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Mortanis posted:The funny thing about their compression system is apparently it doesn't need client side implementation to uncompress the data, given their intent with the porn streaming and the dude that nearly died in the zoo. It gets compressed and sent out and... magically uncompresses in the browser. This is what I've been saying since S1 - imagining a bank of cloud servers and clients have to upload data to get it compressed... That's just such a waste of the product. As you mentioned, ISPs would love cutting their data traffic in half, but with the speed of their decompression, they could push PP-based files as the replacement for .mp4 video, .mp3 audio, etc. They should be making deals to create new file standards and create PP-based media players to handle them.
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May 5, 2016 12:30
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CelestialScribe posted:It's...it's almost as if the comedy is found in the characters being flawed! I don't know about "flawless", but I personally wish they'd make fewer bad decisions. Some of their fuckups are funny and/or drive the plot forward, but I don't think I'm alone in saying that it feels like the screwups can make the show less fun to watch sometimes. I was actually really down on this episode until I saw everything get resolved by the end. We have heard enough stories about Pied Piper accidentally giving away their IP, or Richard being awkward and screwing things up, and for a while it seemed like they could never have any unqualified successes. No, I don't want to watch a show where the protagonists handle themselves flawlessly and create their business with no problems along the way, but they can write conflict coming from exterior sources, or at least let them have a solid win at the end, like in this last episode. I don't know that I would continue watching this show if the next episode was about how another compression company was sticking it to Pied Piper after having bought Dinesh's hard drive. I'm just not entertained by so much consistent failure.
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May 24, 2016 11:36
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Enderzero posted:It's not hard guys. The creators have said that as soon as Pied Piper wins the show will be boring because there's no conflict. They have to be perpetual underdogs or the magic is gone. This is how it has to be when you don't know how long the show will air - if they win too soon you'll have multiple seasons where they have nothing significant to do. That's not necessarily true. You can have them "win" by becoming a successful company and releasing their platform, and then tap into the wide range of external conflict that they've flirted with in the past, like Gavin Belson's rivalry -- make the Endframe compression team the main villains, or another startup out to steal their market, or another Maliant out to co-opt their tech, or something like the Oracle/Google lawsuits going on right now, with another company using their tech and claiming "fair use". Or hell, just show all the pressure that comes with expanding your business and finding new hires, dealing with remote office employees, having to actually host the awkward extravagant parties that featured in season 1, etc. I think it's taking a very narrow view of the subject matter to decide that your protagonists need to take 6 seasons and a movie to just get their project off the ground, suggesting that the only possible way to introduce conflict is by having the protagonists gently caress things up over and over. I've already come up with a half-dozen plotlines for a Pied Piper business that isn't continually getting hosed over.
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May 24, 2016 15:36
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Rexides posted:As for the show itself, that was quite the curveball they did with Laurie. I mean, all things considered it was a very rational thing to do when you are a dried up, emotionless husk of a person, but right now there is no way to just ignore this when there is any interaction involving her. She is basically the season's villain now. I wouldn't say villain, she's obviously working toward Pied Piper's success, and supported Richard's platform over Action Jack's box. Even after Gavin Belson valued Endframe's platform at $250 mil, the fact was that Jack had a concrete deal for their box that would have made them a lot of money instantly, and so I gave her some respect for putting faith in the crew to produce a valuable platform rather than going with the guaranteed payday. I mean, I'm sure Elizabeth Holmes could tell you something about the accuracy of a company's financial valuation. But in the end, she's a corporate financial manager, and she's going to make the most profitable decisions for her company. I wouldn't have expected her to use her leverage to completely ruin Erlich, but it makes sense in a certain robotic sort of way. She's definitely more ruthless and focused on the bottom line than I would have thought, but I still don't see her working against the core engineers.
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Jun 15, 2016 12:16
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Binary Logic posted:But if she valued Erlich's shares so low doesn't that pull all the shares down? She's now set a price for PP far below what it was. That is, if Erlich's 10% was valued at $713,000, then Laurie Bream of Raviga Capital has determined that 100% of the company's shares is only worth $7,130,000. Does it work like that? I was under the impression that Erlich's deal wasn't publicized, and that even if it got out, since Erlich was having financial difficulties and the deal was made under duress, it was not really a true valuation of the company shares.
