Solo had nigh-impossible shoes to fill. Han Solo is one of the most iconic characters in cinema. Unless they could grow a younger clone of Harrison Ford and have him star in it, there's virtually no actor in existence who could satisfy fan expectations. Disney unwisely took a huge risk in even trying.
A much better idea would've been something more like Rogue One, focusing on less well known characters who inhabited the same universe and were integral to the plots of the original trilogy. Alas, Hollywood is bereft of original ideas these days. They think the "safe bets" are reboots, retreads, and re-use of classic cinema. Personally I'm glad Solo flopped. Maybe it'll force Hollywood to come up with something at least partially original for a change.
Disney tried to copy Marvel's success a bit too much and it bit them. However, I'd argue the enormous decline in quality to be at least as responsible as the rapid release schedule.
Perhaps the two are related? With a bit more time between releases, TLJ's script might've gotten in front of more people and given them more chances to tell Rian Johnson and Kathleen Kennedy they were supposed to be making a Star Wars movie instead of contemporary political commentary. Lord knows Mark Hamill did everything he could to tell them it was dreck.
Plus the flagships tend to hold their value better
Only recently has this even been partly true. The cryptocurrency bubble created insane demand which artificially inflated video card prices. Case in point: I bought an RX580 almost two years ago for about $250. Less than a year ago that same card was going for almost $350 on Amazon. Only recently has it finally fallen back to what I originally paid for it.
What *used* to happen was cards were rapidly made obsolete by advances in video card tech. A $1000 card would be worth half that in a year and be worth less than an entry-level card two years later. Advances in DirectX tech also made cards obsolete that might otherwise have been mildly competitive since the older cards didn't support the latest DX version.
Video card tech has, IMO, stagnated over the last couple of years. Instead of getting 50% performance increases with each new generation, advances are now more like 10%-25% and shrinking. DX versioning also slowed. I think we're reaching a point of diminishing returns. nVidia hopes to bypass this with the "killer new feature" angle in the form of RTX. However, RTX suffers from the classic "chicken and egg" problem: there aren't many games that will take advantage of it, so there's little incentive to buy the card; meanwhile game developers won't implement the features until there's a large base of cards that will take advantage of it.
If RTX (or some AMD equivalent) can be shifted down in price to the midrange market *then* people might adopt it en masse because it's a no-brainer. But wide adoption of real-time raytracing tech ain't gonna happen so long as it's exclusive to cards hovering around -- or in some cases above -- the $1000 price point.
Just bought a Samsung 4K TV. Samsung, of course, does data gathering. It's in the EULA and you can't say no to it. However, I don't watch cable. I watch everything through my Vero 4K+ and my Plex library, which Samsung can't track. Screw you Samsung.
I also recently got AT&T's fiber Internet, replacing the loathsome Comcast I'd put up with for two years because they were the only high-speed option. AT&T, of course, wants to track my Internet usage. So I use a VPN for everything. Screw you AT&T.
Now Sony wants to limit what apps you can put on their TV's? Screw you Sony. Not only will I not buy your products, but if I am ever in the position of being forced to use one, I'll find a way to deny you whatever you think you'll get out of me.
These heavy-handed actions by companies will only engender more of us to find ways to throw monkey wrenches into their plans. Bring it on. There's nothing I love more than screwing over companies who thinks their customers are suckers.
I'll take you one step further: in a corporate environment with thousands of PC's this would be effectively impossible. Right now there are tools to mass-deploy BIOS updates. Throw a physical requirement into the mix and all that becomes useless.
A midrange Mac will cost you as much as a high-end PC while offering less functionality. I'm currently running a Core i7-4790K, a CPU launched in 2014 and discontinued in 2017. I picked up the CPU on eBay for $50. My prior CPU was a Core i5-2500K -- released in 2011 -- which is still running in my daughter's PC.
