Comment by dkonofalski | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dkonofalski | Hacker News Reader

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I'm not being combative and you're (I'm guessing purposely) leaving out parts of my statements to try and argue a point I've never made. I know my experience isn't universal but, by definition, if people are saying that a dot in the corner of the display makes their setup "unusable" then their setup has always been unusable because the OS has access to put things on their display at any time.

If the computers came from the clients, then the clients didn't care whether something might pop-up on accident. There's literally no way for someone on the production side to prevent that with a computer that they don't know the ins-and-outs of so it cannot be an issue so that's not the type of situation that I'm talking about.

I'm only talking about the people who are saying that this dot makes a Macbook "unusable" for the purpose of display. That's 100% not true and anyone that needs that level of precision, as a professional, uses dedicated I/O hardware to keep exactly that from happening.

> That's 100% not true

I don't know what else to say. I work with people who put on live shows for 20,000+, they use PCs and Macs to drive the display WITHOUT Decklink or similar, and they would be upset if there was a persistent orange dot on the screen. If you want to split hairs about whether or not that makes the new macOS "unusable" in these situations, then fine, but in the environment I'm familiar with it would not be tolerated. They would replace the Mac device with a PC which doesn't have this issue because they would deem it unusable, even though it can technically still display images on a screen.

And despite your repeated comments on this article, it IS possible to configure a PC to not show any notifications for use in a live show, between a combination of changing OS settings, closing unneeded programs, and using the fullscreen APIs of the OS. This is something that can be done ahead of time and tested. I've written software that shows fullscreen on secondary displays on large projectors for presentation-like purposes and I have never had an OS notification pop up over the fullscreen software on a secondary display, even on other people's machines where they didn't take care to shut down programs and turn off notifications. Other commenters here seem to have similar experiences.

You don't know what else to say and I don't know what else to tell you. Those people would also be upset if anything else outside of a dot popped up on their display, wouldn't they? Or are they just against dots for some reason? Hardware I/O devices exist for precisely this reason. They literally only exist to be able to control what gets output outside of the OS. Just because you personally never had an OS alert or something else pop-up doesn't mean it's not possible or that it doesn't happen. It does happen, usually unintentionally. That's why we have I/O devices.

Here's what it boils down to:

notifications = low probability

orange dot = 100%

The risk of an embarrassing notification got traded for the certainty of the orange dot.

It's not 100% unless you're using an input to record audio and then it's there for a reason. 99% of the people in these threads aren't going to see this during their PowerPoints because they're not recording anything and the 1% that do and care about the dot should be using a hardware I/O device anyways because the OS can do a lot more than just display a dot. Additionally, applications can also fix this themselves by using Apple's APIs.

alt tabbing by accident to a folder full of goat pr0n thumbnails = quite routine in schools/during presentations

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