Yo, Tech Tails readers! Spring is here, sort of! Since I am writing this on the Friday before Tech Tails Tuesday, and taking into account we live in Vermont, there’s a very real possibility that by the time you read this, Vermont will be recovering from a record breaking Nor’Easter. So I’ll go ahead and […]
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Solid state, not as solid as it could be?
It’s not like there’s a much better option at the moment, SSDs are crazy fast and getting faster every year. It turns out that flash-based memory, the storage that all modern machines are coming equipped with, has it’s drawbacks like anything else. Before you all riot, I will point out that Apple and drive manufacturers have worked really hard to find the best vNAND PCIe based storage. Just like they’ve have worked to get the most reliable RAM, to the point that it’s integrated into most MLBs these days. When it comes to building these chips there is still only so much that the industry is capable of.
Don’t get me wrong! I love Solid State storage and it’s definitely the future of our hardware in so many ways, however, I have seen a few issues here and there specifically in regards to their longevity and consistency. Though these symptoms are also just indicative of drive failure in general, I’d like to point out that many conventional rotational Hard Disk Drives or even the older more hard-coded tape backups can last for many years without any power applied to them and left on a shelf to get dusty. If you did that to an SSD, even in the slim chance it powered on again, it likely would be corrupted and have no data to access or it would experience slowness and freezing. Even with their drawbacks, the future is SSD drives. They remain more reliable and significantly faster than spinning drives. They are the new standard for internal storage, just do not get comfy having anything stored on your internal drive by itself. You will always need to have a back up no matter how reliable to drive is boasted to be. Apple encourages iCloud backup and sync along with regular time machine backups for a reason, any drive has the ability to fail, no matter how solid it is claimed to be.
When it comes to solid-state drives the manufacturers seem to be improving and learning from past mistakes over the years. Apple has worked to integrate the SSDs into the MLB of the 2016/2017 MacBook Pros equipped with the Touch Bar and four ThunderBolt 3 ports a lot more reliable, but please don’t forget to backup! Remember, we can never say it enough, your data is not safe in only one place. All storage can fail, and expect that to happen to you at some point. Preparing means that should your drive fail, you will significantly reduce your downtime.
Hello, Tech Tails readers!
Happy first Tech Tails article of the spring season! As I’ve mentioned in previous articles, spring is my favorite of all seasons. The brisky mornings, afternoon sunshine, chilly evenings and the waning and waxing temperatures certainly keeps one on their toes. And that could not ring truer than it did this past weekend. In the Burlington area, we were just shy of a 60º day on Saturday afternoon- glorious! I could not have asked for a better weekend to relocate into a new apartment. And if I may subtly pitch some of our home automation products, I am beyond excited to get my new living space decked out in Homepod and some Philips Hue bulbs and strips, for starters. I highly recommend keeping the idea of home automation in the back of your mind while you conduct your seasonal spring cleaning this year. You’re never too late to hop on the evolving home automation market. Sometimes folks will ask me, “What’s so cool about home automation?” to which I respond, “You ever seen 2001: A Space Odyssey? It’s like that only without the monkeys.” After that, it’s easy to venture down the rabbit-hole and demonstrate the wide-reaching and ever-expanding utility our home automation products have. Next time you’re in a Small Dog Electronics, tell a sales associate you want to see some of the cool features our home automation products have. You won’t be disappointed! Come to think of it, if you swing by our South Burlington store, there’s a very good chance our friend Erich Sullivan is already preaching the gospel of home automation by the time you get there.
We have some good material for you in this edition of Tech Tails courtesy of myself and our friend and fellow technician, Moses Laporte. We hope you take something away from it. As always, we’re happy to answer any questions you may have.
Stay groovy, Tech Tails readers!
Connor “Keep calm and open the pod bay doors, HAL” McGinnis
connormcginnis@smalldog.com
The rise of eSports
I may be dating myself here… wait, scratch that. I am literally dating myself here, but when I was ten years old a movie came out called The Wizard, starring The Wonder Years’ Fred Savage and sponsored heavily by Nintendo. The story revolved around a pair of brothers on a cross-country journey to make it to the “Video Armageddon” video game championships in California to compete for a prize or something-or-other, it was all quite cliche but for my Super Mario-obsessed brain, it was incredible.
The concept that there were such things as “Video Game Championships” that thousands of people watched and participated in on the level of professional sports teams literally blew my mind. Little did I know that the first “Nintendo World Championships” of video games actually happened a year after the movie came out and was much less of an event than the movie had depicted and growing up in rural Vermont before the internet meant that even had there been a Video Armageddon every year, my elite skills in The Legend of Zelda would never get me there no matter how many times I got the Triforce.
Competitive electronic gaming or as it’s known today ‘eSports’ is clearly not new, but around the turn of the century when higher-speed internet became widely available, multiplayer games such as Counterstrike, Starcraft and League of Legends among many others spurred the development of national and international tournaments with cash prizes, scholarships, sponsored teams and finally the kind of recognition and following that allow someone to be an eSports athlete full-time.
When it began, amateur competitions drew a few thousand fans in person and over the Internet. In October 2013, 32 million people watched the championship of Riot Games’ League of Legends on streaming services such as Twitch and YouTube. That’s more viewers than the 2013 NBA Finals and MLB World Series combined.
Streaming services also provide a platform to earn big money for content creators. Twitch streamer Tyler “Ninja” Blevins recently revealed that he makes $500,000 per month streaming gameplay on Twitch but he cautions people eager to make money playing video games,
“You can’t just drop everything to focus on playing video games for a living. It’s also becoming a very competitive career choice. You want to make sure you’re securing your future while putting the extra time to make this happen as well.”
So where is this headed? The International Olympic Committee just made moves that may introduce eSports into the Olympic Games in the future, making statements addressing the challenges in dealing with the violent themes in many competitive games, and the strong male-heavy gender imbalance in the current pool of eSports athletes, neither of which reflect on the spirit of the Olympics. Regardless of this, the IOC officially recognized eSports as an actual sport in November, paving the way for big moves in the future.
As of yet, there’s no word on whether using the Power Glove™ would be considered an illegal performance-enhancement but I’ll be in training just in case.
