Hopefully when the 'long awaited feature' is added, it includes a long awaited 'disable this "feature"' option.

Does AMD have anything going on for hardware accelerated video encoding like Nvidia's NVEnc?

Years ago I used to pretty much hang in the camp of perf vs. $$ but AMD/ATI's hasnt really been competitive in the ranges I've been looking at for probably close to a decade.

I'm really happy to see competition in the space now but, I'm pretty reliant on NVEnc for H.265 encoding, and if AMD doesn't have something similar (that gains some wide support), I don't see myself shifting back over to AMD for primary GPU's anytime in the near future.
 

I'm going to be the guy that walks around on top of busses and subway cars with a phone app that checks to see if the transport company that owns the drone has paid it's transit fees.

Drone no ack my ping? Account overdue? I'm going to have a brand new poly composite bat with a contoured ergonomic neoprene grip to bring the offending drones into compliance with transit authority policies.

TICKETS. NOW.

I claim the title of chief drone smasher.

It also needs to be able to shoot a net for the ones that try to flee.

Figure 90% of the populace that uses a smartphone or any other kind of device has no idea how it works, what's local vs what's remote, who owns what or where their data is anyway, the other 10% are pretty much like the people here & technology types that understand how these things work.

This isnt a trend, it doesnt need a fancy new name that someone can say "I COINED THIS!". It happens with any type of technology.

How many people knew how a phone actually worked 20-30 yeas ago?
Ask your parents if they knew what actually caused a phone to ring when someone called you. Or what the difference was between SxS, CrossBar or ESS as a function of how a call was connected.

What about cars, people use some form of mechanized transportation almost every day. Go ask someone to name the 4 cycles of an internal combustion engine and what each of those does and how that causes your wheels to turn. (we'll leave pure electrics out of this).

As technology advances and subsets of it become commonplace, people don't really care how things work, as long as they do. It's the engineers, developers, admins and support people (like the people reading this) that are the ones in charge of getting it there, for better or worse.

We spend our time making these things accessible so that the average guy on the street doesn't need to know how something works to be able to use it effectively. Probably so they can focus on coming up with cool sounding names for things like "Ambient Computing".

I'm sure they'll manage to f'up the implementation.

Not every show is a serial... Sometimes TV is just background noise.

All I want is a separate playlist that you just throw a few different shows in it and it will play random episodes from those shows.

Don't want them sequential/ordered, don't want it to update status with OH you watched season 4 episode 5 of 10 year old tv show, NOW YOU WANT TO WATCH ALL OF THE REST IN ORDER!

Just a simple randomizer pool.

I swear this was a thread like 2 months ago, not sure why these keep getting submitted.

I joined netflix in early 1999, Blockbuster had a miniscule DVD section at the time and the rule of VHS was just losing it's crown.
Netflix had a huge selection compared to them. I was on a 4 disk at a time plan until a couple years back (dropped to 2+Stream).

The thing is because of licensing and streaming rights, there's still a lot more content available on physical media vs streaming. The biggest issue now is that they don't seem to be replacing media for older things (or media is unavailable) so you get into situations with older shows where disk 1 of season 1 is no longer available and then some of the older media that shows up looks like it's been through the wringer. New release though they're still keeping stock coming in as it becomes available due to the OMG EXCLUSIVE OWN IT 10 WEEKS SOONER ON WHATEVER STEAMING LIBRARY IS FUNCTIONAL UNTIL IT SHUTS DOWN!!(Yeah we lost the DRM war peeps)

For streaming media I have Netflix, Prime and I cut to Hulu for Live a couple months ago.
It's ok, it's not a 100% functional replacement for something like cable, but it's good enough for me and I figure it'll get better.
I picked them over GoogleTV because Hulu has History Channel and YoutubeTV doesn't, DirectTV's streaming DVR thing is barely functional from what I hear (seriously people still watch TV not timeshifted?) and sling, I'm not sure how they're still a thing after the old slingbox fiasco... I thought they got sued into oblivion.

Net result for me was a $200 reduction in my cable bill and the primary driver for actually getting rid of cable at the end was signal quality.
Cox cable here where I am does a pretty harsh re-compresses on everything (way to high on the reduction factor guys and high motion high color? ugh someone preview the output at least) and they downmix the audio. I understand that it's an issue with the bandwidth available how they do catv signal delivery and they wont be able to to move into 2160p delivery without major changes to that infrastructure but hey, that's not my problem. That industry has known their limitations for more than a decade and haven't really decided to do anything about it.

My only technical complaint about hulu from a quality perspective is their audio delivery sample rate is close to borderline, but I'm not sure if that's how they get it from the upstream producers or if they mess with it. I have a fairly robust audio system in my main tv room and on that one I can hear the difference between a 192khz sample rate and lower and hulu is right at the edge on multichannel audio where I'll start to notice a tinny-ness like quality to it.

I still have the physical media Netflix sent me for the first cut of their streaming app for the ps3 somewhere.
First version you had to put the disk in there and boot it like a game.

Your post sum's up my feelings pretty well... Generally it goes like this.... On most Nix's/Nix like platforms, I fire it up, and the amount of crap that I have to remove/disable/discard is really pretty minimal. It's more like after baseline config/tuning slam in some apps for it's function and it's ready to rock.... On a windows box, drop in the os, then FIGHT'S ON to not have it try to do stupid things all the time. On windows 10, I pretty much cant get it to the kind of minimalist place where I want it (I've only been at it on win10 for a couple of weeks though...).