Apple makes its margin on its premium products, therefore their "midrange" products are more akin to low-end PC components. Apple has no incentive to offer you anything in the "value" segment as it would merely detract from forcing you to buy their premium line.
the populace still cannot rebel no matter how unsatisfied they become with the status quo
The ruled will always outnumber those who rule. An oppressive, controlling, authoritarian regime can only survive as long as it takes the ruled to realize they have nothing to lose by overthrowing the regime.
a known and well established narcissist, psychopath, compulsive liar, scammer, con-man and child molester
Wow! You do realize you just described pretty much every politician in office, right? If we held all elected officials to this standard, Washington would be a ghost town!
You seem to be out of the loop regarding something we call: news.
Then perhaps you'd be so good as to post a source link for your "news." Every article and news site I've read since the disaster says the death toll directly attributable to the meltdown is zero, precisely as the GP stated.
Should you present evidence from a reliable, unbiased source then I'm more than willing to accept it as fact. However, until then, all the "news" available on the accident refutes your assertion.
People who trust "news" they see on Facebook are about as dumb as the people who trust they're getting an "authentic Rolex" for $15 from a guy on the street.
Here's a tip: any news from *any* source should be (a) weighed for bias based on the source, (b) cross-referenced with a diverse selection of other sources to check validity, and (c) checked against *opposing* sources to see what -- if anything -- is being left out, exaggerated, etc.
Yes, I know that's actual *work* which people are loathe to do these days. However, if you're not going to put any effort into making sure your news isn't actually propaganda, you deserve what you get.
Given the typical pathetic performance of most sound bars, this isn't exactly a big hurdle to crow about. With 5.1 setups being so ridiculously cheap, sound bars are only for people too lazy to run speaker cable.
I'm not sure if you were being funny or not, but this is a horrible idea. Instead of the "best of both worlds" you're getting the worst of both. Read and write times will be gated by the speed of the mechanical drive, negating any SSD speed benefits. You'd be better off with two mechanical drives: same speed at much lower cost.
All the more reason to have some way of doing failure analysis on the failed component. If, for example, it died after prolong high temps, you know you've got a cooling issue and can perhaps do something about it. If you can't do an analysis, you have no way of knowing if there is something you can do to avoid -- or at least reduce the possibility of -- future failures of the same type.
Do you get this anxious when a RAM module fails? There really is no difference between a RAM module failing and a SSD failing...
Uhh...people don't usually store critical files in volatile RAM. Kind of a huge difference there. Further, RAM failures may crash the computer but it rarely destroys anything else in the process. A mass storage failure -- be it HDD or SSD -- virtually guarantees you'll lose whatever data you had on it. Your only recourse is RAID (which isn't an option on most laptops) or some sort of backup (which is difficult to enforce on mobile users).
Yes, you can blame users all day long for not backing up their data. It doesn't help when you're still responsible for IT as a whole. The problem lands on your desk whether you want it or not.
True, but that doesn't explain sudden, catastrophic SSD failure. Modern controllers remap bad blocks to the "spare area" on all SSD's. Keeping track of said blocks can offer a modicum of failure prediction. Indeed, many high-quality drives -- and nearly all enterprise drive arrays -- do exactly that.
None of it matters if the onboard controller itself dies, and such failures cannot be predicted nor can they be analyzed. That's what the OP was lamenting. The only possible remedy is to avoid that brand/model in the future, assuming that's even an option (and with Dell/HP/Lenovo it frequently isn't since the OEM's will only warranty and replace OEM equipment).
I didn't keep paperwork. I'm not a goddam analyst. If someone wanted to do that, fine. Just don't bother to tell me.
Good God, do you realize what a walking, talking epitome you are of the worst aspects of someone in IT? Condescend much? I've been in this industry for almost three decades. The absolute worst IT people in existence are the ones who treat humans exactly as you are treating them. It doesn't matter one whit how much of a technical genius you might be if you can't understand you're not just working on machines for the sake of the machines. You're working on tools that people depend upon to do their jobs. Your dismissive attitude towards the human factors of this job is inexcusable. It creates a hostile environment between users and IT that doesn't need to exist. It's a damn good thing you don't work in my IT shop. I'd have fired you for something like this no matter how "good" you were with the gear.
