Readit NewsI'm sure it's difficult enough for people to find work right now without you putting a knife in their back on the way out.
How mediocre are we talking about here? (I’m curious)
You can find secret little pockets within Microsoft where individuals & small teams do nothing at all, day in and day out. I mean literally nothing. The game is to maximize life and minimize work at the expense of the company. The managers are in on the game and help with the cover-up. I find it hilariously awesome and kind of sad at the same time.
Anyway, one round of layoffs this year was specifically targeted at finding these pockets and snuffing them out. The evidence used to identify said pocket was slowly built out over a year ahead of time. It's very likely that these pockets also harbored poor & mediocre developers, it stands to reason that a poor or mediocre developer is more likely to gravitate to such a place.
Not saying all the developers that were laid off were in a free-loader pocket, or that this cohort must be the ones that were interviewed. I'm only suggesting that the mediocre freeloaders form a significant slice of the Venn diagram.
1. Start chrome, navigate to tv.apple.com, click on the #1 show of the day (no problem)
2. The site tells me I can sign up for the TV service that I already have instead of offering a play button.
3. I click on the "sign up" which pauses for 10 seconds then tells me I'm already subscribed why did I hit the button you idiot.
4. I back arrow to the original page, it still asks me to sign up, hit F5 a couple of times to no effect.
5. Reload tv.apple.com from the start and navigate to the page, now it finally shows a play button.
6. Hit the play button but it gives me a popup saying that I need to verify the three digits off of the back of my credit card. I enter the digits and click the next button, but nothing happens.
7. Off to Google where I learn that if that happens you can log into accounts.apple.com first to avoid it.
8. I go through the login process on apple's site, which involves pulling out my phone to scan a QR code.
9. On the Apple site I try to go to the AppleTV+ options, which requires a second QR scan on my phone because it's apparently a different account.
10. On the site I verify that it shows the ATV+ subscription is active.
11. Return to tv.apple.com and click on the show to see that it again says I need to sign up to the service.
12. Click on the sign up button again to be told that I'm already subscribed.
13. Go back and reload the page entirely again so the play button reappears.
14. Click on the play button and get asked for the three digits again. Groan.
15. This time the next button actually works (miracle!) and it loads a second page talking about parental controls with another non-working button on the bottom.
16. I close the window and click on my profile in the upper right, verify that the parental controls are off.
17. Attempt to watch again, but again get stuck doing the 3 digit verify and get stuck on the parental controls window.
18. Go back to the settings and try turning on parental controls, which requires setting a PIN and doing another account verification, but leaving them on the most permissive settings.
19. Return to the site, to discover that it asks for the 3 digits yet again and then send me to that parental controls screen again.
20. Go back to settings and turn off parental controls because that didn't help.
21. Hit up Google again and find a person who suggests that switching browsers might help. I'm running the most common browser with no extensions that I use for these streaming sites because they can be such a pain in the ass, but sure.
22. Fire up Firefox with uMatrix and Adblock+ and have to do the login stuff yet again, but this time the show actually plays.
So to watch an hour of TV I had to spend over 30 minutes faffing about with the stupid website. It made me pine for the days of piracy when this was all so easy. I also downplayed how many times I had to do the reload dance to even get the play button to appear, going back to the start only worked about 1 time out of 3.
This isn't the only time I've struggled with streaming sites. Acorn for example simply refused to stream to my home. My wife is really into British mystery series and was pretty excited about it, but we had to drop it because their website simply refused to deliver the video and their tech support was completely unhelpful.
I have sympathy for you, that sounds hellish. But. You are aware that Apple has never been in the web content business, right? And I’ve never heard of anyone watching Apple TV from a browser. I didn’t even know that was possible. I thought the channel existed as a means to sell Apple hardware, because it does work beautifully on their devices
The list didn’t show the god damn GoPro app, which was taking up 20GB of space from downloaded videos. I guessed it was the problem because it showed up in the device storage list, but literally not reported when you look at the list of data to backup.
iMessage is another great example of a failure. I changed my iMessage email and didn’t receive messages in a family group chat until I noticed — I had to text the chat before stuff started coning through. Previously sent messages were never delivered. And they all have my phone number, which has been my primary iMessage for LITERALLY over a decade. iMessage’s identity system is seriously messed up on a fundamental level. (I’ve had numerous other issues with it, but I’ll digress.)
The USB-C thing just made everything better. It cost Apple basically nothing---maybe a few million/year of profit, which for a company that's worth $3 trillion is nothing, and it made my and many other people's lives quite a bit more convenient.
Same with this Airdrop thing, and same with RCS (although there's some reporting that RCS had more to do with China than the EU).
Eventually, someone is going to break open iMessage, and poor Apple will actually have to compete again for customers. Maybe they'll innovate something more interesting than Airpods Ultra Mega Pro Max or a thinner phone.
However I would preferred a backwards compatibility lightning 2.0 upgrade. Cleaning a usb-c port is a huge pain and they are more prone to pocket lint clogging than lightning.
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Actual HDR needs at least 10 bits per channel and a modern display with peak brightness far in excess of traditional monitors. Ideally over 1,000 nits compared to typical LCD brightness of about 200.
You also don't need "three pictures". That was a hack used for the oldest digital cameras that had about 8 bits of precision in their analog to digital converters (ADC). Even my previous camera had a 14-bit ADC and in practice could capture about 12.5 bits of dynamic range, which is plenty for HDR imaging.
Lightroom can now edit and export images in "true" HDR, basically the same as a modern HDR10 or Dolby Vision movie.
The problem is that the only way to share the exported HDR images is to convert them to a movie file format, and share them as a slide show.
There is no widely compatible still image format that can preserve 10-bit-per-channel colours, wide-gamut, and HDR metadata.
I wrote camera firmware. I’ve implemented HDR on the both the firmware level, and later at the higher client level when devices became faster. You’re either overloading terminology to the point where we are just talking past each other, or you’re very confused.
I don't think one can call it even close to success when the best way to run AAA games on your hardware is to literally replace the entire operating system which uses cobbled together components like FEX and wine/proton, etc... the fact that that works with more games is insane.