Reminds me of the at least 40 year old calculator my mother is still using, even though you need essentially a search light both for it to power on and to make out anything on the dim LCD screen. It's always been like this though.
Electricity must be cheap where you are. If you have to use an x86 platform, please use a modern one that is both vastly more powerful and adept at decoding video while also needing a tiny fraction as much power and producing next to no heat and noise.
Keep in mind that these are low-end TVs with, according to reviewers, generally subpar picture and sound quality, with quality issues that make them worse to look at than even old TVs. If you just need "a TV" and your only concerns are that the device is flat, the image in color and some sort of noise is escaping the speaker holes, they'll do, but don't expect anything more than that. To me at least, it makes more sense to not connect a smart TV to the network and use a separate streaming device attached to it.
I would even buy a slightly older used dumb TV from a reputable manufacturer over one of these sketchy things, since it's not like LCD TVs are finicky technology - they tend to last for an incredibly long time in my experience, easily 15 years or more. On my parents' 2008ish Toshiba (1080p and every analog and digital input in the known universe, which, in combination with an excellent analog upscaler, makes it awesome for old games consoles - but it's of course no looker in terms of colors by modern standards), the only thing that has broken so far is the spring of the power button, so I bent a wire press it in and a switch at the plug to be able to turn it off completely.
This is getting a bit off-topic, but a relative of mine replaced her flatscreen TV from 2002 (!) just two years ago - and it was still working fine, but since it only had an analog tuner and SD resolution, she was looking for an upgrade. I got her a small 4K OLED from Samsung (since discontinued) and she's very happy with it (even the "smart" features are quite inoffensive), although I did have to get her a soundbar as well, because if there's one thing that has regressed on TVs, it's sound quality, in part due to how ever thinner and lighter designs have reduced speakers to little more than phone speakers on some devices.
I managed to get my entire family onto this service and even some friends. That said, they are almost all also using at least WhatsApp, because they are only using Signal to stay in touch with me (since I'm not on WhatsApp).
I used a Fire TV for a while (because it was cheap and you could sideload almost any Android app), but at some point I got tired of the awful (and increasingly worse) UI and sluggishness of the device, so I splurged on a Shield TV Pro a few years ago. It's night and day in terms of performance alone - and yes, you can change the function of any remote button with the Button Remapper app. Custom launchers are also possible, although I haven't tried this in a while.
The main downside is that the device has much less reliable WiFi, for some reason. After some infuriating days of troubleshooting attempts, I solved that issue once and for all by relocating a meshnet satellite close to the device and running an Ethernet cable.
Exactly my thinking. Also, the built-in Ethernet port is very useful and kind of sells me on this device. I know, dongles exist and even work with smartphones, but this is neat.
I don't quite like how the device looks from the front though. The gap between the accessory and the display is kind of ugly - and since the gamepad accessory has a different shape compared to the others, one can't easily design a different 3D printed case for the device. Although, maybe I could print a different shell for the keyboard and GPIO board.
Good thing the Shield TV Pro can serve as a Plex server. Just don't store your content on short thumb drives plugged directly into the device - they can overheat and corrupt, since the device appears to be using them as heat sinks. Use a USB extension cord or hub.
This is incorrect. When the concept of the social market economy was first brought to the public attention by the conservative German CDU in the late 1940s, it was meant to be a counterpoint to the "unsocial command economy". Being staunchly anti-Socialist was a core policy of most large democratic parties in Western-European countries, not just West-Germany, as a reaction to the massive and very close threat from the East. Relations only began to thaw in the 1970s, only for the Cold War to heat up in the 1980s.
Yes, I know, this is the past and today, things are different in terms of rhetoric on the old continent, but this was when the economic systems that are still in place today were created.
Only a Sith deals in absolutes. Nearly every real-world economic system sits somewhere on a spectrum instead of neatly slotting into one category only.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/996_working_hour_system