For those unaware, this is a reference to the real, actual patent Sony was granted that requires the user to stand up, T-Pose, and shout “MacDonalds!” in order to skip an ad.
I'd start with the question: where do you want them to go? Windowing systems generally don't have a 'limbo' where windows can live without being displayable, and that probably isn't what you want, either.
Do you want them all to auto-minimize? You can probably get that. But it starts with answering the question.
I could imagine a tiling window manager like sway having a "temporarily gone" pseudo-workspace that holds windows that were on another monitor until you plug it back in or pull them to another workspace. Or to remember that workspaces 1, 3, and 5 were on another monitor recently, and to put them back there when you plug back in.
Sway does the latter. When you have multiple displays, every workspace gets assigned to a display. When you remove a display, those workspaces move onto a remaining display, but, importantly, every window stays on the workspace it was on, so you don't get shuffling and rearranging windows. When you plug that display back in, those workspaces go back to that display. I get that there's no "perfect" way to handle this situation, but the way Sway does it is so much more simple and predictable than Gnome or Windows.
If it's the same problem I've had, I feel the pain!
On a laptop, reconfiguring to use monitors as and when you connect/disconnect them can be great.
However, I'm often on a PC with a fixed multi-monitor setup. The situation where one monitor is briefly out is transient. But some windowing systems decide to permanently erase all your painfully eked out settings at the drop of a hat.
The correct behavior in this particular case is actually just to do nothing, the fact that a monitor seems to have gone away should just be ignored. (Because it didn't go away, really. Maybe I'm just messing with it for a sec, or it's a different brand and turns on/off a few seconds after the others)
[IIRC on KDE you can prevent auto-reconfiguration by turning Kscreen OFF ]
Or even cheaper, there are little HDMI EDID emulation dongles. That said, you end up with windows staying on unreachable displays, so it's not always the best solution.
...that seems like a really good and intuitive feature. What would expect it to do instead? Close the window? Keep it on some invisible virtual desktop? (how large is the mysterious off-screen area in which windows can be lost?)
My laptop has a 15" 1080p panel. It's attached to 2x 32" 4K panels. When I'm done for the day, I turn the screens off.
When I come back the next day, all my windows are on the laptop onboard display, and if I'm lucky, resized in a way that makes them movable. If I'm unlucky, I need to close the application, re-open it, and hope it's back in a helpful way.
The 2x 4K panels show me my wallpaper every morning. They don't show me any windows that were on them.
For anyone else who gets stuck with a window where the draggable part is off-screen on Windows, if you click the icon in the taskbar to "focus" the window, hold Win+Shift and hit the up arrow, it'll maximize the window so you can see the controls. If it's on a different monitor, or on a "ghost" monitor your computer thinks is plugged in but isn't actually, use Win+Shift and left/right arrow keys until you can see the window :)
Suspend the machine instead? The external monitors will go to sleep when they lose the signal.
I don't know how you expect that machine to know that you're only disabling that monitor temporarily and you expect it to restore your windows at some future time when it reconnects.
If you plug in a new monitor, should windows jump onto it spontaneously?
I do the same, either my Dock, my Laptop or my screens, or all together give some weird issues where the screens turn on every 5 minutes and go to sleep.
And searching for 'Dock screen wakes up during sleep' just floods <search engine> with 'screen does not wake up after sleep'. And with <search engine>'s removal of respecting + and -, I am not sure I'll ever find a solution...
You can ask Windows to try and remember the location. It's not fool proof, but it works 90% of the time.
In fact, I've got more issues with windows opening on a non-connected screen (and then having to do Winkey + right a couple of times until it shows up on my laptop screen.
Funny, on my gaming windows computer I turn off my OLED monitor BEFORE I turn off the computer to let it do its special processing reliably. I’ve had the opposite issue to yours, several windows will remain on the turned off monitor! I have that one on HDMI and the second monitor on a DP connection.
How many 65" Displays with Display Port are there? Also, don't nVidia GPUs only support the nearly 10 year old Display Port 1.4, which doesn't support variable refresh rates for high resolution/high framerate displays? Sure, buying an AMD GPU is a solution, if you don't mind worse drivers and higher power usage for less performance.
