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Cake day: August 6th, 2023

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  • Never been implemented. It doesn’t exist.

    Cables support it but zero devices made it to the consumer market and both devices would need to support it for it to work. It’s a dead standard from another era at this point. WiFi speeds have become so significant that there’s just no reason for the additional costs that would be involved.

    I admit if half of the people out there who bought smart TVs started refusing to connect them to the internet and bought streaming boxes instead there might be an incentive for TV makers to try it but no incentive for streaming devices to help them do it and at that point it’s just easier for TV makers to require an internet connection or the TV doesn’t work.




  • data such as host name,

    Okay why do they need to know that? Why do they need to know if the computer is called “Melissa’s Laptop” or “Workstation 15, Internal security division”? Seems like this kind of data could if stolen be misused and it has minimal legitimate purpose IMO as anyone can put anything as host name and while in organizations it often corresponds to use it doesn’t have to for individuals. Someone could call their machine “Mack’s Porn Rig” and they only use it for doing banking and a little coding.

    kernel version, desktop component versions, detailed information about hardware and drivers involved, screen size and resolution information,

    This all seems legitimate enough, this would be helpful for understanding the hardware their users run on and targeting features or bug fixes.

    network device MAC addresses,

    Not great but there is an argument for it, they could just grab and send the first 3-4 octets which would give them the info they need on manufacturers without getting uniquely identifiable data that along with some of this other stuff is concerning for fingerprinting.

    disk serial numbers,

    Okay, what the fuck. Why do they need disk serial numbers? What possible use is there for that. Those are used for warranty claims and could be used as part of uniquely fingerprinting a computer and person. Not cool.

    disk partition data,

    This is vague enough. I guess one could choose to see this as just info about partitions in use say if there’s also an NTFS partition that looks like a Windows install that would be useful but on the other hand data encompassed within a partition could also nefariously be read as allowing them access to all your data. Partition layout, partition labels, and file systems used on disks available to the system would be a clearer way to put this and erase any doubt.

    information about the number of running processes and installed packages, versions of basic packages such as systemd, gcc, bash and PipeWire.

    All this is also fine just technical data stuff.






  • This isn’t the end of Linux but it may be the beginning of the end. Right now alarm bells are screaming in China, Russia, India, across the global south about this. They’ve seen the decades of US sanctions, often arbitrary and other punitive measures including cultural campaigns of exclusion and punishment (remember “freedom fries” after 9/11 because the French wouldn’t go along with US adventures in Iraq?) now reaching a fever-pitch. All pretensions of the US to stand for freedom and individual liberty and such have been pushed aside, shoved away by these acts and the blatant hypocrisy of their support of the genocidal zionist state which even now broadens the war of aggression and genocide against Palestinians and Lebanese with full US support and diplomatic cover at the UN.

    They see that all that lofty talk from the US was after all a lie. A large number of lies.

    Where do we go from here? I fear fragmentation and partition of the world may be inevitable, a new cold war, the internet, software, everything being divided by series of hard and not so hard walls and barriers impeding cooperation, business, trade, cultural exchange, and people to people relations and discussions at an organic grassroots level.

    Those in the west will see the freedoms increasingly curtailed, lofty language rolled back behind a large series of ever more expansive “but…” clauses, corporatization of the internet will increase, surveillance, control all justified by the waved wand of hysteria over Russia, China, Iran, muslims, whoever necessitating giving up your privacy, your rights, your freedoms, and of course any right for a dissenting opinion against whoever the current US president is and their administration.

    National security in the 90s was used to outlaw export of encryption, to embargo the idea of a secure internet, to push for backdoor chips via the clipper chip in all personal computers. Now it and the same kind of foreign boogeymen are being used to finish that task that they failed at and we are letting them because of jingoism.


  • Sure. Sure. They’ve been close or getting closer for 10 years now.

    I’ll believe it when it actually releases and not a moment sooner. Otherwise I would be the opposite of shocked if July 2025 rolls around and it’s still not out but still “close”. As I would be if December 2025 rolls around and “there are only a few more issues, very soon!” is the statement. It’s become a joke at this point and likely will remain the butt of jokes and rightfully so for years, perhaps decades to come in the open source and graphics design communities.


