Silicon Valley

I've got my fingers crossed for Ballers. I liked Entourage when it started, and Jeremy Piven's character was my favorite part. I never watched Arli$$. When I was younger it didn't seem appealing, and now I just imagine it's too dated for me to bother with.

Ill give them all a shot but the only one that looks good so far is TD, I think there is some other shows on stars or cinemax that look good.

Forgot about Penny Dreadful on sundays a long with Donovan, Stars also has Ash vs Evil Dead and American Gods that look promising (Not sure on release dates though)

richard was an absolute shit CEO, him sending a fucking text to delete everything could have left to personal lawsuits if he had lost since it would have all been timestamped. He is more like Steve Wozniak or Paul Allen or the google guy you never read about than Steve Jobs, the techie genius who is completely clueless about business and social interactions and management and everything besides code.

good finale though the lawyer and erlich were the tits, I think next season we'll see Bighead get promoted to Gavins job, Gavin getting fired, and becoming the CEO of Pied Piper in an attempt to get bigger than Hooli and buy his old company back with Pied Piper stock. Not sure where Richard fits into it though, it would be funny to see him start a 3d company up but I think he'll just stay at PP as the CTO/VPE.

The only technical niggle I have with the show is that the setting is completely bizarre, like Hooli is an amalgamation of Apple, Facebook, and Google (iphone + android + facebook all rolled into one). Pied Piper is a fucking compression algorithm, its like saying Winrar or 7zip is going to revolutionize the computer world and become bigger than Apple. Oh well, its fun show anyways. The guy on stream becoming so popular in the philippines reminds me a lot of the current E3 live streams in how transient the popularity is.

spronk_sl said:

good finale though the lawyer and erlich were the tits, I think next season we'll see Bighead get promoted to Gavins job, Gavin getting fired, and becoming the CEO of Pied Piper in a plot to get vengeance against Hooli.

Click to expand...

I too find this scenario likely.

spronk_sl said:

Pied Piper is a fucking compression algorithm, its like saying Winrar or 7zip is going to revolutionize the computer world and become bigger than Apple. Oh well, its fun show anyways.

Click to expand...

Are you watching the same show? They do real time insane compression. 4k video on demand, streaming, with virtually no bandwidth cost. If you don't see how that would revolutionize the world, I'm not even sure how you found the internet.

Xevy_sl said:

Honestly, I think Richard isn't fit for the CEO. I mean everything he's accomplished has more or less been dumb luck or Erlich magicz. I think as long as he's VP or whatever title it'd be fine. Hopefully the new CEO would be a flexible person though and we don't have another straight-man trying to stop all their shenanigans.

Click to expand...

Disagree, slightly. He got them funding. Yeah, the funding turned out to be a fuckup, but he did that. He got them an in with he porn people. Yeah the funding guy fucked it up, but he straight sold that lady. He has glimpses of genius and then something comes along, usually not him, and fucks it up. Jobs wasn't born Jobs, he became Jobs after lots of struggle and trials and shit.

The new CEO is going to be a straight buzzkill. She said it clearly, the problem with Pied Piper in her eyes wasn't even the myriad fuckups, it was a core problem of how they are utilizing their tech. They're thinking streaming video and shit, she is thinking bigger and different. idk what that is, I guess we find out next year. But they pretty much laid out the new CEO's strategy in a 45 second scene.

She's also clearly not checking numbers like she should because Netflix is 30+% of peak time internet usage.

spronk_sl said:

its like saying Winrar or 7zip is going to revolutionize the computer world and become bigger than Apple

Click to expand...

Except its not. PP is now a complete platform being ran on a lossless compression algorithm that makes hosting and distribution costs negligable and allows for HD video streaming to 100,000+ viewers with servers located inside a garage. That is like saying "Oh that twitch thing will never take off." Imagine if Twitch managed to run seamlessly on Source quality with only 25% of the hardware infrastructure. You don't think that would be valuable in this day in age? What if Netflix managed to lower their bandwidth footprint by 75%. You don't think that would be valuable?

ok i'll concede a lossless 4k compression that crunches data 5x or more will be extremely valuable, although they use p2p to save on bandwidth so that would be a non starter for the real world. As Monica's boss said though it'd probably be more valuable for corporate use like remote desktop, VPN, offsite backups, file transfer, etc, etc.

HEVC (h265) was supposed to be 50% better than AVC (h264) but in reality its closer to 20%, and adoption has taken years and years to roll out and even now I think AVC is the majority stream format, even though HEVC was finalized in 2013. any new codec would take 3-5 years to propagate out to enough devices that streamers would even consider using it

and yeah I agree everything I wrote is way too "goddamn stop being such a fucking loser its a comedy", just fun thinking about what would happen if it was real. I don't think anyone would accept P2P streaming as acceptable due to issues about piracy, bandwidth usage, concern about illegal streams, etc especially if the player would continue to steal your bandwidth when you aren't watching anything. The recent big uproar over Hola (it uses your bandwidth to support other peoples proxing) is a good example of that.

Octoshape (now DingIt) was a thing before Twitch really took off and it used P2P to distribute streaming video. But since PP has now gotten away from requiring a plug-in or downloading it's own player (that was the pre-pre-pre alpha) I'm not sure if it is using P2P anymore in the current form. From what it sounds like it works inside a (probably) custom HTML5 player. I assume all this changed on the season 01 finalie when Richard re-wrote the algorithm to his middle-out approach.

Mist_sl said:

It's the Steve Jobs story. Now he has to win back his company.

Actually he only has to win back Monica, they can vote him out as CEO, but they can't vote him off the board.

Click to expand...

They're probably playing this like Google, where the two founders ended up in lower positions after venture capital got a hold of them. Richard is by no means ready to run a business, nor does he seem to have the skills to pull it off. Having some other person come in and run it for awhile where they become kind of Richard's mentor will probably save Pied Piper. It's not like Richard is going anywhere, he is at this point almost the entire value of the company.

Its basically what I said a while back. Richard knows how to code and make great software. He hasn't the slightest clue how to run and manage a company worth millions. This entire season was predicated on Richard and/or Erlich fucking up the business.

hi guys, i just watched both seasons over the last 2 days and this show is awesome, fucking hilarious. i dunno how i kept forgetting to watch it all this time. i love Mike Judge's stuff. this show has me pissing my pants. the dude with the jewfro and fucked up beard kills me every time i see him.

Hi I just watched an entire two seasons of a show in two days and can't remember one of the main characters names.

i was too lazy to check IMDB for the exact spelling in case i said something like thanos bachman or something.