On the storage end of things, they spend very little most STB's had like 20GB's in them when I was working for the cable company. I think the new at the time HD boxes had 40GB hard drives. Considering at the time 1TB drives on the PC where getting common at the time.
I understand why they had such small drives but it was still frustrating to me, my wife would fill the entire drive on 2 DVR's and I would get nothing... If the drives where larger maybe things would have been better for me!!! lol
Now I just use Direct TV Now and the Shield TV / Apple TV 4K and that whole cloud DVR thing... but the upside is most of the stuff I want is on demand or on Netflix or Amazon or Youtube or Pluto TV or The Roku Channel (seriously the Roku + stick thing is under 30 bucks totally worth it for all the free content)
Streaming is the way to go if you can get the internet connection to back it up, you can save money or roll the savings into signing up for a few services and enjoy virtually unlimited entertainment.
I actually heard they are planning on just using ARM chips for everything... Not sure how much faith I put in that rumor but if true it would be really weird... It would have to be some extreme upgraded ARM to offer any reasonable performance in a desktop machine?
I was wondering if the code he will produce is just going to be like 600,000 lines of copy pasted code from random open source projects with a bunch of random junk thrown in to make it look like he did work?
My faith in humanity is that he probably did do a bunch of work and will release it but it's probably far from a finished product. So either way not much good will come of this?
I guess a 3rd possibility is that he did get a lot of it done and is close to being finished but just doesn't have the energy for that final push to give birth... So maybe the code could be finished in some sort of open source fashion and everyone will win?
USA, Russia, Pakistan, India, China, Nigeria, pretty much where there exists people and money... My theory is that some people are greedy lazy assholes... regardless of race country or religion. But he some people would rather point at country X and say "Those people are scum!" As if by extension suddenly the country they live in is the epitome of purity.
Yeah I imagine this is pretty much the case, once you get out of the trenches so to speak it's just a numbers game and at that point reality just sort of flies out the window. I remember in training (was very thorough and great training) all the great things we could do to help customers and "Be the reason" all that flies out the window once your on the floor in production. After you hit the floor it's literally about keeping the customer on the phone as long as possible (sub contractor phone tech support so time is money...) and hitting all the steps in the flow even if you know they just need to plug the damn VGA cable in... I literally got a write up for helping a customer reinstall the graphics driver VS reformatting the machine and starting from scratch. My solution saved the customers data, but that didn't matter because I deviated from the script... So happy I am no longer in that field.
Honestly most of the time I get the feeling it's not the engineer's at fault for most issues (although some clever "solutions..." uggh but I digress.) most of the time there is a list of requirements and in that list is "Do A-Z with cost under what A-Z could reliably be done with, also do it all in a time scale that is either impossible or just unrealistic"
I worked for Dell doing L2 tech support and yeah it was good times... (Vista was launching during that period of time and Vista ready was a hilarious joke.) a running gag at the call center was pointing at the worst PC's we could find and saying "Of course it's Vista ready!"
From the rumor mill at the time the engineer's had running battles with management about what qualified as "Vista ready" with them wanting the machines to meet a minimum "performance rating" and management just going "but it runs? that means it's ready right?"
Win on Sunday sell on Monday? I think it was NASCAR or something to do with racing. (not a race fan but I do remember that saying being said on TV or in a movie or something)
I used to be a huge "pirate" but that I would download movies all the time, in the last 6 months I have probably downloaded like 4 movies all of them stuff so old that legit they should be free by now or at least able to be streamed from one of the gob of services I pay for...
Anyway what changed my habits was Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, Roku channel and Direct TV Now. Between those options if I can't find something to watch that would say more about me than the content... As a "pirate" I don't mind buying my content if it has some sort of benefit to me like ease of access or choices, hell I will even endure ads if I must... (sometimes I enjoy those too... sometimes lol)
Solar is good just use a magnifying glass on the weeds... kids have been doing it to ants for years. If fire is an issue just spray some water down after. No heating or cooling needed.