(To be clear: I want HDMI to die, DisplayPort to win, and AMD to get their crap together. But at the end of the day, we need support on both the GPU and the Monitor/TV side, and that's where it's lacking.)
The ludicrous part is how many TVs display 4K@120, but can only input 2K@120 or 4K@60, just because they have exclusively HDMI 2.0 ports instead of including a DisplayPort 1.4 port.
Maybe you loaded the comments in the window of time where I had not yet added some additional details.
I am specifically advocating for using monitors that connect using USB-C connectors and the DisplayPort protocol.
I am not a big fan of the DP connector itself. I have a monitor that supports it, and I’ve used it with that one and others in the past. But USB-C connector (like one of my other monitors has) and DisplayPort protocol is far superior.
Oh yeah, no objections on the principle: DisplayPort is awesome.
The regular DP connector is fine because at least it locks in (sometimes too well), and MiniDP has been pretty great (especially when chaining multiple monitors on systems that support multi-stream, so anything except Apple).
I do have a love/hate relationship with USB-C, mainly because you need to double, triple, and quadruple check that the cable actually has all the wires in it for DP and not just USB 3 or even worse, USB 2.
In a perfect world, HDMI would be a historical artifact. In the current world, it's sadly a necessity for big TVs or many gaming setups :(
I had a similar thought, I would assume the patent is meant to be used defensively to discourage something downstream of Roku from injecting ads.
If Roku wants to display ads, they can already do so if the content originated from their system. If Roku is displaying content originated from an external system, that external system can display their own ads to defeat the detection of pause events. (DirecTV already does this).
Read further and you'll find it was just Roku identifying that users were using the same password across multiple services of which were separately breached and credential stuffed.
If anything this reflects positively on Roku that they announced it
Ads should only be on TV and radio, and in magazines, and movies, and at ball games, and on buses, and milk cartons, and T-shirts, and bananas, and written on the sky... But not in dreams.
> When the media device pauses the media content, the display device can determine that a pause event has occurred and insert an ad shown on the display device.
Hilarious. I love how all the streaming companies are hijacking the pause control now. Why do you think I hit pause? Pick one or more of the following:
1. I need to go to the bathroom.
2. I want to inspect the current frame more carefully.
3. I want to see an ad for psoriasis medication.
Hint: One of the above answers is wrong. Think about it and get back to me. I'll wait. (I did hit pause after all.)
> No, they're probably earning a fortune they'll be proud to pass down to their grandchildren.
Still a drop in the bucket compared to the billionaires being minted semimonthly through combination lottery games, though at least in both cases not a cent of the fortunes being passed to grandchildren came from me.
actually you could argue that the people who did absolutely nothing for society in return for the assurance that none of their family will ever have to work at all, for the next three or four generations if not longer, have nonetheless contributed a net positive to society when compared with the apex parasites who actively work to degrade the quality of life of everyone else for their own gain.
I'm certainly not defending them, just pointing out that we should criticize them accurately. Not because their work is hollow and soulless (which is more true for those of us who actually have to continue to work to survive), but because it's evil and parasitic, as you say!
If it didn't work they wouldn't do it (and when it stops working they will find something else). Advertising is pretty insidious. I have been adblocking most things for over a decade now and thought I was mostly saving myself from annoyance and wasted time, but in the last 4-5 years in youtube video ads from creators themselves showed up. I only discovered sponsorblock last year so I've only been using it for around a year and it's interesting to see my own unnoticed positive biases to brands where the advertising was previously sneaking through just melt away. Now when I watch a video that is too new or obscure for someone to have marked the ads with sponsorblock I am back to getting annoyed and wondering why I ever thought positive thoughts about this brand in the first place. If this stuff is having this effect on me (highly disagreeable personality, above average but not genius level intelligence, made a living trading commodities calling bullshit on the concensus opinion) then the rest of the world must be screwed.
I am assuming spending as much as they are on advertising would weaken them to the point that a non advertising competitor would destroy them eventually. I don't see much of that so i assume it works. I also have my own noticed response to advertising to go on.