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Jun 15, 2016 13:37
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NoEyedSquareGuy posted:Despite all the complex underlying compression stuff, Pied Piper looks like all it needs would be a redesigned front page with an upload button, download button, messaging interface options, then some sort of "advanced settings" tab for all the engineers who actually wanted to mess around with bitrate or whatever the more technical aspects are. I'm still liking the show but a lot of the conflict at this point seems to derive from Richard being stubborn for no legitimate reason. Yeah, for that whole speech about how you can't take the wings off an airplane, you can definitely simplify your platform for people who don't understand things like buffer size or bicubic spline. Make an interface that looks like Windows, drag your files into the folder here, now they're in the folder compressed! Click download, now they're on your device AND in the folder? One of the issues that the missing download button hints at, though, is that Richard/PP don't want to let the client have any part of the compression algorithm. What if you want your files and you won't have an internet connection? It doesn't seem like its possible to download your files at the compressed sizes, which suggests that they're reluctant to put a method for decompression in the client. Seems like a very large misstep to me. When we first started using zip and rar, did you have to go online to compress/decompress? Were they at risk of competitors stealing their technology when they put those abilities in the downloadable zip/rar clients?
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Jun 21, 2016 11:52
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Heisenberg1276 posted:Isn't the selling point that they compress over the air so that it's instantaneous? Which would suggest they do decompress on the client No, that was the whole point of the missing download button and the guy who kept pointing at his phone and saying "look, 0kb used!" The files aren't stored on the user's device at all, it seems like you upload it to the platform, which compresses it and stores it for you, and then when you want to use a file, you open it in the PP app and the platform decompresses it and opens it for you. It just happens fast enough that there isn't much difference between opening a local file that's already on your device and opening a file by having the platform decompress and send it to you. It doesn't seem like there's any method to actually store the compressed files on your own machine. e: wait, if it opens so fast, that implies that it's sending the compressed file and that decompression takes place on the client...so what the hell? Why wouldn't it have a download button? Sure, everyone's connected to the internet, but not all the time, not on airplanes, not in rural areas. I would be worried storing data ONLY on the platform without being able to download it locally for later use. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 12:09 on Jun 21, 2016 |
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Jun 21, 2016 12:04
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Rexides posted:I can't say I really enjoyed this episode. The Gavin plot felt contrived, and the PP parts were just sad. I did like the revelation that Jared would do anything for the company, I just have to wait for the next episode I guess. But he didn't have to cut poo poo! They could have left the existing UI under an "Advanced Settings" tab or something, and just had it default to a "Basic Settings" tab that only has an upload/download button and a folder to drag-and-drop your files to be compressed under the default settings. All the features and customization would still be there, they'd just be necessarily hidden from the 98% of users who don't understand or don't care. That and a small tutorial to explain exactly how it works ("Pied Piper will store your files for you! Drag your files HERE - now they're accessible from anywhere!") would have fixed the problem entirely. I mean, I get that it's a joke how Richard can't explain anything simply ("What's in your eggs? Electrons!"), but you'd think Monica or someone else at Raviga could have gotten a PR agent that could create a tutorial or advertisement that could explain the gist of Pied Piper to the average consumer without getting bogged down in explaining the neural net and covalent states or whatever. e: my prediction for next week - PP takes off for real, but in India. Jared's deception comes to light, but it doesn't matter because good word-of-mouth from all the people making fake accounts causes hundreds of thousands of REAL accounts to be opened by consumers in India. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 13:26 on Jun 21, 2016 |
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Jun 21, 2016 13:24
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Accretionist posted:If real, shouldn't something like pied piper be applicable to internet backbones? It's like instant encryption and decryption and you can interact with compressed data. They should be making billions already by shrinking all internet traffic to a fraction of its size. Yes, and I've been saying this since season 1 -- Comcast/Time Warner et al would pay out the nose to basically double or triple their bandwidth. They should also be pairing up with the team behind something like VLC media player or Windows Media Player to create the next-gen replacement for the mp4/mkv video formats, a PP-powered mp5 that's half as big as current video files and decompresses instantly when played. Or with Microsoft themselves to make PP compression/decompression the new standard in modern OSs, and completely replace rar/zip usage. Having an online platform where users upload their own data and storing it for them on the cloud in a sort of compressed Dropbox is probably the dumbest use of the technology I can think of, actually. Even the Box seemed more useful and marketable. But this is a TV show.
