> What's crazy is that it's still close to the best device you can get.
Unless you prefer an Android TV device, I don't get the appeal of the Shield Pro. I bought one years ago and resold it a few months later. For me the only things it did better than an Apple TV (playing certain ripped blu-rays) are better done by the Ugoos AM6B+. So those are the two devices I use nowadays.
The appeal of the Shield Pro is you don't have to deal with custom flashing a "no-name" device and you don't have to dual box to keep streaming services happy.
It's frustrating that nobody else seems to care about attempting to be the all-in-one box given how much Shield is showing its age now. It's really sluggish
I don't get why Apple just refuses to allow audio pass through or DV Profile 7. They're clearly on board with DV in general and don't hesitate to play Dolby's branding games, so why not profile 7 support???
> The appeal of the Shield Pro is you don't have to deal with custom flashing a "no-name" device and you don't have to dual box to keep streaming services happy.
Fair, but I just wasn't willing to put up with Android TV. And the Shield doesn't handle FEL so there's still some ripped content it won't play.
For me it's easy enough to use my Apple TV for streaming and even most ripped blu-rays, and the Ugoos for the blu-ray rips that benefit from it. Flashing the AMB6+ was a one-time thing. After that, updating the OS is just dropping a tar file into a folder and rebooting it.
> It's frustrating that nobody else seems to care about attempting to be the all-in-one box given how much Shield is showing its age now.
It's a niche market and any all-in-one box is likely to run afoul of Dolby Labs licensing restrictions.
> I don't get why Apple just refuses to allow audio pass through or DV Profile 7.
I don't even care about pass through audio if it could just use Dolby MAT to playback decoded DTS:X / Dolby TrueHD Atmos w/o losing the spatial channels.
DV Profile 7 is very likely Dolby licensing issues.
> Fair, but I just wasn't willing to put up with Android TV.
When I bought my Shield TV's I actually liked Android TV. Very nearly every update since then has just slowly made it worse and worse.
Now it's absolutely disgusting as it shows straight up advertisements (not "recommended shows", like literally ads for car insurance or whatever).
So I guess there's really just not much to choose between regardless. It's spyware + adware regardless of price vs. Apple's lack of local backup support :/
Oh I learned it the hard way when my device failed and I I had to replace it and log in and configure each and every app from the start. Half a day gone.
It wouldn't surprise me if there's pressure from Dolby or the media companies to not do so, since Profile 7 is only used on BluRay (and the primary use case for playing back BluRays on Apple TVs I'm pretty sure is not playing backed-up personally-owned media). And, I'm sure Apple isn't losing many sales to not supporting it.
Lack of pass-through could probably be argued the same way, although it is a bit more surprising.
How was it better than an AppleTV playing ripped Blu-rays? With Infuse on the AppleTV I've been able to play every rip I have (4K HDR movies, dozens of TV episodes).
The Apple TV doesn't support DV profile 7 (you just get the HDR base layer; you lose the enhancement layer), nor does it support TrueHD Atmos (you get the bed channels but lose height channels). Same for DTS:X.
Whether or not this matters or you notice will depend on the specific Blu-ray and whether you have a Dolby Atmos capable sound system.
Same here. I just ordered a new one because there's basically no better alternative that supports so many formats. My TV, for example, doesn't support TrueHD 7.1, but the Nvidia Shield Pro does. I guess the new Apple TV 4K is also worse in this regard.
It depends on what you're looking for exactly. Some models of FireTV Cube have pretty beefy processors and can handle some things the Shield can't, like Dolby Vision FEL.
Laggy / stuttering interface may well be a unsuitable HDMI cable…
Yes, really - switching cables instantly got rid of any stuttering in the UI no reboot or setting could fix for me - if I wouldn’t have experienced it myself I probably wouldn’t have believed it..
Mine can get laggy if it's been on for a couple of weeks, but a reboot puts it right back to normal.
Honestly I don't think I've ever been as happy/satisfied with a consumer electronics device as I am with the Shield. It does everything I wanted it to do and more. It's a shame there will probably never be another model.
Stores are now installing e-ink price tags to save labor updating price labels. They're not going to turn back from centralized HVAC/fridge monitoring and control.
Unlike fridge remote control (note, not remote monitoring but remote control) e-ink price tags actually make a good deal of sense. The prices are already managed centrally so it reduces the labor to needing to accurately document which piece of hardware is at which shelf location as opposed to needing to manually check that each tag has the up to date price. (TBF OCR is now good enough and mobile SoCs now powerful enough that you could probably automate most of the traditional task but that wasn't historically the case.)
