bobdvb

19 ms·

61.
by bobdvb 1y ago
I got YouTube Premium Family and it's so great. Plus, I am supporting content creators better while avoiding ads.
62.
by bobdvb 1y ago
YouTube is a modern engineering miracle, and yet it's so accessible. People complain so much and don't appreciate what they have.
63.
by bobdvb 1y ago
As someone in tech over 40, and who previously worked in embedded systems, it amazes me how little attention we pay to efficiency today. I now work with teams who will think nothing of spinning up 1000 containers with 2000 vCPUs to run a mi
64.
by bobdvb 1y ago
A lot of the time the company cannot make it remote global because of tax and regulatory compliance. I work for a multinational company who has employees in at least a dozen countries, but we can't employ anyone who isn't in a cou
65.
by bobdvb 2y ago
1) You can't pass a PCI-DSS audit if you have expired certificates. 2) You can't always tell the CDN providers what to do with certs. 3) We've seen examples of new root certificates that mean devices don't know about thi
66.
by bobdvb 2y ago
I was in a meeting with a senior guy from one of the top Asian brands and I said "We're getting out of TVs, we've lost $x millions and that's enough." He said "Hah, we can lose way more than that!"
67.
by bobdvb 2y ago
But then they're running on the same common platform as the models half the price. But more than 95% of the cost of the TV is in the panel itself, a fancy model is usually just a bigger model and maybe some different, higher end panel.
68.
by bobdvb 2y ago
It's really hard to get these things across to consumers. This is why we ended up with phrases like "Full HD". The average consumer doesn't know what these numbers mean, people who read hackernews aren't the 99%. Ph
69.
by bobdvb 2y ago
Greater than 95% of the cost of a TV is in the panel. TV panels must have a near 0% defect rate and a single piece of dust during the manufacture will render the finished panel e-waste. The bigger the panel the risk of a defect goes up expo
70.
by bobdvb 2y ago
There are several examples I've seen of firmware on devices failing because of bit rot, so that's not true. We used to design devices so that the bootloader was pulled from NOR instead of NAND because of this. Then the device coul
71.
by bobdvb 2y ago
That's the point, there are no substantive contracts between you and the OS. If we want apps to be responsible for root certs that's interesting, but then the app needs some roof of trust with the OS anyway.
72.
by bobdvb 2y ago
99% of consumers don't understand what that means and if we normalise the average consumer bypassing certificate checks that's definitely a bad thing.
73.
by bobdvb 2y ago
We tried to disrupt the market, back about 10 years ago. One of the significant problems is that 80% of TV SOCs are made by one company, MStar (or their subsidiary). And there's only a handful of companies who make the motherboards wit
74.
by bobdvb 2y ago
I never worked for Samsung, but I built TVs for JVC and LG, among many other brands. I don't work in consumer electronics anymore but a decade ago that was my field. TVs are a wildly unprofitable business. It's astoundingly bad. Y
75.
by bobdvb 2y ago
Microsoft removed support for Skype on TV, not Samsung. Most apps get removed because the people writing them don't want to support them anymore. The Samsung framework from 2013 was always trouble and it doesn't support many curre
76.
by bobdvb 2y ago
There's little difference between enabling a single screen shot and allowing screen recording. The rights owners require blocking of screen recording, so all screen capture gets blocked as a result.
77.
by bobdvb 2y ago
It's also worth noting that in most cases on-net caches (in ISPs) aren't as common as people think. It's mostly private peering at public data centres. Google doesn't have servers in all ISPs, this was more common in the
78.
by bobdvb 2y ago
Most providers who do cheap/free CDN have exclusions for serving video because the economics of it suck.
79.
by bobdvb 2y ago
If you could opt-out of Google ads and just be distributed/indexed by YouTube, then you'd be paying for hosting/delivery/indexing. Given that the economies of scale are spread among many users, the bigger streamers who t
80.
by bobdvb 2y ago
It's also important to recognise that content providers and CDNs adding private peering or hosting within ISPs doesn't diminish public peering. It actually frees up capacity on other transit routes. ISPs don't QoS some compan
81.
by bobdvb 2y ago
I know a few companies that have managed to get the license to do it. F1 TV also gets radio spectrum which they use for something like 4G for their wireless cameras.
82.
by bobdvb 2y ago
For movies and series, there's a process called "Minimum Commit" where the media companies have to commit to spend $X for a bundle of content that includes both the content you want to sell and a random selection of crap to p
83.
by bobdvb 2y ago
A significant part is that there's very poor data about how many people have surround sound systems or systems that can make use of such quality. Sending it speculatively adds to the cost of delivery, but for a percentage of the audien
84.
by bobdvb 2y ago
You can get a DVI to HDMI adapter which costs less than a coffee. Adding an HDMI connector is more likely to get you into expensive licensing discussions than DVI is.
85.
by bobdvb 2y ago
By that measure, locks on our houses don't work, so we shouldn't bother locking the door? To repeat what I said to the other commentor: Ultimately the goal of content protection (not just DRM) is to make it as inconvenient as poss
86.
by bobdvb 2y ago
Yup, and I have zero issue with people finding exploits, ultimately many of those just serve to help us improve security as they get released. Ultimately the goal of content protection (not just DRM) is to make it as inconvenient as possibl
87.
by bobdvb 2y ago
I'm a senior person who looks after content protection and anti-piracy at a major streaming company. The idealism of those who want to see the demise of DRM doesn't actually hold up in the face of reality. Even when we remove rest
88.
by bobdvb 2y ago
I've already been using HaLow for years to link my in-laws house to our holiday cottage. I get ~14Mbps which is enough for my wife and I to work remotely for a few days. I purchased a cheap "CCTV wireless bridge" from AliExpr
89.
by bobdvb 2y ago
Ultimately the CTO pays the bill but my boss, the head of Tech Ops, effectively pays the bill for cloud, even though almost all the users are not in his reporting line. Our division is a service to the business as Platform Ops. Our bill is
90.
by bobdvb 2y ago
The reasons compression is strong: 1) Customers want their service to be cheap, distribution costs for streaming companies are significant and every minute watched is a sink for the business. Streaming is not a massively profitable proposit

More ›