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Jun 27, 2016 13:29
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From the looks of the preview they're actually allowing the team to succeed at something for a minute. That was one of my biggest gripes over the last few seasons -- every single thing they did got screwed up in one way or another until I was desperate to see SOME sort of victory that didn't immediately get ruined. I mean, I love the show, and I enjoyed watching them fail, but the protagonists aren't so wretched that you don't want them to succeed in the end, and even if they stopped plumbing that well for comedy, there's still plenty of material in actually having to run a successful startup. I figured by the time they got to four seasons, we'd have had an inversion of the first episode of the show, where Richard's the one throwing the big party for the launch of his startup and having to get on stage and deliver the same kind of awkward, nerdy little speech and hire hot people to mingle with the crowd.
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Apr 21, 2017 18:41
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I gotta say, I'm a little frustrated that they're back to nothing. It's been three years of 1 step forward, 2 steps back, and I don't know how thrilled I am that we're back to square 1, genius coders with no funding. If they go back into the same IP ownership bullshit with Gavin Belson from seasons 1 and 2, it's gonna have to be hilarious to keep me watching. I'm not sure why you think the show would turn into Ballers once they're actually successful, there'd be plenty of material in having to run a successful startup and manage talent and egos and Silicon Valley weirdness, we even got to see a bit of it when they were running the startup out of Ehrlich's house. I posted not too long ago that I thought we'd see an inversion of the pilot episode by now, where Richard is the one throwing a big lavish party for his grand opening and inviting all these uncomfortable engineers and having to go up on stage and give the same kind of awkward speech filled with tech buzzwords. I don't know why they're rehashing the same plot beats when there's a lot more interesting stuff they could be doing. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 01:14 on May 2, 2017 |
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May 2, 2017 01:11
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SLOSifl posted:They're not back to nothing, they have the algorithm that Jack is all over and the new internet thing. I think the licensing ideas could keep that going as funding for either their mesh internet or a totally new thing. That's exactly where they were at the start of the show -- they had Richard's compression algorithm and they were trying to get it funded and worrying about Gavin Belson claiming the IP. I also think the octopus recipes app was kind of a missed note. It was funny, but it wasn't really plausible. Why would that guy be excited to hear Jin Yiang's pitch about an app with octopus recipes? Why would Jin Yiang come up with it in the first place? An app that contains 8 recipes is a middle-aged housewife's first project after taking a course at the library -- even if Jin Yiang's weird and out-of-touch, he'd at least be doing something more interesting than that. I'm surprised they didn't stretch themselves to come up with an equally-ludicrous app that at least made sense, like Bighead's erect nipple detector app from the first season.
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May 2, 2017 02:27
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Colonel Whitey posted:Jian Yang's pronunciation isn't that bad, I don't really believe the VC thinks he has an Oculus app. Even if they did, "eight Oculus recipes" doesn't make any sense. Bighead only thought so because he's kinda stupid and wasn't really paying attention. However it still doesn't explain why the VCs are meeting with him. I think Jian Yang is much much smarter than he lets on to Erlich and is totally playing him, possibly with an actual good app idea in his back pocket to be revealed at the right time. That may be how he got the VC meeting but that's total speculation. Eh, I think we're overthinking it at this point, and probably getting close to complaining about the magic xylophone -- it was just a funny joke, and they're probably not going to revisit it at all. I just thought it was an odd note when they've done ridiculous but plausible app ideas before.
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May 2, 2017 19:27
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Phi230 posted:What I don't get is why do they need to build an app or platform or something so myopic like video chat? I was saying this in Season 1, or whenever he explained that his big idea was to make a platform for people to upload files, which is really the dumbest possible use of the algorithm. The obvious use, which they kinda touched on with the porn company, is to market it to ISPs to essentially quadruple their bandwidth and speed, work with the big media players to replace .mp4/.mkv with ultra-small PP media files, talk to the big datacenter companies about creating a new database file standard at 400% efficiency. Even the box was a really dumb version of this -- why would you just market it as a large hard drive when there are so many wider applications? And the kicker is that it absolutely would make Richard into a Nobel-Prize-winning world-changer Steve Jobs personality, it would change the tech industry at basically every level. Here I don't mind them not going with ultra-realism, though -- even typing that out sounded like a much more boring show filled with hurried tech explanations and mostly populated with people like that poor dead-eyed database engineer in the basement of Maliant. Phenotype fucked around with this message at 14:46 on May 3, 2017 |
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May 3, 2017 14:44
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I had kind of the same reaction to the belching at first, but it's really a fantastic show and worth watching if there's any way to get you past that, it's one of the few cases where something actually deserves most of the hype it gets on the internet. The pilot episode is the worst for it, but I think he tones it down quite a bit after that, or at least it becomes less noticeable. It's actually one of the quirks of the show that I really like now that I'm used to it -- the random belches and stammering make them feel a little bit more like real people, not just actors reading a script.