No they are doing it so that they can change prices more quickly and thereby extract more profit. Next (or already current) step is adjusting prices dynamically based on nearby customers.
oatmeal1 is right. The largest components of most people's budgets are housing and transportation. Restricting new construction constricts new supply which results in rent/mortgage payments being higher than they need to be. Zoning which makes driving easy and anything else very hard makes buying and maintaining an automobile a de facto necessity. It also exposes you to oil shocks.
Banks want attested terminals and for the customer to pay for them. An even better deal for the bank than ATMs, kind of like of how cable TV boxes enforce DRM on the customer and are paid for by the customer.
I've been menionting this a lot and it feels like no one is listening. These 3rd and 2nd party actors are expecting for you to pay for equipment for them. It's insane.
More context: I've been saying this a lot about this in the scan and go at sams club and how there are fanatics that act like it's a good thing and to be the only way to pay.
You'll pay for their security measures either way. Does it really matter that much if you see the line item charge or if it's baked into your interest rate spread?
It does matter though. If the cost comes out of their budget they have different incentives than if the cost is born by the customers in some semi-hidden fashion.
Just gotta hope that based on how economic theory is supposed to work, if doing these things result in saving costs during procurement of specialized equipment, the savings are passed on to the consumer… hopefully…
In this case it's not. It's removing employees, but there is no notice cost decrease in product. There's just re-enforcement of "you didn't rob us". (Checks at the end, etc).
This is the entire usability/footgun issue with SSH public keys. For the tech savvy being able to copy and paste id_ed25519.pub into their online account settings would be a dream. But who will train the masses to do that? A lot of people would accidentally paste their private key. Just like how journalists learning OpenPGP emailed over their private key compromising it. For low tech savvy people having direct access to key material is an anti-feature. They can lose it. They can leak it or be phished into giving it up. They don't want to manually sync it between devices or generate per device keys and enroll all of them. Then companies exploit this need for user friendly design to create vendor lock in.
My point is your browser, password manager could do just that, all the attestation, hardware keys, required user confirmation etc, authorized clients etc are all a power ploy from FIDO to own peoples authentication.
I expect a lot of people are using Microsoft apps which do their sandboxing at the app level, coordinated with Authenticator, and not MDM. Ends up with the same level of control of company data but no device level control.
It depends. Predatory salesmen are happy to oblige a customer's desire for a $299 monthly payment, while glossing over the 84 month schedule and 12% interest. They have a very short term view. Uninformed customers are like shooting fish in a barrel.
A mainstream bank takes a longer term view. They offer financial literacy info for customers who are interested. If a customer overdrafts less frequently and is able to leave significant amounts of money deposited the interest spread is more profitable than collecting overdraft fees.
The predatory loan market is a fringe market though, and it's not even that lucrative because delayed payments and default rates are so high (and bankruptcy rinses the lender).
Don't confuse the existence of people who profit on inefficiencies as being a sign that the system works best with those inefficiencies, or that those inefficieces are even particularly profitable.
Economics class is usually in high school and it's optional.
Schools are really expensive to operate. Most districts and schools make it easy to graduate to maximize their graduation rates. Standardized testing is suppose to catch local lowering of standards but state departments of education are also under pressure to maximize test pass rate. So resources flow into pulling the bottom quintile of students up to a minimum standard. This means teaching to the test on math and English, and de-prioritizing other subjects or dropping them entirely.
We could expand the breadth of educational basic standards. This would require a cultural shift in valuing formal education more, increasing teacher training/recruiting resources, making schools year round, more centralization of education budgets at the state or even Federal level.
Generally speaking public schools tend to be better in states like Massachusetts than Kansas.
In the majority of states in the USA, districts in the state are not allowed to graduate students without taking both an econ class and a personal finance class. Kansas is one of the stricter states. I can only think of three off the top of my head that do not mandate econ/finance classes, Colorado, Massachusetts, and Washington. Pretty hilarious to claim MA has better education requirements than KS LOL when its the other way around. Also hilarious when the average SAT score in Kansas is 1256 vs a mere 1128 in Massachusetts, LOL. I can't immediately think of any way that the schools in MA are better than KS, which is pretty funny. Is there even one stat or requirement where MA beats KS? Maybe college sports scores...
That said, public schools are mandatory pass, and the kids know it.
I think the problem with education is the prepack solutions sold by politicians intentionally don't reflect reality, sometimes intentionally reflect the opposite, and are designed to be ineffective or even actively counterproductive.
