Your pet peeve, technical or otherwise.

[Sal Ammoniac]

COMCAST REMOTE CONTROL

One thing that really peeves me is how Amazon Fire TV handles PAUSE. The pause seems to time out after a very short time (around five minutes or less), dropping you back to the main menu. This doesn't even give me enough time to make popcorn or take a bathroom break.

Why pause even times out at all is a mystery to me. Hell, when I hit the pause button, I should be able to go on holiday for six months and come back to find it still paused in the same spot. 

[james_s]

COMCAST REMOTE CONTROL

One thing that really peeves me is how Amazon Fire TV handles PAUSE. The pause seems to time out after a very short time (around five minutes or less), dropping you back to the main menu. This doesn't even give me enough time to make popcorn or take a bathroom break.

Why pause even times out at all is a mystery to me. Hell, when I hit the pause button, I should be able to go on holiday for six months and come back to find it still paused in the same spot. 

Pause timeout makes sense in the pre-IPTV video on demand systems. When you play VOD content a QAM channel is set up to broadcast the requested content and the box on your end tunes to that channel and displays the content. The actual playback is occurring on a video server in the headend and your transport controls are forwarded to that server. If you leave a video paused it leaves that physical channel tied up and it wouldn't take very long for the whole system to get clogged by people pausing some show and walking away. With IPTV streaming this isn't really the case though and I see no reason not to let it pause indefinitely.

[PlainName]

otherwise your car may end up like this one

Blimey! Bet he was loved at the hand car wash.

[PlainName]

With IPTV streaming this isn't really the case though and I see no reason not to let it pause indefinitely.

It's taking up a connection, and possibly it's holding the stream active on the local CDN. I notice that when starting some content it can take a while to actually get going, but after that it's fine. It occurred to me that it might be digging the stuff off disk somewhere (hey, it can't live as an ever-ready streaming stream but has to reside somewhere) and then piped to the CDN. With the number of connections Amazon will be supplying, even a small hump can turn into a mountain.

Edit to note that's purely guesswork.

[james_s]

With IPTV streaming this isn't really the case though and I see no reason not to let it pause indefinitely.

It's taking up a connection, and possibly it's holding the stream active on the local CDN. I notice that when starting some content it can take a while to actually get going, but after that it's fine. It occurred to me that it might be digging the stuff off disk somewhere (hey, it can't live as an ever-ready streaming stream but has to reside somewhere) and then piped to the CDN. With the number of connections Amazon will be supplying, even a small hump can turn into a mountain.

Edit to note that's purely guesswork.

I don't know how it's architected but I bet they could design it so that paused content would time out after a while on the server side while remaining paused on the client. The client device could potentially buffer enough content that playback could resume immediately while giving the server time to spool up the stream and resume from the previous point. It is certainly technologically feasible to do.

VOD was one of the features I owned at a former job at a place that made settop boxes, IP based streaming was just starting to pick up steam around the time I moved on so I did not get into a lot of the technical details.

[RJSV]

REGARDING USING PAUSE, TO SLO-MO STEPPING

Just to clarify, (thanks for timeout comments, BTW),
my interest was to keep doing repeated press - press, which gives a SLO-MOTION or STOP FRAME effect, for closer examination of action.
   Whether an Olympic Diver, or your little dog, you can close examine / stop.  Now, (my Comcast TV) remote will 'go back a second' when you press the second time so RESUME PLAY features a tiny rewind...for your convenience; understandable, in an isolated context.
It means you get to skip any hassle, trying to rewind the video, a moments time.
   BUT, that feature totally destroys any chance of doing those close-up examinations / frozen if you want, as that 'rewind' you end up with a 'bup bup...bup bup...bup bup' type repeat, of that same 700 milliseconds, rather than steady slow progress thru your video.
   Not verified, but I believe my ANDROID phone does that little, 700 mSec rewind, also.
   A potentially 'nice' feature that, again I didn't and wouldn't ask for.

   So, now, if I want to record and analyze some new machine function, like those SLO-MO video segments, of gasoline engine (or Olympic Gymnast movements), I cannot do. CAN'T DO ! That's a lame functional change, reminding me WHO owns my phone.

[james_s]

That's a software issue. I can tell you what probably happened there. The team is using agile methodology which in practice means that most of the thoughtful spec writing goes out the window and they start working on little bite sized features and changes. Most of the QA is dispensed with and the focus is on fixing the problems that the most users complain about. Edge cases like yours get ignored because few people notice and even fewer bother to report it. Somebody either made some related change and broke it, or someone decided it's better this way for one reason or another and it got changed. That tiny rewind for example may have been intentional, someone thought it would add convenience and didn't even consider your use case.