I don't know if I believe that... I can see companies falling for the politician's fallacy (We must do something -> this is something -> we must do this). They have money to spend to promote their product, advertising is a well known way to spend money to promote a product, therefore they buy advertising.
If it's #1, at some point you will come back from the bathroom.
When you do, there will be a moment in between when you can see the screen but haven't hit play yet. This is a prime ad opportunity.
If you are watching with others, they may wait for you while you go to the bathroom. They will also be able to see the screen.
Sorry for not being any fun. I just think Roku is behaving somewhat logically here. (I say "somewhat" because there is one issue: speaking for myself at least, would never buy a TV that does this!)
You're not thinking innovative enough. Don't just show ads, replace the ads the running app is displaying and then charge the app maker to run ads through your platform.
If I'm getting this right, any ads you'd see on a Roku would be hosted by the apps themselves e.g. Youtube and such. So Roku wants a piece of the ad action and this is the only way to do it without the burden of providing any actual content.
"Transfer more value! Transfer more value! Transfer more value!", the shareholders chanted, as the virgin shrieked on her descent into the throat of an active volcano.
"It is done!", responded the CEO, eyes hidden behind the ceremonial quarterly meeting headdress, shielding them from the immense heat of the lava.
Speaking of which, the one question I've always wanted to ask bcantrill is if he meant to say "Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Oracle" when he said "Don't make the mistake of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison."
On purpose or not it was a great sentence, but if it were premeditated, that only makes it better.
> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.
and a bit later,
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison
Reads like this is for Roku TVs. They've gotten wise to the fact that I'm using my Apple TV more (because I can't update the Roku software any higher), but they still want to sell me ads.
(IANAL.) I'd like to remind Big Co's that contracts aren't valid if there isn't consideration. And continued use of my own TV isn't consideration. (And this is backed by legal precedent, too.)
When given choice, people escape them - via netflix or adblock. The same people spend their free time watching youtube reviews, chatting on gear forums, or recommending each other deals on social media; it looks like people genuinely want to learn about good and fairly priced products.
I sincerely hope we’ll find a better way of reaching an audience than forced ads.
Ironically the fully skippable commercials on cable TV with a DVR are the best deal we can get anymore, anything in the streaming world can take control of the video stream away from you.
I just subscribe to paramount plus again to watch discovery. Seems perfectly reasonable, they give me a program I want (with no product placement from what I can gather - unlike the JJ Abram’s films with their “Budweiser classic”. I don’t think a self sealing stem boot counts), and I give them £8 a month. Everyone is happy.
However you try to double dip and I don’t give you a penny.
Content doesn’t appear effortlessly on all your devices. Some subtitle languages may be missing. Less mainstream content may be of low quality, slow to download or missing too. Plus, you have to plan ahead or wait for the download to finish. At this point I would double check the streaming plan price (as long as there is an ad free tier).
I haven’t used pirate bay for a long time as I can simply buy or rent the material I want
However start putting adverts in that and it’s changes, it’s either “don’t watch at all” or “get from pirate bay (or elsewhere)”, because the product I want isn’t available.
20 years ago I used to get tv from places like irc because it was the only way to get the material. 25 years ago I hd no choice by to wait for the vhs to come out.
It’s a service problem, not a price problem. Sadly it seems companies want to make the service bad, which means they throw the baby out with the bath water.
The core problem is that, as a amorphous class, consumers are more price sensitive than quality sensitive, and those that aren't tend to have very little price sensitivity. So the profit-optimal solution is to charge your minority of price insensitive users through the nose, and extract value from the price sensitive by enshitiffying your service.
This sucks for those of us in the middle ground (having taste but not unlimited budgets), as we get shoved into "eat shit and smile" group.
This enshittification part looks especially interesting to me. For that you need a user base. So I guess any rules promoting fair competition would be relevant and pro consumer in this context. If the users can easily migrate to a non-enshittified provider, then all is well.
If you are watching your Linux ISOs on your self-hosted setup that uses a Roku; presumably they can still inject ads; regardless of where/how you obtained the media.
Don't worry, there will be a small monthly subscription of $9.99 to disable them! Or if you buy the new Roku Plus Extreme you can opt-out of personalized ads! What more could you want?
