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Comment Re:Useless technology anyway (Score 1) 90

> And you've done nothing to explain what the use case is.

Sorry, did I miss when I agreed to educate you? Since when is it important to ME that YOU agree with me? I don't care what you think. I'm telling you to get your head out of your ventilation shaft and consider that _other people have other needs_.

Okay. Thanks for all but admitting that exactly none of those needs are actually solved by the feature we're talking about.

You don't have a need. You just don't want your routine to be disrupted by a company taking away a feature that works for you. And it's entirely okay to feel that way. But it's not really a good reason to have designed such an overly complex and, at least in the real world, frequently under-performing protocol in the first place.

Your other comments show you don't understand the limitations of the things that work for you, in other use cases.

Keep telling yourself that I'm the one who doesn't understand the tech if it helps you sleep at night.

Comment Re: Useless technology anyway (Score 1) 90

My TV doesn't have Internet. The remote is not going to let me watch Netflix.

Then neither will casting, because casting by definition requires the TV to have Internet. It's a handoff process whereby the TV itself retrieves the content from the Netflix servers, and all your phone does is handle the authentication and key delivery plus playback controls.

You can do screen mirroring with a non-Internet-capable or disconnected TV, but not you can't use the ridiculously designed feature that I'm talking about.

So everything I'm saying is useless is useless for you, too.

Comment Re:Kind of cool, but... (Score 2) 50

When folded, the Z-flip is also about twice as thick as a non-folding Galaxy phone, but it's actually more comfortable in a front pants pocket if you climb stairs often enough.

I've experimented with this. It's because the tradeoff lets the folded phone slide around more freely (compared with a larger phone), and that's the key to comfort.

By the same argument, the Z-fold design combines the worst of both the regular, non-folding phones (namely their height is comparable to a pants pocket) and the extra thickness of the Z-flip.

Comment Re:Just give it time (Score 1) 38

And if that doesn't work, we'll appeal to an even higher authority.

It's already in the works.

The Pope is technically infallible.

He has a direct wifi connection to the Invisible One In The Sky.

So when he gets put to the question, it will take a day, two tops, and he'll relay the Big Boy's exact wishes to the old girls.

Two and a half, if saturday's barbecue party in the Vatican's garden is particularly bangin'

Comment I have this problem with Slashdot (Score 1) 71

I do a lot of browsing using Seamonkey, and that browser cannot handle some fairly recent changes to Javascript. Most Slashdot functions don't need them but the login process does. I logon there by moving the cursor just to the SE of the "Submit" button, then slowly North until my logon appears. After that I'm home free.

Comment Battle of Sluys (Score 3, Interesting) 14

The article linked shows a painting depicting the battle of Sluys, what this article skips is that back then only the nobles were taken prisoner (because they could be ransomed), anyone else was killed. Going back to the main article, Geoffrey Chaucer is mentioned as a soldier and diplomat who had been ransomed back in 1359.

Comment Re:Siri is so frustrating (Score 1) 17

My latest pet peeve is when Siri violates basic privacy standards by compelling data collection that isn't necessary.

A couple of days ago, I asked it for a list of restaurants near a particular town where I would be in a couple of hours. Siri immediately told me I had to enable location services for that query. What? Why? My query didn't ask for a list of restaurants near me. I asked for a list of restaurants near a different town, and more to the point, I gave both the name of the town and the state.

I attempted probably half a dozen different variations of that query, including things like avoiding the word "near", and Siri failed in the same way every single time, so this isn't just a one-off glitch specific to how I worded the query. It's a general problem with the way Siri handles queries that involve location.

This violates the first rule of location services, which is do not ask for the user's location unless you actually need the user's location. If the user is asking for restaurants in Panama City, Florida, Siri does NOT need to know that the user is currently in Charleston, South Carolina. It's none of Siri's d**n business. And more to the point, if Siri actually tried to do literally anything with that location data, it would be pretty much guaranteed to reduce the quality of the results rather than increase it, so having the data is just an invitation for any AI that might be involved to do something utterly stupid.

Comment Re:Useless technology anyway (Score 1) 90

So it's not for you. You don't understand or need the use case.

And you've done nothing to explain what the use case is. As far as I can tell, the use case is "Someone who wants to use their phone to control the TV instead of the TV remote," which is a tremendous amount of technological overhead for such a negligible benefit.

It's way easier to point your camera at the screen and do an instant sign-in on the TV than it is to get your phone connected to the right Wi-Fi network and cast to the right TV, so the use case would have to be pretty compelling to make up for what a pain in the a** it is when it works, much less when it doesn't.

You're coming across as "old man yells at cloud", and about something you don't even use!

Major correction here: about something that I have tried to use on many, many occasions, but never used successfully. There's a difference.

I won't read or engage further as I for one only spend my time on worthwhile things and you seem stuck in the mud.

You won't read or engage further because you don't actually know any compelling reason to use it. If you did, you would have said what that reason was by now.

Comment Re:Useless technology anyway (Score 1) 90

> Casting and the entire mechanism of having the device being casted to have to have direct access to the media source is idiotic and only exists because they insist on a extra level of weaponizing devices against the owners and policing what you can do with your own devices

You could have just said "I don't understand why that is needed" and saved yourself the effort.

The use case is extremely powerful. You want to direct a device to do something, rather than try to stream a 2160p video out of your phone over wifi. That's really not so hard to understand, surely?

Not really, no. If I wanted to use the TV to do all of the networking and playback, I would have just used the TV's app to do it. The number of hotels I've seen where the TV supported Chromecast or AirPlay streaming but did not have a built-in Netflix app are literally zero.

From my perspective, casting is a complete disaster by its very nature. It relies on the display device having full Internet access, which isn't a given. Literally every time I've wanted to do casting, it has been because the TV set's Netflix app wasn't working because of a network problem, and it couldn't get access to the Internet, so I was trying to use the phone's network connection. By shifting the network connectivity back to the TV set, it makes the entire system completely worthless, because the exact situations where it could be useful are the exact situations where it isn't.

Comment Re:What's old is new again (Score 1) 42

That wasn't *all* I said, but it is apparently as far as you read. But let's stay there for now. You apparently disagree with this, whnich means that you think that LLMs are the only kind of AI that there is, and that language models can be trained to do things like design rocket engines.

Comment Re:Betteridge says... (Score 1) 85

Maybe, but these figures already basically match my evaluation of the situation.

The figures can be entirely correct and still the answer can be "no". Why? Because Android might use the Linux kernel, but it isn't really a Linux distro in any meaningful sense of the word. And Steam Deck and Chromebooks *can* have some reasonable facsimile of a Linux development environment, but I'd expect maybe 0.1% of users to actually turn it on.

So most of those folks are Linux "users" in much the same way that TiVo owners were linux "users", i.e. they are using a device that deep down, at a level that the user is unaware of, runs some small subset of what a Linux distro typically contains, with a bunch of stuff on top that they mostly aren't in control over.

It's like calling Mac users UNIX users. It's technically correct — the best kind of correct — but grossly misleading.

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