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Absurd and unsafe platforms at this point are a stylistic mark for SW. The last location in Rogue One can almost be explained (antenna operator “needs” to see the antenna as he moves it), but the one of Erso’s death is preposterous: here’s a bunch of engineers soaking in the rain on an unsafe landing platform while a (equally wet) supervisor talks about this and that. Couldn’t they do it equally well in a meeting room inside, especially considering they are less than a dozen? No, because it’s Star Wars and people in SW live on unsafe platforms exposed to the elements, as much as they possibly can.
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Because they’re indicative of tech. You see those wireframe images, those trippy visualizations, and (a personal weakness of mine) some nice software rendered 3D like Quake, Daggerfall, or Thief (the original) and they viscerally feel like technology. There’s no chance for your brain to fill in with the plausibility of it being real, and we don’t associate those looks with hand-drawn art, so it feels technological.
Also Tron implanted pretty hard in our collective conscious.
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Buoyed along by all those resultant “hacker” movies in the 90’s… which were visually cribbing from Tron…
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I would argue that getting everybody to wait outside in the rain for his arrival was just a typical power-trip by Kennic.
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If Star Wars has any problems it’s NOTHING to do with the data formats. I feel you might be over analysing this a touch.
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Forget data storage for a minute … would someone care to explain to me wtf this Yavin 4 guy’s job is?
I always assumed he was scanning approaching spacecraft for security reasons, but then it dawned on me that by the time this guy detected dangerous enemy craft, they’d probably all be dead. Might I suggest some kind of large scale planetary radar? Or maybe radar would give their location away? In which case OMFG amazing the rebels lasted that long in the first place.
My other thought is that’s he with the spaceship inventory department, and he’s merely checking craft in and out of the system.
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I bet if you check on Wookieepedia he has a whole biography.
EDIT: Yep.
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In cubic volume but not in any other way.
Suppose we use the old school high bandwidth data transfer method - a VW microbus packed with hard drives. At 300 megabytes per second (max sata 3 speeds, which you aren’t going to get anywhere near with regular hard drives) it will take 3.3 million seconds of computer time to transfer your 1pb of data to backup. Call it a month. Distribute it over 200 5tb hard disks (The most cost-effective way to store a petabyte), and you need 4+ hours to copy your data. And you have 200 potential points of failure where the backup can fail, the drive can die, or you somehow lose track of part 39/200 of your backup set. And a lot of man hours to gather all those hard drives and,pack them on the truck.
But transmitting it over the internet is hardly any better. Assuming you can somehow get exclusive access to an internet backbone connection, it will still take 6 hours to get the data cross country at 400 gigabits per second. That’s not allowing for packet overhead or for bandwidth back the other way to do validation and error checking. Any bottlenecks or downtime in the data pipe will balloon that to days or weeks.
The fact that we can now store a petabyte in the trunk of your car does not mean that handling such huge amounts of data has become any less of a nightmare than it used to be before the era of 10tb hard disks.
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That’s about how I saw it. In the case of Rogue One you can assume that data pack they stole was raw data of the plans of a moon sized facility and perhaps a shit ton of holographic videos of all the communications during the process of designing the place. Lots of crap and who has time to sort that all out while you are running around inside a facility like that and being shot at?
They have a hard enough time transmitting a visual hologram without it glitching out so trying to send all that data more than to obit is out of the question.
Once they get the data on the Tantive IV it gets handed off to a team of people that search the damn thing for the small bits of data they need and that gets handed to Lea on some sort of smaller device that gets loaded on to R2D2.
The idea that there are a metric shit ton of weird formats would actually stand to reason on a galactic empire that . Can you imagine the arguments that would occur with over 3 million populated planets on data formats?
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Hard problems underlie public key crypto, but if you had to, you could build out an architecture using only symmetric-key systems, which, at least in principle, can be immune to brute-force attacks essentially forever. And failing that, you could use one-time pads although it would start to become something of a headache.
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Maybe somewhere out there there’s a spacefaring civilization that enjoys pulpy sci-fi movies about a society that has fanciful, far-out technology like high definition color video displays or portable touchscreen communication devices that can post users’ status updates into a high-speed, planet-wide data network.
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Can you imagine what Unicode would look like?
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Interesting idea, but I always assumed that all the ways data is treated in Star Wars are screwy for the same reason that all tech is screwy in Star Wars - because it’s a fantasy series rather than sci-fi. The technology is basically magic, or a stand-in for something you’d find in mediaeval society - peasants, hand-written tomes, etc.
Specifically a fairy tale.
I do wonder if the decades where wireframes actually were high tech, starting with a time when wireframes had to be pre-rendered and until fairly recently when they represented real-time graphics, if this didn’t simply last long enough to cement the idea of them as high-technology into the culture. The way various elements became representative of futuristic in past eras - e.g. finned vehicles, skyscrapers, elevated roadways.
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The Maltese Falcon
It’s the ship that made the Kessel Run in less than twelve parsecs.
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I remember I was working on a project once and the client asked me to envision the most advanced, most futuristic robot voice and I thought, “well, I guess one that is natural and indistinguishable from human,” but of course that’s not at all what they wanted.
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In the same series…
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“She’s dying… of a broken heart,” diagnosed the medical droid programmed to avoid a malpractice suit at all costs.
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