Having spent all too many hours enjoying Air New Zealand's hospitality - in the loosest sense of the word - I remain perplexed as to the design of their entertainment system. Things have moved on a lot since I last did a long-haul trip in 2005 - while we were chuffed then to have multiple movies broadcast to your seat, we now have personal on-demand systems in each seat. There's just one problem - they're somewhat rubbish.

So rubbish in fact that Air New Zealand warn customers: Please do not press the buttons too fast, or your screen will freeze and you will be unable to use it for 15 minutes while it reset. Robust, that. And the temptation is definitely there - there's a notable pause as you press each button, and sometimes it misses them all together. It doesn't help either that when you try to select a movie you have three fifths of the screen occupied by a large blurb teaching your grandmother to suck eggs, and therefore have a minimal section of the screen in which to page through said content. Streaming is also somewhat slow - the movies are compressed enough that MPEG artefacts are very clear, and you attempt to fast forward at your own risk.

The most vexing thing about all of this is that these problems have been solved: either you have smart terminals style devices talking to a central server (there's a hell of a lot of embedded hardware that can decode MPEG very cheaply) or you use dumb terminals with a multi-user server driving everything. How you end with with terminals that offer shocking performance and a 15 minute reboot time is beyond me.

It's a telling reflection on the state of software engineering that not only is this kind of half-arsed solution produced these days, but that it's both accepted and lauded by the customers and users. We wouldn't accept this from an engineer of any other form - why here?