And then they will decide that no-ads should actually be slightly less ads instead. And if you are still using that Rolu Plus Extreme after two years, you don't deserve to be able to opt out anymore.
In my grandparent comment I mentioned “fairly priced products” - if the price (including ad removal) is fair and the product is good, I have no problems with paying.
What's a reasonable amount, in your opinion, to disable ads on a piece of hardware you purchased (i.e a Roku) to watch your own locally streamed media?
If that was added after I bought the product, zero for sure. If I knew about the cost upfront - whatever I’d be fine with at the time of purchase. Then again, likely a competing device without a subscription would be of better value.
The amount of money that Roku is making, as well as their market cap, are utterly irrelevant, and the only reason you're bringing them up is a manipulative tactic to divert attention from the fact that the vast majority of Roku's revenue comes from ads and streaming.
More lies and emotional manipulation. Neither of my comments were personal attacks - they were clearly directed at the text of your comments, as someone who actually read them could tell.
> Perhaps you need to calm down and realize you're the one who mentioned finances.
This is utterly nonsensical. "There's no viable revenue source for content creators if you neither pay them directly nor run ads" is a true statement of fact that's relevant to the discussion. A sarcastic, pleading, emotionally manipulative comment such as
> Ah yes. Roku, the company with an $8.65B market cap and constant year-on-year revenue growth of at least 11%, is going to go bankrupt unless they show you ads when you pause the screen.
...is neither logical, nor relevant, nor is related in any way whatsoever to my response.
Roku loses money on making televisions and makes it back on advertising and services. It turns out people don't hate ads enough to spend money to not see them.
Reason #27,621,938 to stop watching TV. The media creators hate you, the device manufacturers hate you, the streaming companies hate you. It’s amazing what hoops people are willing to jump through in order to poison their own minds.
Yeah, all that mind poison from nature and science education, documentaries, great films and TV shows that entertain and help us experience the human condition through great visual art and storytelling. Are you from 1950?
No, just someone who managed to keep his sanity in the onslaught of advertising, someone who sees the forest through the trees.
As to the nature and science education, documentaries, great films and TV shows that entertain and help us experience the human condition through great visual art and storytelling, those can be had without subjecting yourself to advertising (other than whatever advertising they put in the programs themselves) by using ad-free platforms like Jellyfin or Kodi running on whatever available piece of hardware (old laptop with broken screen and keyboard, SBC, discless workstation, ...). There is no reason to give in to the ad juggernaut, it can not force your door or pry open your eyelids to force you to watch. Just don't use anything which pushes ads and you're set.
This is not fantasy, it is the daily reality of countless individuals and families. You don't need to give in to the advertising industry.
This seems like patent troll. HDMI-CEC would let you see the pause request if they are using remote not tied to the device. However, to display the ad, it would require you to hijack the input and would be extremely disruptive to the user. Unless they were already using Roku and Roku needs to know Pause command to be helpful to the user. So besides "Show ads" how is this any different from "We handle pause properly!" which is basic function.
Has someone created an enshittification standard scale (ESS) where we can just rate what stage a company is at? It could actually be useful as I would guess that there is probably a good correlation to poor long term financial performance at high ESS.
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[ 3.0 ms ] story [ 323 ms ] threadhttps://www.snopes.com/fact-check/sony-patent-mcdonalds/
https://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2024/02/hdmi-forum-to-amd-no...
USB-C connectors using the DisplayPort protocol is the best of all worlds
https://www.displayport.org/displayport-over-usb-c/
Do you want them all to auto-minimize? You can probably get that. But it starts with answering the question.
On a laptop, reconfiguring to use monitors as and when you connect/disconnect them can be great.
However, I'm often on a PC with a fixed multi-monitor setup. The situation where one monitor is briefly out is transient. But some windowing systems decide to permanently erase all your painfully eked out settings at the drop of a hat.
The correct behavior in this particular case is actually just to do nothing, the fact that a monitor seems to have gone away should just be ignored. (Because it didn't go away, really. Maybe I'm just messing with it for a sec, or it's a different brand and turns on/off a few seconds after the others)
[IIRC on KDE you can prevent auto-reconfiguration by turning Kscreen OFF ]
That's why I run fluxbox window manager on a non-ubuntu linux distibution.