Looking around, it looks like MA beats KS on most metrics. For example, 55% of MA students take the SAT, while only 2% of KS students take the test. There is a reason that MA always ends up at the top of lists that rank public education while KS is much lower. To be fair, KS has been improving in rankings quite a bit, which I agree MA has been unable to do.
MA did pass a personal finance requirement for schools earlier this year. Like many other states it doesn’t have to be, but can be a stand alone course. While it may seem like MA is lagging behind, the majority of those requirements have been put into place within the last 5 or 6 years, so this is pretty new in most places. And a lot of states have done things that seem counter productive, like allowing a personal finance course to replace core math requirements. MA typically lets schools figure out how to implement requirements, so as in most cases the wealthier areas will figure out a high quality way to do this, and the poor areas will do their best to meet the state requirements for the lowest cost, providing less benefits to the students than it should. (Yet another reason that relying so heavily on local resources for public education is a poor choice).
Likely it just means that college-bound students (which should be ~1/3 of young adults based off educational attainment levels in the US), strongly lean to taking the ACT.
Auctions are great because it's harder to game than a lottery. If a company truly believes there is a shortage of rocket surgeons and they need to access to the global market of these specialists, they can bid high. No hand wringing about not being able to find American rocket surgeons (willing to work for low income country pay scales). No stuffing a lottery with tons of entries - bids incentivize applicants to not waste slots. No worrying that a Federal department made the wrong decision on total supply, price, or who the recipients are - auctions self-adjust and update.
Auctions are bad because need is not entirely measured in money. Highest bidders win is not egalitarian. Sometimes we do want to subsidize rocket surgeons visas for disadvantaged parts of the country.
My concern with such approaches is around the "all skilled labor is lumped into the H-1B visa", be it needing fluency in French and a teaching certificate or a PhD in data science with a focus on economics - its the same pool of visas.
Within the H-1D which is for tech jobs (just like H-1A and H-1C were for healthcare while they were active), it can have a different pool size and requirements and for that one could require a certain base pay and have an auction on top of that.
This could allow for regulating tech job immigration differently while minimizing the impact to French teachers or medical professionals in rural America that have no way to compete with Big Tech salaries.
The reason I think this is more likely doable is that it works the same way that the H-1A and H-1C visas did before to address one section of the skilled labor visa applications.
is it because you personally would benefit from having tech jobs visas regulated so that your own wages don't get pushed down?
I think skilled labour import is, on the whole, beneficial. The bigger issue isn't this, but that they're legally bound only to that single company (and would need to reapply for the visa when they would change jobs).
If this condition could be changed, then it fix the issue.
Because jobs with the BLS classification of 15-0000 are the ones that have the current H-1B dependent employers and make up the majority of the applications in the lottery.
Most employers that submitted petitions to Homeland Security were
approved, and most were approved for one H-1B worker, but a small
percent of employers garnered over one-quarter of all H-1B approvals
between fiscal year 2000 and fiscal year 2009. Over the 10-year
period, about 94 percent of all submitted petitions (initial and
extensions) were approved, with a high of 97 percent in fiscal year
2006 and a low of 84 percent in fiscal year 2009.[Footnote 33] With
respect to the number of approved workers per employer, 68 percent of
employers were approved for 1 H-1B worker and about 99 percent of all
employers with approved petitions (627,922) were approved for 100 or
fewer workers. However, over the decade, less than 1 percent of all
employers with approved petitions were approved to hire almost 30
percent of all H-1B workers.
During FY2022-FY2024, approximately 13% of employers
indicated on their LCA filings that they were either H-1B
dependent or were willful violators. However, most of these
employers planned to hire only exempt H-1B workers. Less
than 1% of employers filing LCAs indicated that they were
required to comply with the additional attestation
requirements.
The system that works for most other employers is being abused. Changing the system that helps staff rural schools and hospitals to one that benefits Big Tech because of body shops hurts everyone else.
Again from the GAO:
Restricted agency oversight and statutory changes weaken protections
for U.S. workers: Elements of the H-1B program that could serve as
worker protections-—such as the requirement to pay prevailing wages,
the visa’s temporary status, and the cap itself—-are weakened by
several factors. First, program oversight is fragmented and
restricted. For example, the Department of Labor’s review of H-1B
applications from employers is cursory and limited by law to only
looking for missing information and obvious inaccuracies. Yet a recent
Department of Homeland Security study reported that 21 percent of the
H-1B petitions they examined involved fraud or technical violations.
This is where the changes should be addressed. Making sure that the DoL has the funding, staffing, ability to audit.
Strengthening those abilities for BLS classification 15-0000 jobs rather than trying to rewrite H-1B for everyone is likely easier to accomplish.
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