  • Majestic@lemmy.mltoLinux@lemmy.ml*Permanently Deleted*
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    2 months ago

    The real answer is organize your library. There’s no reason to have it like that.

    At least create two folders “Movies” and “TV Shows” or however you want to name them. Put movies in the movies sub-folder, ideally in named folders that match the name of the movie (so Movies/The Godfather (1972)/moviefile.mkv) and TV shows in the other folder again with a subfolder for each show with year included.

    The best way to do this is to use a media manager when adding files. Something like mediaelch or tiny media manager and scrape your films and ideally tv shows as well and create local metadata for them that you save. Both can do renaming though tmm does it slightly better if you pay for the subscription version and it can automatically scrape and rename your library along with creating the relevant nfo files and things like posters so Kodi just works.

    I guess you could try connecting Kodi to another service. If you’re okay running Plex on some other machine or Jellyfin you can connect Kodi to that if they scrape it all properly but most likely they’ll have issues as well because the only real solution is organizing your library. There are paid tools as I mention as well as free ones. Filebot is another paid tool that does organization and such.



  • Well it’s believed it entices users to click the malware to run by disguising itself as the last accessed folder with the same name and folder icon.

    In that case having the option to always show extensions enabled would be helpful for trained users who care to be careful.

    It’s not that interesting sounding given we know the NSA and eyes countries have developed compromised firmware for certain hard drives to enable true spread without interaction or hope of prevention. Whenever I see one of these I wonder if it’ll be a case of compromising the device itself but it’s this old stuff instead which can be defeated with a good security posture.


  • Fact is Apple TVs are likely to get better and more features including new ones because they’re under active development and most will get 6+ years of tvOS updates with those new features whereas the NVIDIA shield is stuck in time, no new development has been apparent for years.

    Unlike AppleTV which is important to Apple’s home ecosystem of devices (including homepods, various home devices, iphone integration with on-screen video calling) and thus less likely to have development stopped, the shield is just another androidtv platform among a sea of them and poses no larger risk to NVIDIA products and loyalty if discontinued. And likely the only reason it isn’t discontinued is they can sit on it, reap increasingly lowered costs as profit and just sell it at the same price without investing anything in it further.

    If NVIDIA shields were at least permanent price-dropped by 30% they’d at least be competitive on price even if stagnant but the asking price is unacceptably high.

    If you want expensive, premium non-Apple streaming products then buy a Dune-HD, they at least silo things like a plex install via virtualization away from the androidtv google stuff so privacy is maximized via their customized linux container. They also have excellent support and are constantly and actively improving their products including offering AV1 support, frame-rate switching without flicker, and so on. They have a model at $199 for equivalent product to the shield pro but it comes with WiFi 6, av1 support, and the ability to run all kinds of services with absolute ease as well as an internal bay for a 2.5" hard drive and optical audio outs. It has a linux container which has the ability to install and run a torrent client, various other services, including I believe plex, SMB sharing (already present by default I think). You can also install android apps on the model I mentioned.


  • I use the pro in comparison because the non-pro version is even more dated on lesser hardware and going to be sluggish, lesser in capabilities than other alternatives in the android space.

    For one it can’t (reliably) run a plex server or other services so there’s really no advantage other than brand loyalty to NVIDIA to buy the non-pro shield over say a Walmart Onn 4k for half that price. (And that’s the truth, you can’t reliably run other services on the non-pro shield without incurring a noticeable performance penalty and degradation if it’s even possible in the first place)

    I compare apples to apples here or tried to be honest. ATV4K has 4GB RAM, Shield Pro has 3, there are various other reasons to compare them, they’re both the top of the line. Though as I mentioned if you want to compare the non-pro shield then there’s the smaller ATV4k which still has without buying an SD card 64GB of storage for $129.

    As to “offers”. I used retail prices you use this which I consider dishonest and desperate. Not a credit to your side. Apple TVs regularly go on sale multiple times a year via official dealers like Amazon, Target, Costco. Shield’s rarely go on sale, if you’re talking about used or shady third party dealers then you’re not doing an honest apples to apples comparison.