I guarantee that even after you fixed whatever was wrong with the WAN, the people you interacted with said "what a fucking asshole, I hope we never have to deal with him again" instead of "man, that guy did a fantastic job and I'm going to tell his boss how happy we are with his work!" But I'm guessing this is probably something you could care less about anyway. Good luck with your career. You'll need it.
"Look: I got just so many hours in the day. I live and breathe computer shit and I spend all my time studying and experimenting with the crap that supports your business. You're a law firm. You need to shuffle documents and you have no use for a propeller head using your equipment, on your dime, learning stuff that's not relative to the income stream."
You must be all kinds of fun at parties, but I digress.
For a small firm I agree it's usually pointless to do a failure analysis. However, if you're dealing with a larger company, failure analysis is crucial. Otherwise you could be replacing a failed unit with one that's just as failure prone because you don't know why it failed. Warranties are great but they don't replace lost data and/or downtime due to device failure. RAID and backups aren't magically 100% effective. I think what the OP is lamenting is there isn't even the slightest possibility of doing any analysis even if you have the time to do it.
Don't blame the OS. Blame "no backups." Failure should be expected and accounted for with a backup plan.
While I am the first to agree to this at the enterprise server level, it's far more difficult for the consumer or typical desktop user, especially for laptop users. RAID isn't always an option for laptops (frequently it's impossible) so you're left with some sort of external (USB or Thunderbolt) backup device or cloud storage. The former is difficult for road warriors and is nearly impossible to schedule since it's manually attached. The latter depends on an always-on Internet connection to have current backups.
My strategy was for laptop/desktop users to have their My Documents (and any other crucial directories) mirrored using OneDrive (included with Office365). It worked most of the time but nothing could be done if a drive failed while someone wasn't connected to the Internet. Any changes made since the last sync were irretrievably lost.
Doesn't help if the controller fails. SLC flash has better write longevity but none of that matters if the controller bombs.
Further, a sudden, catastrophic failure is (by process of elimination) almost certainly a controller failure. No matter if you're using SLC/MLC/TLC/etc. flash, cells don't die en masse. They usually die a little at a time. The controller expects this and remaps bad blocks to the spare area. Keeping track of spare area usage is one of the best ways to predict impending failure. If the controller fails then all that is for nothing even though (theoretically) all your data is still perfectly preserved on the flash itself.
Should possession of a narrative be a basis for risk assessment? No.
Yes, it should, although only if the narrative doesn't involve a single case of failure. If you have multiple failures of a single brand or model, you should use that to inform future purchasing decisions. Knowing the cause of the failure could further inform. Random failures are to be expected but if multiple failures caused by the same defect occurring in a given product line or due to a specific environment (workload, temperature, etc.) then you have some useful data to make future product selection with.
The OP is lamenting the paucity of any kind of failure data. Basically he's left with the decision to forego purchasing that model -- or even that entire brand -- hoping it will improve reliability. Hope is not a strategy for engineers. We prefer data.
I think you may be missing his point. I've had SSD's die on me as well with absolutely no warning. What's unnerving about it is you have no idea why it failed. Good engineers like failure analysis; it helps determine if you're buying a crappy product, running your product out of spec, or any number of other metrics which can inform future purchases.
Mechanical drives usually give you some indicator of why they failed in the form of horrible noises. SSD's don't give you much of anything. If neither SMART nor spare block allocation figures are out of spec you have nothing to go on. I've chalked these up to the controller on the drive itself failing but that's just a guess. I have no way to perform any additional diagnostics that might tell me more. As a result, I've simply avoided buying drives of that brand anymore. Crude, yes, but what other metrics can I use? I'm not talking about a single drive. It's happened to multiple drives of a similar make/model, all of which failed suddenly and gave no data afterwards I could use forensically.
Slashdot Mirror
Solo had nigh-impossible shoes to fill. Han Solo is one of the most iconic characters in cinema. Unless they could grow a younger clone of Harrison Ford and have him star in it, there's virtually no actor in existence who could satisfy fan expectations. Disney unwisely took a huge risk in even trying.