I even pay extra for the ultra HD streams but it's just got to the point I can't use it.. with out getting angry... so I don't watch it, and at that point why pay for something I am not watching?
I agree.... 3rd party theme's would be awesome on Netflix also maybe 3rd party category tools/filters so you could install "Action Movie Extreme!!!" as a category and "Happy Halloween Super Slasher Flicks!!!"
The theme thing would be nice if I could just get a simple hack to disable that one "feature", and it's not about data usage for me. Although I have heard people complaining that it chews up data unnecessarily, so if your on a phone or your ISP has data caps it can cost money.
Give people a little of what they want and at a decent price is the best way to prevent piracy. Also listening to your customers is business 101:(
I hear you.... Netflix should be more configurable to what the user wants... What you said has gotten worse lately too, I mean it's always been kind of annoying in that respect but less and less of what I would watch shows up and then I en up digging for an hour looking for something to watch and then I get smacked in the face with my complaint:(
About to cancel my subscription to Netflix and probably not for the reason or reasons most would...
It's that damned auto play preview music and video clip every show plays if you move just so much as look at a picture for a moment...
For like the first 10 minutes I thought it was cool, then I got mildly annoyed with it, then I looked for a way to turn it off.. Now I signed up for Direct TV Now and Amazon and maybe I will switch to Hulu... But really Netflix needs to have that optional.
I have 200Mbps down and 40Mbps up, and in spite of that at times Netflix gets a hiccup now and then. Not often mind you but it can still happen, usually around 5PM to 7PM If it's going to happen.
About the only things a person can do on their end to improve things is getting your own modem and router, a good quality home network will make sure your getting as much bandwidth as you can out of the wall. (I have a 320Mbps Motorola cable modem and a Linksys EA7500 not the best stuff but it's leaps and bounds better than the stuff my ISP would try to give me.)
Also make sure you don't have 18 devices on that 3Mbps connection... Updates and random checks for the weather and and and will suck up that 3Mbps pretty quick.
At that speed you might go into your Netflix settings and change it to 480P:(
I cannot count the number of things I have bought online at Newegg and Amazon and Aliexpress and a few other places. I have never bought anything online from Walmart and just don't feel the need too. The prices are usually better someplace else and Walmart already gets enough of my money when I go shopping as it is. Although lately I have been trying to shop almost anywhere else but Walmart, I just hate doing all my shopping and then seeing 40 registers and 3 of them (at most) open and like 10 people in front of me at each register.. Tell me your not making enough money to pay a couple of more people the small wages they pay to open a few more registers. I love computers (shop at Newegg,com should be a clue) but I hate the self check out lanes unless I have like 3 items or less (then they are awesome, love them, but try using them when you have like 40 items in your cart... they suck.)
I am regret... I built my skylake system shortly before Ryzen came out Skylake has its own bugs to add to these new ones.... But it will last me a while longer I plan on building a Ryzen 2 system when those launch. Will be the first AMD build for me although I have owned some AMD machines on the side my own personal rigs have always been Intel and I have been building since the P3 days. It was mostly a good run minus the whole Pentium 4 stuff but I can put up with slightly lower performance the show stopping bugs? Not so much and it feels like AMD is doing better than Intel right now at that.
I do and had built my Skylake with the intention of buying a better CPU down the road, I am an Intel guy through and through but AMD has my attention and might have my next purchase.
I was just talking to my wife about this the other day, I remember about 20 years ago that cable for basic (Florida) was about 20 dollars a month. Yes there was a lot less commercials and for the most part the programming was in my opinion slightly better. Fast forward to today and the quality is virtually non existent beyond the exception here and there. The price for just basic is more than double the price unless you "bundle" and then it's still at 60* dollars before taxes and fee's.
I believe that the cable industry is pricing itself right off the map, I cut my cable off years ago and switched to streaming. Saved sooo much money.
*that 60 dollar price is like half what Brighthouse was charging and I am sure is just an introductory offer so even that low price seems too high to me.