Leave windoze, leave ubuntu, regain control of your computer...
When I come back the next day, all my windows are on the laptop onboard display, and if I'm lucky, resized in a way that makes them movable. If I'm unlucky, I need to close the application, re-open it, and hope it's back in a helpful way.
The 2x 4K panels show me my wallpaper every morning. They don't show me any windows that were on them.
"intuitive" is in the eye of the beholder.
Still a very stupid problem to have to solve.
I don't know how you expect that machine to know that you're only disabling that monitor temporarily and you expect it to restore your windows at some future time when it reconnects.
If you plug in a new monitor, should windows jump onto it spontaneously?
And searching for 'Dock screen wakes up during sleep' just floods <search engine> with 'screen does not wake up after sleep'. And with <search engine>'s removal of respecting + and -, I am not sure I'll ever find a solution...
You can ask Windows to try and remember the location. It's not fool proof, but it works 90% of the time.
In fact, I've got more issues with windows opening on a non-connected screen (and then having to do Winkey + right a couple of times until it shows up on my laptop screen.
(To be clear: I want HDMI to die, DisplayPort to win, and AMD to get their crap together. But at the end of the day, we need support on both the GPU and the Monitor/TV side, and that's where it's lacking.)
I am specifically advocating for using monitors that connect using USB-C connectors and the DisplayPort protocol.
I am not a big fan of the DP connector itself. I have a monitor that supports it, and I’ve used it with that one and others in the past. But USB-C connector (like one of my other monitors has) and DisplayPort protocol is far superior.
The regular DP connector is fine because at least it locks in (sometimes too well), and MiniDP has been pretty great (especially when chaining multiple monitors on systems that support multi-stream, so anything except Apple).
I do have a love/hate relationship with USB-C, mainly because you need to double, triple, and quadruple check that the cable actually has all the wires in it for DP and not just USB 3 or even worse, USB 2.
In a perfect world, HDMI would be a historical artifact. In the current world, it's sadly a necessity for big TVs or many gaming setups :(
given how affordable blackmagic made SDI and how trivial it is to run some coax the trick is how to get a hdcp stripping hdmi to sdi converter.
https://www.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/bsx72f/say_...
If Roku wants to display ads, they can already do so if the content originated from their system. If Roku is displaying content originated from an external system, that external system can display their own ads to defeat the detection of pause events. (DirecTV already does this).
Roku data breach: Over 15k accounts affected
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39674041
If anything this reflects positively on Roku that they announced it
Hilarious. I love how all the streaming companies are hijacking the pause control now. Why do you think I hit pause? Pick one or more of the following:
1. I need to go to the bathroom.
2. I want to inspect the current frame more carefully.
3. I want to see an ad for psoriasis medication.
Hint: One of the above answers is wrong. Think about it and get back to me. I'll wait. (I did hit pause after all.)
No, they're probably earning a fortune they'll be proud to pass down to their grandchildren.
Still a drop in the bucket compared to the billionaires being minted semimonthly through combination lottery games, though at least in both cases not a cent of the fortunes being passed to grandchildren came from me.
actually you could argue that the people who did absolutely nothing for society in return for the assurance that none of their family will ever have to work at all, for the next three or four generations if not longer, have nonetheless contributed a net positive to society when compared with the apex parasites who actively work to degrade the quality of life of everyone else for their own gain.
You only get so many shots in your life worth running with.
Anyone who doesn’t do everything in their power to avoid adverts is part of the problem.
Says everybody until they are wanting to advertise their own product.
You're assuming that most companies have decent metrics.
I don't know if I believe that... I can see companies falling for the politician's fallacy (We must do something -> this is something -> we must do this). They have money to spend to promote their product, advertising is a well known way to spend money to promote a product, therefore they buy advertising.
...because most of the rest were for products I already wasn't using.
When you do, there will be a moment in between when you can see the screen but haven't hit play yet. This is a prime ad opportunity.
If you are watching with others, they may wait for you while you go to the bathroom. They will also be able to see the screen.
Sorry for not being any fun. I just think Roku is behaving somewhat logically here. (I say "somewhat" because there is one issue: speaking for myself at least, would never buy a TV that does this!)