A much better idea would've been something more like Rogue One, focusing on less well known characters who inhabited the same universe and were integral to the plots of the original trilogy. Alas, Hollywood is bereft of original ideas these days. They think the "safe bets" are reboots, retreads, and re-use of classic cinema. Personally I'm glad Solo flopped. Maybe it'll force Hollywood to come up with something at least partially original for a change.
Disney tried to copy Marvel's success a bit too much and it bit them. However, I'd argue the enormous decline in quality to be at least as responsible as the rapid release schedule.
Perhaps the two are related? With a bit more time between releases, TLJ's script might've gotten in front of more people and given them more chances to tell Rian Johnson and Kathleen Kennedy they were supposed to be making a Star Wars movie instead of contemporary political commentary. Lord knows Mark Hamill did everything he could to tell them it was dreck.
Perhaps the gaping plot holes, illogical character actions, and inconsistency with decades of in-universe lore have something to do with it?
Just a thought.
Plus the flagships tend to hold their value better
Only recently has this even been partly true. The cryptocurrency bubble created insane demand which artificially inflated video card prices. Case in point: I bought an RX580 almost two years ago for about $250. Less than a year ago that same card was going for almost $350 on Amazon. Only recently has it finally fallen back to what I originally paid for it.
What *used* to happen was cards were rapidly made obsolete by advances in video card tech. A $1000 card would be worth half that in a year and be worth less than an entry-level card two years later. Advances in DirectX tech also made cards obsolete that might otherwise have been mildly competitive since the older cards didn't support the latest DX version.
Video card tech has, IMO, stagnated over the last couple of years. Instead of getting 50% performance increases with each new generation, advances are now more like 10%-25% and shrinking. DX versioning also slowed. I think we're reaching a point of diminishing returns. nVidia hopes to bypass this with the "killer new feature" angle in the form of RTX. However, RTX suffers from the classic "chicken and egg" problem: there aren't many games that will take advantage of it, so there's little incentive to buy the card; meanwhile game developers won't implement the features until there's a large base of cards that will take advantage of it.
If RTX (or some AMD equivalent) can be shifted down in price to the midrange market *then* people might adopt it en masse because it's a no-brainer. But wide adoption of real-time raytracing tech ain't gonna happen so long as it's exclusive to cards hovering around -- or in some cases above -- the $1000 price point.
And yet, three or four years later, the death toll due to radiation is...wait, let me check again...yup, still zero. Care to try again?
Just bought a Samsung 4K TV. Samsung, of course, does data gathering. It's in the EULA and you can't say no to it. However, I don't watch cable. I watch everything through my Vero 4K+ and my Plex library, which Samsung can't track. Screw you Samsung.
I also recently got AT&T's fiber Internet, replacing the loathsome Comcast I'd put up with for two years because they were the only high-speed option. AT&T, of course, wants to track my Internet usage. So I use a VPN for everything. Screw you AT&T.
Now Sony wants to limit what apps you can put on their TV's? Screw you Sony. Not only will I not buy your products, but if I am ever in the position of being forced to use one, I'll find a way to deny you whatever you think you'll get out of me.
These heavy-handed actions by companies will only engender more of us to find ways to throw monkey wrenches into their plans. Bring it on. There's nothing I love more than screwing over companies who thinks their customers are suckers.
I'll take you one step further: in a corporate environment with thousands of PC's this would be effectively impossible. Right now there are tools to mass-deploy BIOS updates. Throw a physical requirement into the mix and all that becomes useless.
Clear as mud.
It's spelled MUD and what do Multi-User Dungeons have to do with a security thread you insensitive clod???
A midrange iMac will make you sooo happy.
A midrange Mac will cost you as much as a high-end PC while offering less functionality. I'm currently running a Core i7-4790K, a CPU launched in 2014 and discontinued in 2017. I picked up the CPU on eBay for $50. My prior CPU was a Core i5-2500K -- released in 2011 -- which is still running in my daughter's PC.