The reason I cut my cable off was the Internet was about $40 for 100Mbps and plenty fast enough for streaming, but getting cable even bundled was over 120 dollars... Almost 1,000 dollars a year so yeah... It's still not what I would call cheap, but it keeps over $500 in my pocket and I like that.
A reasonably bright light source and picking up the phone and holding it at an angle can usually show the long smudge trail left by people using one of those lock screens... Z type patterns seem to be the most popular.
Unless they just finished playing a game of Angry birds or something.... Then you gotta wait:(
If you pick and choose semi carefully.... you can fit most of everything from the 80's up too PS1 and N64 on the Nvidia Shield TV Pro.
For me the money was well worth it, I watch Netflix on the thing and play a crap ton of games:)
Now back to playing Chrono Trigger on the "SNES"!!!
but yeah I agree, this Mini NES has me interested but only from a collecting stand point, I can play all the NES games and probably with better filtering (I have recently been introduced to the wonders of BRZ, nothing is perfect when it comes to filters but I enjoy the cartoon kind of look that BRZ gives.
Another advantage of emulation is that you can play some of the funnier hacks and mods and translations. Disadvantage? That sweet sweet NES block controller... Although I am not sure I want to hold one ever again... I think my fingers still curve in a bit more than normal from playing NES so much back in the 80's.
I'll be the first to admit I don't use thumb drives on a daily basis or have tons of USB peripherals (Mice, keyboards, joysticks, cameras, but not a ton of them....) I don't mind using adapters I have an OTG adapter for my tablet that I use once in a while. My view on this situation though, is that if your paying out the butt for a laptop. It should cater to the users needs and it's large enough that having a normal port isn't too much to ask.
USB is far from out dated and new devices are being made for that port and will be made for many years to come, using an adapter to access a standard is retarded. The adapter should be used for non standard shit... Not the other way around.
Slashdot Mirror
On the storage end of things, they spend very little most STB's had like 20GB's in them when I was working for the cable company. I think the new at the time HD boxes had 40GB hard drives. Considering at the time 1TB drives on the PC where getting common at the time.
I understand why they had such small drives but it was still frustrating to me, my wife would fill the entire drive on 2 DVR's and I would get nothing... If the drives where larger maybe things would have been better for me!!! lol
Now I just use Direct TV Now and the Shield TV / Apple TV 4K and that whole cloud DVR thing... but the upside is most of the stuff I want is on demand or on Netflix or Amazon or Youtube or Pluto TV or The Roku Channel (seriously the Roku + stick thing is under 30 bucks totally worth it for all the free content)
Streaming is the way to go if you can get the internet connection to back it up, you can save money or roll the savings into signing up for a few services and enjoy virtually unlimited entertainment.
I actually heard they are planning on just using ARM chips for everything... Not sure how much faith I put in that rumor but if true it would be really weird... It would have to be some extreme upgraded ARM to offer any reasonable performance in a desktop machine?
I was wondering if the code he will produce is just going to be like 600,000 lines of copy pasted code from random open source projects with a bunch of random junk thrown in to make it look like he did work?
My faith in humanity is that he probably did do a bunch of work and will release it but it's probably far from a finished product. So either way not much good will come of this?
I guess a 3rd possibility is that he did get a lot of it done and is close to being finished but just doesn't have the energy for that final push to give birth... So maybe the code could be finished in some sort of open source fashion and everyone will win?
USA, Russia, Pakistan, India, China, Nigeria, pretty much where there exists people and money... My theory is that some people are greedy lazy assholes... regardless of race country or religion. But he some people would rather point at country X and say "Those people are scum!" As if by extension suddenly the country they live in is the epitome of purity.
Yeah I imagine this is pretty much the case, once you get out of the trenches so to speak it's just a numbers game and at that point reality just sort of flies out the window. I remember in training (was very thorough and great training) all the great things we could do to help customers and "Be the reason" all that flies out the window once your on the floor in production. After you hit the floor it's literally about keeping the customer on the phone as long as possible (sub contractor phone tech support so time is money...) and hitting all the steps in the flow even if you know they just need to plug the damn VGA cable in... I literally got a write up for helping a customer reinstall the graphics driver VS reformatting the machine and starting from scratch. My solution saved the customers data, but that didn't matter because I deviated from the script... So happy I am no longer in that field.