Because most of them understand Sturgeon's Revelation even if they don't know what it is.

Just about a month ago I got a emv chipped card from my bank. The grocery stores and a few other shops near me have that same type slot reader under the keypad you mentioned. I've been sticking my card in all of them when it prompts for an insert/swipe but I don't know if they're just not enabled around here or what because it never works and I always have to fall back to the mag strip.

The thing I don't like about it, is on the signature block on the back of the card I just write check id, then I put clear tape over the sig block and the cvv so it doesn't wear off (I've worn off the cvv #'s before...). Anyway, so my old card had a picture of me on the front of it. The new one doesn't. So now if someone actually does bother to read where it says check ID, instead of just me saying look at the picture, I have to pull id as well (which is either an RFID Drivers license, or an RFID enabled passport card). So for now, I kind of miss my old photoid card, vs my emv chipped card that doesn't work. I already had to buy a faraday cage wallet because of my drivers license & passport card (I'm paranoid about the rfid stuff), and then another rf blocking pouch for my regular full size passport.

Yeah, it's everyone elses fault. You don't buy anything right? Something like 85% of all cargo moved around the US is done by truck because the rail system is shit and inefficient compared to the roadway system. So pretty much everything everyone buys, moves by truck.

When I look at fuel costs, the consumer at the pump is probably the bottom rung of ladder. Lower fuel brings construction costs down (what you think a loader, grader, excavator or a crane run on batteries?), and makes it cheaper to move bulk goods. Anyone saying this is all bad because the gas tax is not high enough already has problems. The gas tax has not changed, so right now it's generating more revenue because more fuel is being sold.

You want more cash into state and federal highway transportation taxes? Then stop wasting money with on bloated government and pork barrel spending. Any additional taxation is just going to either be mismanaged and diverted into non-essential service projects or to go into programs for people who are not putting anything back into the flow, latest one this month? Let's use blanket amnesty for illegals.

So build more Rail you say? Can't do that because even if you try to re-open an old rail spur that's already got track everyone freaks out because then there's going to be a train near them. So they'll bitch about the trains, they'll bitch about the traffic and meanwhile nothing changes.

You know how great the average person's perspective on taxes is? A town near me has a small auto mall. 3 dealerships. One of them (Nissan) went out of business 7 years ago. The building is zoned Auto-Dealer only. So for the last 7 years, no dealer has wanted to move into that space & the building has generated nothing but property taxes. There was a plan to change it to general commercial, it had to go to a general town vote. There were already new businesses lined up to use the space, (3-4 restaurants, office space etc). The town decided in the mid-term elections that they would rather leave 50k+ sq ft of Class-A office/retail space unused and hope that 'sometime' in the future a car dealer would move into it vs. actually having the space used and generating sales taxes etc. Except if that happens now there will probably be protests against it because since nothing else is in the parking lot for that space the building owner has turned the parking lot into boat and rv storage. So if anyone does try to move into it, the people in town are all going to be up in arms about how they have to find a new place to store their rv/boats whatever and how this is such a great travisty...
 

spf, dkim, dmarc, so many ways to try and accomplish the same thing and none of them work well because nobody trusts any of them fully and few people have them fully implemented... Obligatory xkcd

I've got a "smart" tv too, but it's not smart enough to count to 10 without skipping numbers. Volume control is hdmi-cec to a reciever, start from zero going up 1 increment at a time it's like 1,2,4,5,6,8,10 but the receiver can keep track of #'s...Goes like that all the way up.. by the time the receiver is at 30ish, the tv thinks it's at 50 something...

Should have been
          Stronger
          Lighter
Guess I'm tired.

The only thing it's hurting is the other people looking for sapphire display covers like was mentioned a couple months back.

Personally, I'm on the Gorilla Glass bandwagon.
It's:
          Stronger
          Stronger
          Cheaper & faster to produce

apple can pretty much do what it wants and they have plenty of money so it's not like it's a gamble at this point. $1bn is not going to dent their bank.

I own a couple of their devices, but I've personally relegated them down to be things I don't even carry around, and the interface always makes me feel like I'm using one of those kid's toy computers that has like 6 buttons with pictures on them (the cow says Mooooo).

You know this article has been posted on multiple news sites, and it continues to amaze me that it gets the amount of negative reaction that it does.

Breaking down this instance, and throwing out wrongful prosecution & 'they got the wrong guy' (in the case they had DNA evidence as well as admission), this is a person that raped a woman, then slit her throat and left her in the street. She was also pregnant at the time. I have zero sympathy for him. I would rather we shot him up with a sedative & od'd him on painkillers than the other options which are essentially (2):
      Let him sit in prison sponging off taxpayers for the rest of his natural life
    or
    Let him out because `can't you all understand that he just had a lapse in judgement and made a mistake? surely he needs another chance!`

honestly, to all the people crying about the barbarism of this situation, suppose the woman was someone that you knew, spouse, sister, mother etc. How would you feel about the situation then? How would you react to someone killing your wife and unborn child? What would you want to happen to that person?

Maybe we should offer all of the vocal proponents of this situation an option:
Adopt a death row inmate.

You can take a guy on death row home, we'll put a tag bracelet on his foot. You can care for him out of your own pocket, with no reimbursed expenses (no dependant tax write off either) and be responsible for him. If he leaves your house, you pay a fine, if he manages to damage anyone else's property, you're responsible. Any futher crime he commits, you're the liable party.

How about that, keeps the anti-death penalty people happy, keeps scumbags from sponging tax money...