"It is done!", responded the CEO, eyes hidden behind the ceremonial quarterly meeting headdress, shielding them from the immense heat of the lava.
Rather curious that Mr. Ellison owns an island in a volcanic archipelago, isn't it?
On purpose or not it was a great sentence, but if it were premeditated, that only makes it better.
Perhaps not that exact phrasing, but I'd say he said both; https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-zRN7XLCRhc&t=33m - I have it in my quotes file as
> You need to think of Larry Ellison the way you think of a lawnmower. You don't anthropomorphize your lawnmower, the lawnmower just mows the lawn, you stick your hand in there and it'll chop it off, the end. You don't think 'oh, the lawnmower hates me' -- lawnmower doesn't give a shit about you, lawnmower can't hate you. Don't anthropomorphize the lawnmower. Don't fall into that trap about Oracle.
and a bit later,
> Do not fall into the trap of anthropomorphizing Larry Ellison
Joe had just seen a Dr. Ellison. Coincidence? Yes, absolutely, of course it is.
I try to stay above stuff... but fuck this.
(IANAL.) I'd like to remind Big Co's that contracts aren't valid if there isn't consideration. And continued use of my own TV isn't consideration. (And this is backed by legal precedent, too.)
When given choice, people escape them - via netflix or adblock. The same people spend their free time watching youtube reviews, chatting on gear forums, or recommending each other deals on social media; it looks like people genuinely want to learn about good and fairly priced products.
I sincerely hope we’ll find a better way of reaching an audience than forced ads.
I just subscribe to paramount plus again to watch discovery. Seems perfectly reasonable, they give me a program I want (with no product placement from what I can gather - unlike the JJ Abram’s films with their “Budweiser classic”. I don’t think a self sealing stem boot counts), and I give them £8 a month. Everyone is happy.
However you try to double dip and I don’t give you a penny.
Content doesn’t appear effortlessly on all your devices. Some subtitle languages may be missing. Less mainstream content may be of low quality, slow to download or missing too. Plus, you have to plan ahead or wait for the download to finish. At this point I would double check the streaming plan price (as long as there is an ad free tier).
However start putting adverts in that and it’s changes, it’s either “don’t watch at all” or “get from pirate bay (or elsewhere)”, because the product I want isn’t available.
20 years ago I used to get tv from places like irc because it was the only way to get the material. 25 years ago I hd no choice by to wait for the vhs to come out.
It’s a service problem, not a price problem. Sadly it seems companies want to make the service bad, which means they throw the baby out with the bath water.
This sucks for those of us in the middle ground (having taste but not unlimited budgets), as we get shoved into "eat shit and smile" group.
This enshittification part looks especially interesting to me. For that you need a user base. So I guess any rules promoting fair competition would be relevant and pro consumer in this context. If the users can easily migrate to a non-enshittified provider, then all is well.
> Perhaps you need to calm down and realize you're the one who mentioned finances.
This is utterly nonsensical. "There's no viable revenue source for content creators if you neither pay them directly nor run ads" is a true statement of fact that's relevant to the discussion. A sarcastic, pleading, emotionally manipulative comment such as
> Ah yes. Roku, the company with an $8.65B market cap and constant year-on-year revenue growth of at least 11%, is going to go bankrupt unless they show you ads when you pause the screen.
...is neither logical, nor relevant, nor is related in any way whatsoever to my response.
First tv ad in 1941, first radio ad in 1922, first newspaper ad in 1704, first known written ad in 3000 bc.
As to the nature and science education, documentaries, great films and TV shows that entertain and help us experience the human condition through great visual art and storytelling, those can be had without subjecting yourself to advertising (other than whatever advertising they put in the programs themselves) by using ad-free platforms like Jellyfin or Kodi running on whatever available piece of hardware (old laptop with broken screen and keyboard, SBC, discless workstation, ...). There is no reason to give in to the ad juggernaut, it can not force your door or pry open your eyelids to force you to watch. Just don't use anything which pushes ads and you're set.
This is not fantasy, it is the daily reality of countless individuals and families. You don't need to give in to the advertising industry.