Honestly most of the time I get the feeling it's not the engineer's at fault for most issues (although some clever "solutions..." uggh but I digress.) most of the time there is a list of requirements and in that list is "Do A-Z with cost under what A-Z could reliably be done with, also do it all in a time scale that is either impossible or just unrealistic"
I worked for Dell doing L2 tech support and yeah it was good times... (Vista was launching during that period of time and Vista ready was a hilarious joke.) a running gag at the call center was pointing at the worst PC's we could find and saying "Of course it's Vista ready!"
From the rumor mill at the time the engineer's had running battles with management about what qualified as "Vista ready" with them wanting the machines to meet a minimum "performance rating" and management just going "but it runs? that means it's ready right?"
Win on Sunday sell on Monday? I think it was NASCAR or something to do with racing. (not a race fan but I do remember that saying being said on TV or in a movie or something)
I used to be a huge "pirate" but that I would download movies all the time, in the last 6 months I have probably downloaded like 4 movies all of them stuff so old that legit they should be free by now or at least able to be streamed from one of the gob of services I pay for...
Anyway what changed my habits was Netflix, Amazon Prime, Youtube, Roku channel and Direct TV Now. Between those options if I can't find something to watch that would say more about me than the content... As a "pirate" I don't mind buying my content if it has some sort of benefit to me like ease of access or choices, hell I will even endure ads if I must... (sometimes I enjoy those too... sometimes lol)
Love streaming my movies and TV.
Solar is good just use a magnifying glass on the weeds... kids have been doing it to ants for years. If fire is an issue just spray some water down after. No heating or cooling needed.
I even pay extra for the ultra HD streams but it's just got to the point I can't use it.. with out getting angry... so I don't watch it, and at that point why pay for something I am not watching?
I agree.... 3rd party theme's would be awesome on Netflix also maybe 3rd party category tools/filters so you could install "Action Movie Extreme!!!" as a category and "Happy Halloween Super Slasher Flicks!!!"
The theme thing would be nice if I could just get a simple hack to disable that one "feature", and it's not about data usage for me. Although I have heard people complaining that it chews up data unnecessarily, so if your on a phone or your ISP has data caps it can cost money.
Give people a little of what they want and at a decent price is the best way to prevent piracy. Also listening to your customers is business 101 :(
I hear you.... Netflix should be more configurable to what the user wants... What you said has gotten worse lately too, I mean it's always been kind of annoying in that respect but less and less of what I would watch shows up and then I en up digging for an hour looking for something to watch and then I get smacked in the face with my complaint :(
About to cancel my subscription to Netflix and probably not for the reason or reasons most would...
It's that damned auto play preview music and video clip every show plays if you move just so much as look at a picture for a moment...
For like the first 10 minutes I thought it was cool, then I got mildly annoyed with it, then I looked for a way to turn it off.. Now I signed up for Direct TV Now and Amazon and maybe I will switch to Hulu... But really Netflix needs to have that optional.
I have 200Mbps down and 40Mbps up, and in spite of that at times Netflix gets a hiccup now and then. Not often mind you but it can still happen, usually around 5PM to 7PM If it's going to happen.
About the only things a person can do on their end to improve things is getting your own modem and router, a good quality home network will make sure your getting as much bandwidth as you can out of the wall. (I have a 320Mbps Motorola cable modem and a Linksys EA7500 not the best stuff but it's leaps and bounds better than the stuff my ISP would try to give me.)
Also make sure you don't have 18 devices on that 3Mbps connection... Updates and random checks for the weather and and and will suck up that 3Mbps pretty quick.