It's also possible that it's a CODEC limitation, IIRC some types of video encoding use keyframes and cannot easily use trickplay features to stop on the frames between those. My memory is a little hazy there though. It may just be that when you resume it is jumping to the previous keyframe and repeating some you've already seen, generally preferable to jumping forward and skipping some that you haven't seen. This is not trivial stuff, I remember having a lot of trickplay related issues.

[IDEngineer]

The simplest reason is they have poor control over exactly when "pause" takes effect, so rewinding a few hundred milliseconds was their attempt at hiding that.

[mansaxel]

Linux users, please cover your eyes.

The increasing prevalence of .jpeg as a file suffix on web images, instead of .jpg as the DOS-GOD intended it.
Computer-heads still using FAT file systems because they can be trusted, will understand what 'more than 3' letter suffixes do to the file tables.

I actively and aggressively use ".jpeg" as an extension because the 8.3 convention and file systems limited by it need to be eradicated from the active computing world and put in museums. Real Computers (32/64-bit preemptive multitasking, POSIX compliant) have gotten this right since before DOS was released.

The words "FAT" and "trusted" only can appear in the presence of a negation. A real file system has a journal, and is tolerant against power outages. Two file systems have the distinction of never having chewed one of my files; IBM jfs for AIX and ZFS for the system I've run it on, mostly FreeBSD but also Solaris. The rest I'd rather not use, and that includes HFS/HFS+ on the Mac, but that, since Apple gave up their ZFS work, can't be avoided.

(I'm no Linux user except when forced, so that's why I'm staring at this.)

[PlainName]

Real Computers (32/64-bit preemptive multitasking, POSIX compliant) have gotten this right since before DOS was released.

Is that why most non-Windows build tools can't handle spaces in filenames or paths?

[james_s]

When I post something for sale and someone contacts me with "What is your lowest price."

I posted my asking price, I'll generally entertain reasonable offers, I might even take a lowball depending on how tired I am of looking at the thing and whether they can come pick it up so I don't have to pack and ship it but I'm not going to negotiate against myself. Money talks and bullshit walks, either pay what I'm asking or make me an offer, don't waste my time. Seems like I get this more and more these days and it just drives me nuts. I usually just hit delete.

[PlainName]

Ha, yes, I got stiffed with that. Once upon a much more naive time I was flogging my Honda CB900 and figured I would like £1100 for it but could be talked down. So off to the friendly bike shop, who did all my MOTs across various machines, and we got down to business. "What's your lowest price?" he asks. Well, being a kid I think a bit and tell him I might go down to £900, expecting use to meet halfway. "Done!" he says. Damn.

[Labrat101]

Ha, yes, I got stiffed with that. Once upon a much more naive time I was flogging my Honda CB900 and figured I would like £1100 for it but could be talked down. So off to the friendly bike shop, who did all my MOTs across various machines, and we got down to business. "What's your lowest price?" he asks. Well, being a kid I think a bit and tell him I might go down to £900, expecting use to meet halfway. "Done!" he says. Damn.

Yes..   I think we all learned the hard way . 

[Monkeh]

When I post something for sale and someone contacts me with "What is your lowest price."

I posted my asking price, I'll generally entertain reasonable offers, I might even take a lowball depending on how tired I am of looking at the thing and whether they can come pick it up so I don't have to pack and ship it but I'm not going to negotiate against myself. Money talks and bullshit walks, either pay what I'm asking or make me an offer, don't waste my time. Seems like I get this more and more these days and it just drives me nuts. I usually just hit delete.

You should respond that your lowest price is 10% higher and increase the asking price.

[Circlotron]

Prices that end in 0.99 e.g. $29,999.99.

[TimFox]

Unfortunately, I believe that quantitative research by the business-school guys has proven that that annoying technique works with consumers. 

[james_s]

It does work. Psychologically $4.99 is interpreted as significantly lower than $5. Personally I don't really care about that, but it annoys me that gasoline here is always priced with a 9/10th cent on the end, ie 2.969/gal. It shouldn't even be legal to price something in smaller increments than is possible with our currency denominations.

[PlainName]

Prices that end in 0.99 e.g. $29,999.99.

Pah! That's peanuts. It would turn into $20,000 when justifying the purchase to the missus

[vk6zgo]

Cars parked on the verge with "For Sale", a phone number, but no price.

If it has a price marked on it, I know straightaway what the seller's expectations are, & if they are unrealistic, I won't bother calling.
If there is no price shown, I assume it will be unrealistic, & still don't call!

