You can pay a lot for a DAP and have an infinitely better experience than any iPod or Zune. Just saying as an audiophile who has owned all of these devices. But yes, you are correct.
Totally agree. The expectations around what an OSS project should - or even must - have, do, and accommodate is absolutely insane. It boggles my mind sometimes as someone who grew up on OSS. I still contribute OSS and maintain some (small) projects, but I certainly don't feel compelled to support people. I often license MIT. People are grown ups, they can go fix their own issues.
My local karate school used them in the COVID era to build an app for practicing at home. I've used it off and on, though the occasional oblique reference to COVID is a bit amusing sometimes. Never mentioned by name but there's an occasional reference to "as we're stuck at home" and such. They use Vimeo to whitelabel the service.
Whatever they're paying for it, it is too much. Video availability drops in and out. Sometimes the video works. Sometimes it doesn't work at all and gives a weird error. Sometimes it doesn't work and it claims that it "can't guarantee the security of my connection", even though other videos work fine. Sometimes videos that didn't work yesterday work today. I've been tempted to go to their app developer and try to show them how to just host it themselves in S3 or something, which would probably still be much cheaper than what Vimeo is charging. The Vimeo player embedded into the app is extremely minimalistic, for instance, it can't cast to anything, which is a pretty useful feature for something you don't want to be staring at your phone for.
I found I can Favorite a video, which then makes me log in to a Vimeo account, then it adds it as a Favorite to my Vimeo account despite being private, and then I can view it through the Vimeo app proper, although that also seems to have lost the ability to cast to anything in my house lately. Casting is a clusterfuck of its own with the mismatched capabilities matrix of what can cast to what under what circumstances anyhow, but Vimeo seems distinctly behind on that front. It's honestly significantly worse now than the default video player a browser offers at this point.
But it was probably relatively easy for them to set it up ~5 years ago, before Vimeo collapsed.
A notable difference to their (somewhat) contemporary, Nebula. Nebula made the choice to develop their own services, to also own the customer billing relation. Dropout relies on Vimeo for all that.
Are there other services doing whitelabel video sites? (Apart from porn, I'm sure there is a few) I only know of Floatplane providing whitelabel for William Osman's sauceplus.com recently.
I know this wasn't an entirely honest question, but yes, absolutely. You probably see Vimeo videos every day without realizing it, because most of the viewing isn't done on vimeo.com. It's videos on other sites, and the customers can pay to have their branding, not Vimeo's, so if you're buying something online and it has a product video... might be Vimeo. Or one of those websites that have big header splashes with full-video backgrounds. Or a subscription "channel" like Martha Stewart TV with mobile and smart-TV apps. Or a million other things.
Once at Vimeo, maybe 7 or 8 years ago, I was working on putting out the fires of an extremely weird operational issue where a bug in a cloud provider's software-defined networking stack led to corrupted HTTP responses, which got stored in CDN caches, causing persistent playback issues for users (playback not starting, or locking up in the middle). The cloud provider had reported it as a "packet loss" issue, because for the most part the misdirected packets would get rejected by the receiving TCP stack for having the wrong sequence number or whatever, but one time in a billion they would get through and wreak havoc... and we were moving enough traffic that those one-in-a-billion flukes were happening constantly.
I was musing in the shared chat with one of our CDN partners that, with no real way to tell what files were affected, the only way to fix the playback issues for everyone (short of waiting a month for all the cached objects to age out) would be to simply purge the whole cache. I immediately got a bold all caps DON'T EVEN THINK ABOUT DOING THAT in response. If we flushed the whole cache, the origin traffic to refill it would have saturated some internet links to the point of DoSing other customers and probably getting on CNN that evening. And that was then. Traffic levels got significantly higher later on.
They have 1000s if not 100s and 1000s of customers. I know because my company is an edtech platform and we have a lot of customers using vimeo as their video host.
I recently used it to watch "Revolution of our times", a documentary about the 2019 Hong Kong protests. As far as I could tell, this is the only legal way to stream the movie.
I believe it or can believe something like it would happen. They should fix it, if it's true. And quickly. I'm not sure I trust these companies. Anthropic least of all. Doomer Rick Moranis there just comes off too untrustworthy.
There never was a moat in software. It's your business, value, service, industry knowledge, sales, etc. that's what matters. Not the software. Software is and has always been cheap.
Writing tests cases is part of development. Programmers simply need to do it. It helps them immensely.
Product acceptance and user acceptance testing is entirely different and often conflated. That's where people go wrong and are too simple minded (or cheap) to understand or invest in both.
reply