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Please make your products work with URLs

anderspitman.net

31–40 of 353 posts

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#31
post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

My standard operating procedure for TVs is:

Setup sound bar.

Connect new TV to HDMI switch.

Get the TV working with my remote.

Throw TV remote in a corner somewhere....

I don't even try to use a smart TV's internal functions anymore. They're just big monitors to me.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#32
I haven't kept up with the state of video streaming, so for me this raises more questions than answers:

- How inefficient is video streaming when you're downloading chunks of a compressed, static file over a flaky Internet connection?

- Was it worse before? Would it work better with QUIC or HTTP/3?

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#33
post #12

Is this rendering Markdown to HTML on the fly in my web browser? Just render the markdown to HTML once on the server and upload it for the love of God. That being said, the article is entirely correct.

Because then when you edit the markdown you have to take an additional step.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#34
post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the site: I am a data visualization software engineer. Based on this web site, this is a definition of "software engineer" of which I was previously unaware.

Presumably, he makes _data visualization software_. For example Tableau.

Or builds data visualizations using code. D3 for example.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#35
URLs are an utter failure, normal people don't understand them, the only protocol they are ever used for is HTTP, special characters are a mess, IPv6 turns the insanity up to 11. The one other use of URLs has been tricking unwitting users into launching vulnerable applications with malicious input, because applications registering themselves for protocols was a thing once added, then never critically thought about, ever.

URLs are simply not the forward case.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#36
post #14

Maybe this was the whole point of the author's post.. but I'm fairly certain the reason the author's use case is not easily workable is because the OEMs mentioned are deliberately discouraging the ability to play anything that is not inside some sort of DRM control. They don't want you to just be able to play any URL. Its not a technical problem, its a content management problem.

When I first bought a Chromecast I was disappointed how much of a pain it was to play content I already had on my computer. I shouldn't have to spin up a Plex server just to get acceptable streaming capabilities.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#37
post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

Never experienced those problems with Tizen but sometimes it lags like hell. After it warms up it's pretty fast; Unfortunately there's no Crunchyroll app yet.

Re: Please make your products work with URLs

#39
post #17

I hate smart TVs with a burning passion. They accomplish literally the bare minimum to keep people happy and sometimes not even that. Samsung’s Tizen OS is the most genuinely frustrating experience I’ve had with a consumer device outside of printing. Advertisements on my home screen that can’t be disabled, dubious privacy, bugs that require me to reboot my TV, and of course security so bad that they recommend install…

Can't you just remove the smart TV's internet access (no wifi pw, no Ethernet) and treat it as dumb? Then attach a Chromecast or whatever "smart" dongle you think has the best UI.

This is definitely one approach, but I would actually just prefer a full computer, because I do sometimes run other software that is simply not available on any dongles.

One downside though is that I only have a couple HDMI ports to work with, so between a Nintendo Switch and a full desktop PC I'm already using all of the ports.

Also, even though I love the NVIDIA Shield, I find it does not really integrate as well as I hoped via HDMI CEC. It's a bit clunky to be honest, and though it's cool I can use the TV remote over CEC, it is definitely not as good as using the Shield remote, due to latency and some weird behavioral differences. So there are also downsides like that, too...

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