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May 17, 2017 19:21
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Pharmaskittle posted:Yeah that was the first time in the show where they went far enough to make me really think Richard is a piece of poo poo. Maybe they're assuming their audience is at least as intelligent as me (not a high bar) and figuring everyone will get that Richard's little nerd speech was deeply uncool even though it didn't bite him in the rear end five minutes later. It DID bite him in the rear end five minutes later. Blood Boy told Gavin he was quitting to write a tell-all book because that was the only career move he had left, thanks to Richard, which led to Gavin's leaving.
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May 22, 2017 18:25
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Snak posted:This show continues to be hilarious, but I would like the plot turns to settle down just a little bit. I really like the parts of the earlier seasons where they were actually working on building something. Season 3 and 4 so far it seems like every episode is just "everything is turned upside down!" Yeah, this is starting to drive me a little nuts too. I've said it before, but I really wish they'd just let them run a company for a season or two, there's plenty of material there without having everything collapse every other episode.
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May 22, 2017 18:28
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ElCondemn posted:I think the problem is that you think this is a different industry. Over the years I worked for basically nothing chasing one "great idea" after another and never got anywhere. One company I worked for was acquired twice while I worked there, so over 6 or 7 months I had 3 totally new sets of business cards, email addresses and managers. I was kinda forced to quit because everyone that was working with me on the project I was hired for cashed out. After four seasons, even if there's a good chance a real life startup would still be treading water, I would still like my TV show plot to have moved forward a bit. Maybe it's accurate, but it's not nearly as compelling to watch as it would be if they'd just stop hitting the reset button every few episodes. I'm reminded of this article I read a while ago where the producers talked about how sometimes the weird reality of Silicon Valley just couldn't make it onscreen because it was too out-there for a TV show. Something about a CTO coming into a board meeting on rollerblades. Does anyone have the link?
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May 25, 2017 16:09
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That was a joke. Please don't ever post that link again.
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May 25, 2017 17:42
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Fellatio del Toro posted:You all have a weird idea of what the word "casting" means Do you have a solid idea of what the word "pedantic" means?
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May 26, 2017 15:43
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priznat posted:I must have missed that, but really compressing runs of 3/4 spaces won't make a difference over tabs I would think, but then I am not a compression specialist. A space is an ASCII character, a "tab" needs additional framework to interpret.
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May 26, 2017 19:17
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Vintersorg posted:His head is so gigantic - it's loving me up. I kept thinking this too. Show me what you got!
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Jun 2, 2017 16:08
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I eat that fucker's lunch every day. No, I actually eat his food!
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Jun 6, 2017 02:58
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Vintersorg posted:Man, they turned Richard into a villain. What the gently caress. How are they gonna bounce from this? His team loving HATES him right now. Maybe all those rumors were slightly off and it's Thomas Middleditch that's leaving, and Urlich's about to come back from India to take over the company.
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Jun 19, 2017 16:34
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Cingulate posted:In what context? Is that just what the word means (I'm not a native speaker)? Pakistan and India are both part of the Indian sub-continent if I remember correctly. blunt posted:Per IMDB: Uh....
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Jun 23, 2017 20:02
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MC Fruit Stripe posted:Don't call Pakistanis Indian Huh, I always thought that was an appropriate term, but actually looking it up it sounds like they do find that offensive. I also, for the longest time, thought that Eskimo was also the correct name to use, like Sioux or Inuit or whatever.
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Jun 23, 2017 21:31
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bring back old gbs posted:You don't get paid more for being in "good" movies I'm pretty sure you do get paid more for being in good (or at least heavily-grossing) movies, but my point was you may not continue to get movie roles if everything you star in is a complete disaster.
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Jun 23, 2017 23:25
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