** Twitches **
Throw on top of this the fact we are talking about an empire that spanned 3 million civilized worlds of many different species. Imagine the task of cat-herding millions of races into specific technical standards while not at war?
Heck with a voice chip, why didn’t droids come with their own radios, so 3PO wouldn’t lose touch with Luke, Leia and Han in the garbage masher because “Opps! I left my com link on a table. Opps! I forgot, I turned it off!”
Maybe it’s only an option if you’re a droid.
I love this bit
Since tweeting about the OB/GYN plot hole, I’ve received countless messages from men who are furious with me about letting “feminism ruin” Revenge of the Sith, which might be the first time that fans have ever crawled out of the woodwork to defend Star Wars prequels.
Heck, that was the plot of a whole Schwarzenegger movie ~20 years ago. That robot (all windows and virtually no tape shelves) seemingly spent the whole movie transporting a single tape from shelf to shelf.
Maybe I was just bitter that our Storagtek system (several silos interconnected in a honeycomb shape) was all tapes, no windows. There was nothing to see.
TBH I always thought he was a futuristic one-man-band control tower, ensuring craft speeds and directions were ok for landing; or emitting some sort of tracking signal to help crafts land. After all, rebel bases are supposed to be hasty affairs, so they might be doing manually what is usually accomplished by tech in larger establishments.
I don’t think he was ever supposed to have a defensive function. This guy is Rebel FAA.
Over-analysing Star Wars is a problem now?
Did you join the internet last week?
Wow. The very first UNIX system I built had me booting SunOS 4.1 from a QIC cartridge just like the one depicted in the article. I think it was a SPARCserver 670MP.
ok boot tape -s
Memories, man.
Bazillions of Gungan emojis.
FTFY .
And, in an ironic twist, it also contains the video capture of a city basement, with a locked cabinet, guarded by a tiger. The city hall basement has no stairs. But, should one look in the drawer, they’d find - in a packet labelled “Do Not Read!” - a notice that a certain house was to be demolished.
The planet was soon demolished thereafter.
This article perfectly illustrates the collision between what people want from films. For most, it’s about wanting an entertaining diversion. For others, it’s about wanting world building, and any inconsistencies give them a case of cognitive dissonance.
The original article is fun, but chock full of assumptions, and betrays a heartbreaking lack of imagination. What happens in the films does, because it does. No further explanation needed.
But there are a thousand entertaining scenarios that could explain the apparent discrepancies in the formats. Who says the Geonesian disc contains the Death Star plans? Maybe it’s just a key that unlocks them? Maybe it’s a special hyper-compressed format that’s unstable long-term and unsuitable for archiving? Maybe the Empire’s data format is larger but super-stable? Maybe the smaller formats are super-expensive? We are archiving films here on earth on 35mm rather than electronically because they’re stable, not because they’re smaller.
More to the point, who gives a pair of fetid dingo’s kidneys? It’s a pointless argument that goes against the spirit of the films. Don’t bring a Star Trek critique to a Star Wars fight.
Ugh, I’m arguing about Star Wars on the internet. Slow day.
It is quite true that “Just divide total size by capacity of HDD” is not a viable strategy without considerable manual fiddling and a lot of luck; but the contemporary increases in drive size have made the substantially easier for things in the PB range. If you want roughly RAID6 amounts of redundancy, 240 5TB disks should be enough, or 120 10TBs; but 1TB disks would have involved 1,200 drives.
Purely for example’s sake, Dell is offering 4U/60x3.5in SAS enclosures for dense storage customers. With contemporary disks, you could have your petabyte hanging off a single server in either 8 or 16U. Not inexpensive or tiny; but not overwhelming.
With 1TB disks, you’d fill an entire 72U and still have two disk enclosures without homes; and need substantially more HBAs to drive it all.
A petabyte is hardly something one slings about casually; but going from something that will require the better part of two racks and multiple hosts to something you can do in 12-24U, all directly attached to a single server of no exceptional virtue, is a fair improvement in convenience.
One of my first jobs was loading data from 2 Gb DAT tapes into an Oracle database running on SunOS. Talk about boring…I’d show up at a customer site with a box full of tapes and spend a whole week executing the same tar command over and over and over.
Kids these days have no idea…
Yes, it’s much easier to store a PB of data now than it used to be. That doesn’t change the problem that the bandwidth for moving that amount of data around has not kept pace with the increase in storage capacities. A 5 or 10tb disk basically has the same bandwidth bottleneck as a 1tb disk from years ago.
When you consider all the other scientific anomalies we witness in the Star Wars films, the weirdness of their computers is par for the course. In “The Force Awakens” I was struck by how Starkiller Base can fire a weapon at a planet that is in a different star system and it doesn’t take years for the energy to reach the target (plus on Takodana they can look up in the sky and see Starkiller Base firing its weapon, yet they are on a planet also supposedly light years away, and during daylight hours too.)
I was going to say basically the same thing. Trying to explain the science behind Star Wars has about as much chance as trying to explain the science behind Doctor Who. And that chance is zero because there isn’t any. Star Wars and Doctor Who aren’t sci-fi. They’re fantasy. Therefore, absolutely everything can be explained by either the force or a sonic screwdriver.
I always thought it made the most sense if he was on a break, and liked to collect images of various spacecraft, like a birder or a trainspotter. So he would go up to the absurd little tower and wait for a new ship to add to his collection.
‘Ooh, a Falcon, cool. The guys on /shipnerds will never believe I saw one in the wild!’
Massive security weakness to be collecting images of all the Rebel ships of course, but whatever. It makes more sense than a sentry watching for any ships that haven’t just nuked them from orbit.