A similar thing is car yards with big signs on cars saying "For Sale", instead of the price.
It's a car yard, so surely, we have already established that it is for sale! '

[AaronLee]

Cars parked on the verge with "For Sale", a phone number, but no price.

I've been in a number of various types of stores in my life where prices aren't posted. I generally try to tell the owner or manager that there are items I'm interested in, but I will not do business ever with a store that refuses to clearly post the prices of their items for sale. Usually they'll respond with something like, "Oh, just ask the price of anything you want", to which I'll respond, "If you don't respect me as a customer, and my valuable time, and insist I need to waste my time to ask the price for everything, then I have no respect for you and your store", and I walk out.

[james_s]

I generally agree there, although there was a thrift shop I liked going to before the owner retired, they had tons of stuff and a lot of turnover so there was always something new in there. They didn't bother to price stuff because he said it was just too much work with the amount of stuff they moved but the prices were always very reasonable every time I went, he was willing to haggle but I seldom bothered. On one occasion I got an armload of random stuff including a vintage RCA professional microphone preamp module, paid $20 for the whole pile. I didn't know how much the preamp was worth and had no real use for that particular item but I was pretty sure any sort of tube gear was a good buy at that price. I ended up selling it for over $600 unrestored.

In general though yeah, if there isn't a price posted I assume they want too much.

[Labrat101]

It does work. Psychologically $4.99 is interpreted as significantly lower than $5. Personally I don't really care about that, but it annoys me that gasoline here is always priced with a 9/10th cent on the end, ie 2.969/gal. It shouldn't even be legal to price something in smaller increments than is possible with our currency denominations.

I bought an item in a supermarket that was marked up as 19.99 .I gave them a 20 note . And stood with my hand out . The girl said What ! . I'm waiting for my change.  She said I haven't got a 1.  I Said I'm not leaving till I get it and by law she has to comply  .
The manager turned up .
After a very heated argument I started to phone the police.  If the store takes 0.1 from 1000 customers a day . This is stealing .
In the end I got the only small coin available.  A half . So I paid 19.50 . They lost I won .
Always demand you correct change.  Every One counts 🤪

[AaronLee]

I bought an item in a supermarket that was marked up as 19.99 .I gave them a 20 note . And stood with my hand out . The girl said What ! . I'm waiting for my change.  She said I haven't got a 1.  I Said I'm not leaving till I get it and by law she has to comply  .
The manager turned up .
After a very heated argument I started to phone the police.  If the store takes 0.1 from 1000 customers a day . This is stealing .
In the end I got the only small coin available.  A half . So I paid 19.50 . They lost I won .
Always demand you correct change.  Every One counts 🤪

And based on whatever amount of time it took, and calculating the pay for that time of the clerk and manager, it cost them a lot more than the 49 cents. Another case of people being penny-wise and pound foolish.

Speaking of paying for things, years ago I had some old US red seal currency, but they were only worth very marginally over the face value. So I got kicks out of spending them at stores and seeing the reactions of the clerks. At one shop, the young clerk was probably born long after those bills vanished from circulation, and when she looked at what I handed her, she told me to wait a moment. She went to the side to speak to the manager, thinking it was counterfeit. The manager, realized what it was and whispered to her to accept it, probably thinking the bill was very valuable and he'd just made a good score by accepting it.

Now those blasted Susan B. Anthony Dollar coins, when I tried to spend those, they'd typically think they were quarters, and ask me for more money.

[Sal Ammoniac]

I've been in a number of various types of stores in my life where prices aren't posted.

I'm in the market for a new microscope, and prices are never available on any dealer websites--you always have to "request a quote". Unfortunately, requesting a quote means giving details like your email address and/or phone number to the company, which then results in a constant flurry of annoying calls/emails from sales droids. 

[Sal Ammoniac]

Speaking of paying for things, years ago I had some old US red seal currency, but they were only worth very marginally over the face value. So I got kicks out of spending them at stores and seeing the reactions of the clerks. At one shop, the young clerk was probably born long after those bills vanished from circulation, and when she looked at what I handed her, she told me to wait a moment. She went to the side to speak to the manager, thinking it was counterfeit. The manager, realized what it was and whispered to her to accept it, probably thinking the bill was very valuable and he'd just made a good score by accepting it.

The U.S. Bureau of Printing and Engraving sells currency in uncut sheets (of 100, I think). I heard a show once where Steve Wozniak said he likes to pay for things in convenience stores by cutting $2 bills from a sheet of bills with scissors . In most cases, hilarity ensues because the cashier and manager think this is somehow not legal.

I've heard of one case where a guy (not the Woz) was arrested because a dumb store manager and even dumber cop thought there was no such thing as a $2 bill and hence it must be counterfeit.