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Comment Re: One silly law causes problems (Score 1) 42

I'm not reading the code rn but I would assume the volume is mandated. It's got to be over a certain level to be considered audible to people with hearing disabilities. We had one on our RV as it used to be a bus, I disabled it. I will probably put it on a switch at some point though

Comment Re:Useless technology anyway (Score 1) 67

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:Does anyone know what "preview" means? (Score 2) 55

Depends on what "preview” means. If it means an alpha build meant to be internal, such a bug is fine. To me this build was meant to be shown and tested by customers and closer to a beta build. Nothing ruins testing like the inability to test anything.

One time my company was asked to test some software for a supplier. The software would not run after install on any of our computers. There were no errors displayed to give us hints about what could be wrong. Despite weeks of correspondence with their development team, we could never get the software to run. After the testing period was over, they sent us a questionnaire. Unfortunately we could not answer most of the questions as we could never get it to run. One final question was about the readiness of the software for production. We said the software was not ready for production.

The development team was not happy about that and emailed asking for reasons why we said that. I assume their supervisors read the questionnaire responses. We told them that any software that would not work after weeks of correspondence and no hint about what to fix was not production ready. They responded they had since fixed all installation issues in the latest version. We answered back that we could only test the version we were given and that version did not work.

Comment Re:Only part of the story... (Score 1) 92

What always puzzled me about Intel's...more peripheral...activities is that they seemed to fall into a weird, unhelpful, gap between 'doing some VC with the Xeon money; rather than just parking it in investments one notch riskier than savings accounts' and 'strategic additions to the core product'; which normally meant that the non-core stuff had limited synergies with intel systems; and had the risks associated with being a relatively minor program at a big company with a more profitable division; and thus subject to being coopted or killed at any time.

Seemed to happen both with internal projects and with acquisitions. Intel buys Altera because, um, FPGAs are cool and useful and it will 'accelerate innovation' if Intel is putting the PCIe-connected FPGA on the CPU's PCIe root complex rather than a 3rd party vendor doing it? Or something? Even at the tech demo level I'm not sure we even saw a single instance of an FPGA being put on the same package as a CPU(despite 'foveros' also being the advanced-packaging hotness that Intel assured us would make gluing IP blocks together easy and awesome). They just sort of bought them and churned them without any apparent integration. No 'FPGA with big fuck-off memory controller or PCIe root we borrowed from a xeon' type part. No 'Intel QuickAssist Technology now includes programmable FPGA blocks on select parts' CPUs or NICs. Just sort of Intel sells Altera stuff now.

On the network side, Intel just kind of did nothing with and then killed off both the internal Omni-path(good thing it didn't turn out that having an HPC focused interconnect you could run straight from your compute die would have been handy in the future...luckily NVlink never amounted to much...) and the stuff they bought from Barefoot; and at this point barely seems to ship NICs without fairly serious issues. I'm not even counting Lantiq; which they seem to have basically just spent 5 years passing on to Maxlinear with minimal effect; unless that one was somehow related to that period where they sold cable modem chipsets that really sucked. It's honestly downright weird how bad the news seems to be for anything that intel dabbles in that isn't the core business.

Comment Re:Quality Work Can't Be Rushed (Score 1) 92

Not delivering on schedule is absolutely a symptom; it's just a somewhat diagnostically tricky one since the failure can come from several directions; and 'success' can be generated by gaming the system in several places, as well as by successful execution.

In the 'ideal' case things mostly happening on schedule is a good sign because it means both that the people doing the doing are productive and reliable and the people trying to plan have a decent sense(whether personally, or by knowing what they don't know and where they can get an honest assessment and doing so) of how long things are going to take; whether there's something useful that can be added or whether forcing some mythical man-month on the people already working on it would just be a burden; keeping an eye on whether there's anything in the critical path that is going to disrupt a bunch of other projects, and so on.

If you start losing your grip on the schedule, that fact alone doesn't tell you whether your execution is dysfunctional or your planners are delusional, or some combination of the two; but it's not a good sign. Unhelpfully, the relationship between how visibly the gantt charts are perturbed and how big a problem there is is non-obvious(a company whose execution is robust but whose planners live in a world of vibes-based theatre and one whose execution is dysfunctional and crumbling and whose planners are reusing estimates from the time before the rot set in might blow a roughly equal number of deadlines; despite one having mostly a fluff problem and one probably being in terminal decline); but it's never a good sign.

Comment Re:Useless technology anyway (Score 1) 67

> 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.

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