    Shield promoters are strange people to me in 2024. I don’t think you’ve taken a proper inventory of the landscape. People call apple users shills and so some of them are, but I see shills for various brands and people unfortunately taken in by them.

    Yes it was revolutionary when it came out, now it’s not. That’s life when a company decides to abandon a product line for all intents and purposes and yes no hardware updates, not even a revision in 5 years signals stagnation. They don’t need a major processor upgrade but not bumping a few minor aspects of the hardware like the HDMI ports version or the WiFi for instance just shows they don’t consider it an important part of their brand and I’m not sure why you’d buy into something that could be sunsetted without any surprise come January.

    And not dropping the price which is rather hefty and high considering costs should have gone down over time is also a not so nice sign of greed and inattention. Apple dropped their prices. No reason NVIDIA with its scale and buying power doesn’t have the ability to drop the price if they’re not going to at least actively develop it to justify it.

    VLC is awful for network playback. It’s fine for local fines (though mpv is better) but playing network files you’re going to have pixelation, stuttering, all kinds of problems I can say from experience trying it on both wired and wireless connections. I strongly recommend Kodi, Plex, Emby, Jellyfin, etc over VLC for non-local playback that’s smoother and better.

    Ad-free youtube is likely soon to go the way of the dodo given the aggressive moves by youtube to stop it and most people don’t need or want that on their TV because they’re interested in paid or FAST streaming services. You have eclectic tastes and needs and that’s fine but recommending that to your average person isn’t doing them a service. And it’s nice to think of others, not your own biases and unusual needs.

    And most people don’t need an FTP server (an FTP server, serving what exactly given you’re talking about the non-pro and SD cards, that’s not a great experience compared to an ext hard drive, if you’re going to do that, go for the pro and connect an external spinning disk HDD or SSD via USB).

    Most people don’t need a torrent client (and again on the non-pro you’re talking about downloading onto an SD card, major yikes don’t do that, again if you want to do that please recommend people the pro for USB drives and use that in your honest comparisons here).

    Both the above also require investing in an SD card (or an external drive via USB for the pro which is the better way to go). Reliable non-trash (good brand, good speed) SD cards are going to drive up that cost you stated another $15+ dollars which puts even your non-pro “on sale” (good luck finding it) shield within $5 spitting distance of the ATV4K higher end 128GB model (to get that much storage on the non-pro shield via SD card of a decent brand and speed would absolutely put your costs in line with the ATV4k 128GB model).

    You mention alternative launchers, most people don’t want to do that. Apple TV is ad free out of the box without mucking about with ADB and other things. Again consider the average user and how they’re not going to do that.



  • My problem with this in spite of the dire situation they face if Google is forced to cut funding by anti-trust court rulings (or not even forced but they make paying off Mozilla a moot point so they stop) is that they become an ad company. Ads become tied to their CEO compensation, to the salaries of the people who develop it.

    They claim they’re making a better kind of ad network, a privacy respecting kind. The problem is the ad industry doesn’t want less data, they want more. There are no looming laws that would force the ad industry to adopt a more privacy respecting alternative or die and without that the ad industry is going to shun this and it’ll be a failure and then they’ll have a failed ad network that they can either discard entirely or adapt to industry standards of privacy invasion and abuse and continue to exist and then they’ll make another “hard choices” post about having to do that.

    And I can see it now. This experiment will fail and after some pressure from the ad industry and some devil-on-shoulder whispering Mozilla will begrudgingly start to enshittify. Their ad network will become less privacy respecting by tiny little steps, by salami-slicing or boiling the frog, the whole privacy-preserving measurement thing will be thrown out BUT they’ll still claim they respect you more than Google and will at first perhaps but that will erode. Maybe they’ll just implode at some point after that which given Google is being found a monopoly works just fine for Google and the rest of big tech who want a more centralized, locked down browser company that wants to help implement DRM that can’t be circumvented, that wants to help lock down everything on the web to restrict users freedoms to choose what is displayed or if they can save it or record it or copy it to say nothing of blocking ads.