then, how come when Bill refers to the idea and the DVR technology that allows it he calls it a “TiVO machine.”

Okay, maybe he wasn’t thinking when he popped that phrase in, maybe he gets paid by the word and needed that extra few cents, but then his editor didn’t change it. Who are these people at the NY Times? How old are they? Maybe it is just me, maybe I am getting worked up over nothing, but seriously, “TiVO machine?”