At that speed you might go into your Netflix settings and change it to 480P :(
I cannot count the number of things I have bought online at Newegg and Amazon and Aliexpress and a few other places. I have never bought anything online from Walmart and just don't feel the need too. The prices are usually better someplace else and Walmart already gets enough of my money when I go shopping as it is. Although lately I have been trying to shop almost anywhere else but Walmart, I just hate doing all my shopping and then seeing 40 registers and 3 of them (at most) open and like 10 people in front of me at each register.. Tell me your not making enough money to pay a couple of more people the small wages they pay to open a few more registers. I love computers (shop at Newegg,com should be a clue) but I hate the self check out lanes unless I have like 3 items or less (then they are awesome, love them, but try using them when you have like 40 items in your cart... they suck.)
I am regret... I built my skylake system shortly before Ryzen came out Skylake has its own bugs to add to these new ones.... But it will last me a while longer I plan on building a Ryzen 2 system when those launch. Will be the first AMD build for me although I have owned some AMD machines on the side my own personal rigs have always been Intel and I have been building since the P3 days. It was mostly a good run minus the whole Pentium 4 stuff but I can put up with slightly lower performance the show stopping bugs? Not so much and it feels like AMD is doing better than Intel right now at that.
I do and had built my Skylake with the intention of buying a better CPU down the road, I am an Intel guy through and through but AMD has my attention and might have my next purchase.
I was just talking to my wife about this the other day, I remember about 20 years ago that cable for basic (Florida) was about 20 dollars a month. Yes there was a lot less commercials and for the most part the programming was in my opinion slightly better. Fast forward to today and the quality is virtually non existent beyond the exception here and there. The price for just basic is more than double the price unless you "bundle" and then it's still at 60* dollars before taxes and fee's.
I believe that the cable industry is pricing itself right off the map, I cut my cable off years ago and switched to streaming. Saved sooo much money.
*that 60 dollar price is like half what Brighthouse was charging and I am sure is just an introductory offer so even that low price seems too high to me.
The reason I cut my cable off was the Internet was about $40 for 100Mbps and plenty fast enough for streaming, but getting cable even bundled was over 120 dollars... Almost 1,000 dollars a year so yeah... It's still not what I would call cheap, but it keeps over $500 in my pocket and I like that.
I bet twitch is one? lol
https://www.twitch.tv/depravo
Anyway to delete the 30GB's of "fruit" machines that the .182 set will be sure to include?
If there isn't an easy way than I am sticking with .139
This message will self destruct in 10 seconds!
I can usually get it in two tries...
A reasonably bright light source and picking up the phone and holding it at an angle can usually show the long smudge trail left by people using one of those lock screens... Z type patterns seem to be the most popular.
Unless they just finished playing a game of Angry birds or something.... Then you gotta wait :(
If you pick and choose semi carefully.... you can fit most of everything from the 80's up too PS1 and N64 on the Nvidia Shield TV Pro.
For me the money was well worth it, I watch Netflix on the thing and play a crap ton of games :)
Now back to playing Chrono Trigger on the "SNES"!!!
but yeah I agree, this Mini NES has me interested but only from a collecting stand point, I can play all the NES games and probably with better filtering (I have recently been introduced to the wonders of BRZ, nothing is perfect when it comes to filters but I enjoy the cartoon kind of look that BRZ gives.
Another advantage of emulation is that you can play some of the funnier hacks and mods and translations. Disadvantage? That sweet sweet NES block controller... Although I am not sure I want to hold one ever again... I think my fingers still curve in a bit more than normal from playing NES so much back in the 80's.
They need to make a Pro Pro model that actually has a regular USB port on it... lol
I'll be the first to admit I don't use thumb drives on a daily basis or have tons of USB peripherals (Mice, keyboards, joysticks, cameras, but not a ton of them....) I don't mind using adapters I have an OTG adapter for my tablet that I use once in a while. My view on this situation though, is that if your paying out the butt for a laptop. It should cater to the users needs and it's large enough that having a normal port isn't too much to ask.
USB is far from out dated and new devices are being made for that port and will be made for many years to come, using an adapter to access a standard is retarded. The adapter should be used for non standard shit... Not the other way around.