Apple makes its margin on its premium products, therefore their "midrange" products are more akin to low-end PC components. Apple has no incentive to offer you anything in the "value" segment as it would merely detract from forcing you to buy their premium line.
the populace still cannot rebel no matter how unsatisfied they become with the status quo
The ruled will always outnumber those who rule. An oppressive, controlling, authoritarian regime can only survive as long as it takes the ruled to realize they have nothing to lose by overthrowing the regime.
a known and well established narcissist, psychopath, compulsive liar, scammer, con-man and child molester
Wow! You do realize you just described pretty much every politician in office, right? If we held all elected officials to this standard, Washington would be a ghost town!
Not a bad idea, actually.
You seem to be out of the loop regarding something we call: news.
Then perhaps you'd be so good as to post a source link for your "news." Every article and news site I've read since the disaster says the death toll directly attributable to the meltdown is zero, precisely as the GP stated.
Should you present evidence from a reliable, unbiased source then I'm more than willing to accept it as fact. However, until then, all the "news" available on the accident refutes your assertion.
People who trust "news" they see on Facebook are about as dumb as the people who trust they're getting an "authentic Rolex" for $15 from a guy on the street.
Here's a tip: any news from *any* source should be (a) weighed for bias based on the source, (b) cross-referenced with a diverse selection of other sources to check validity, and (c) checked against *opposing* sources to see what -- if anything -- is being left out, exaggerated, etc.
Yes, I know that's actual *work* which people are loathe to do these days. However, if you're not going to put any effort into making sure your news isn't actually propaganda, you deserve what you get.
Given the typical pathetic performance of most sound bars, this isn't exactly a big hurdle to crow about. With 5.1 setups being so ridiculously cheap, sound bars are only for people too lazy to run speaker cable.
I'm not sure if you were being funny or not, but this is a horrible idea. Instead of the "best of both worlds" you're getting the worst of both. Read and write times will be gated by the speed of the mechanical drive, negating any SSD speed benefits. You'd be better off with two mechanical drives: same speed at much lower cost.
All the more reason to have some way of doing failure analysis on the failed component. If, for example, it died after prolong high temps, you know you've got a cooling issue and can perhaps do something about it. If you can't do an analysis, you have no way of knowing if there is something you can do to avoid -- or at least reduce the possibility of -- future failures of the same type.
Do you get this anxious when a RAM module fails? There really is no difference between a RAM module failing and a SSD failing...
Uhh...people don't usually store critical files in volatile RAM. Kind of a huge difference there. Further, RAM failures may crash the computer but it rarely destroys anything else in the process. A mass storage failure -- be it HDD or SSD -- virtually guarantees you'll lose whatever data you had on it. Your only recourse is RAID (which isn't an option on most laptops) or some sort of backup (which is difficult to enforce on mobile users).
Yes, you can blame users all day long for not backing up their data. It doesn't help when you're still responsible for IT as a whole. The problem lands on your desk whether you want it or not.
True, but that doesn't explain sudden, catastrophic SSD failure. Modern controllers remap bad blocks to the "spare area" on all SSD's. Keeping track of said blocks can offer a modicum of failure prediction. Indeed, many high-quality drives -- and nearly all enterprise drive arrays -- do exactly that.
None of it matters if the onboard controller itself dies, and such failures cannot be predicted nor can they be analyzed. That's what the OP was lamenting. The only possible remedy is to avoid that brand/model in the future, assuming that's even an option (and with Dell/HP/Lenovo it frequently isn't since the OEM's will only warranty and replace OEM equipment).
I didn't keep paperwork. I'm not a goddam analyst. If someone wanted to do that, fine. Just don't bother to tell me.
Good God, do you realize what a walking, talking epitome you are of the worst aspects of someone in IT? Condescend much? I've been in this industry for almost three decades. The absolute worst IT people in existence are the ones who treat humans exactly as you are treating them. It doesn't matter one whit how much of a technical genius you might be if you can't understand you're not just working on machines for the sake of the machines. You're working on tools that people depend upon to do their jobs. Your dismissive attitude towards the human factors of this job is inexcusable. It creates a hostile environment between users and IT that doesn't need to exist. It's a damn good thing you don't work in my IT shop. I'd have fired you for something like this no matter how "good" you were with the gear.
I guarantee that even after you fixed whatever was wrong with the WAN, the people you interacted with said "what a fucking asshole, I hope we never have to deal with him again" instead of "man, that guy did a fantastic job and I'm going to tell his boss how happy we are with his work!" But I'm guessing this is probably something you could care less about anyway. Good luck with your career. You'll need it.
Nobody sells one because such a device cannot be built. Entropy always wins in the end.
"Look: I got just so many hours in the day. I live and breathe computer shit and I spend all my time studying and experimenting with the crap that supports your business. You're a law firm. You need to shuffle documents and you have no use for a propeller head using your equipment, on your dime, learning stuff that's not relative to the income stream."
You must be all kinds of fun at parties, but I digress.
For a small firm I agree it's usually pointless to do a failure analysis. However, if you're dealing with a larger company, failure analysis is crucial. Otherwise you could be replacing a failed unit with one that's just as failure prone because you don't know why it failed. Warranties are great but they don't replace lost data and/or downtime due to device failure. RAID and backups aren't magically 100% effective. I think what the OP is lamenting is there isn't even the slightest possibility of doing any analysis even if you have the time to do it.
Don't blame the OS. Blame "no backups." Failure should be expected and accounted for with a backup plan.
While I am the first to agree to this at the enterprise server level, it's far more difficult for the consumer or typical desktop user, especially for laptop users. RAID isn't always an option for laptops (frequently it's impossible) so you're left with some sort of external (USB or Thunderbolt) backup device or cloud storage. The former is difficult for road warriors and is nearly impossible to schedule since it's manually attached. The latter depends on an always-on Internet connection to have current backups.
My strategy was for laptop/desktop users to have their My Documents (and any other crucial directories) mirrored using OneDrive (included with Office365). It worked most of the time but nothing could be done if a drive failed while someone wasn't connected to the Internet. Any changes made since the last sync were irretrievably lost.
Doesn't help if the controller fails. SLC flash has better write longevity but none of that matters if the controller bombs.
Further, a sudden, catastrophic failure is (by process of elimination) almost certainly a controller failure. No matter if you're using SLC/MLC/TLC/etc. flash, cells don't die en masse. They usually die a little at a time. The controller expects this and remaps bad blocks to the spare area. Keeping track of spare area usage is one of the best ways to predict impending failure. If the controller fails then all that is for nothing even though (theoretically) all your data is still perfectly preserved on the flash itself.
Should possession of a narrative be a basis for risk assessment? No.
Yes, it should, although only if the narrative doesn't involve a single case of failure. If you have multiple failures of a single brand or model, you should use that to inform future purchasing decisions. Knowing the cause of the failure could further inform. Random failures are to be expected but if multiple failures caused by the same defect occurring in a given product line or due to a specific environment (workload, temperature, etc.) then you have some useful data to make future product selection with.
The OP is lamenting the paucity of any kind of failure data. Basically he's left with the decision to forego purchasing that model -- or even that entire brand -- hoping it will improve reliability. Hope is not a strategy for engineers. We prefer data.
I think you may be missing his point. I've had SSD's die on me as well with absolutely no warning. What's unnerving about it is you have no idea why it failed. Good engineers like failure analysis; it helps determine if you're buying a crappy product, running your product out of spec, or any number of other metrics which can inform future purchases.
Mechanical drives usually give you some indicator of why they failed in the form of horrible noises. SSD's don't give you much of anything. If neither SMART nor spare block allocation figures are out of spec you have nothing to go on. I've chalked these up to the controller on the drive itself failing but that's just a guess. I have no way to perform any additional diagnostics that might tell me more. As a result, I've simply avoided buying drives of that brand anymore. Crude, yes, but what other metrics can I use? I'm not talking about a single drive. It's happened to multiple drives of a similar make/model, all of which failed suddenly and gave no data afterwards I could use forensically.