These guys are out of business anyway. They don’t have to care; they can just dump whatever they have somewhere and scuttle off into the night, never to be seen again, nothing more than an echoing “woop woop woop woop” fading off into the distance.

They’ve been handed a rare and highly valuable treasure. They get all the good will from the community for doing the one thing that everyone always wants these companies to do but never happens, and this is now someone else’s problem.

If you’re going to have a problem, someone else’s problem is the best kind to have.

Yeah, but everybody knew those were a stupid fucking idea from the start. I didn’t and still don’t feel much sympathy for the people who deliberately bought one of those solely for its intended purpose and then got the rug pulled out from under them.

Ooh! Ooh! Ooh! I know this one!

It’s D) All of the above.

And you can grab a rando bottom-of-the-barrel 12TB from Amazon for about $0.0095825/GB (not GiB).

Dead Cells: The leading cause of gamepad breakages among PC players. 9 out of 10 ninjas agree.

Reigned: 👑

Reined: 🐎

Another factor to add is that major retailers use anything they throw away as a tax write-off “loss” and they are therefore extremely cagey about giving any of it away for any reason, even to employees, I guess because if this is found out it could have some kind of implications, I dunno.

My nephew works for Target and apparently they do this. He tells me a manager will stand there and watch them crushing perfectly good floor model TV’s and other electronics in the trash compactor so he can sign off that they did it and none of those items were used for any beneficial purpose whatsoever, because weaseling out of $0.02 in taxes is apparently more worthwhile to corporate than giving a dedicated employee a new but slightly scuffed TV they were going to throw away anyway.

It’s positively infuriating. I’m sure the perishable goods/food sector is even worse.

For the context of bulk consumer storage (or even SOHO NAS) that’s irrelevant, though, because people are already happily using spinning mechanical 3.5" hard drives for this purpose, and they’re all already SATA. Therefore there’s no logical reason to worry about the physical size or slower write speeds of packing a bunch of flash chips into the same sized enclosure for those particular use cases.

There are reasons a big old SSD would be suitable for this. Silence, reliability, no spin up delay, resistance to outside mechanical forces, etc.

Here is the anti-story to the above:

Back when I was in school I needed a handful of 35mm film canisters for some damn fool project or another. I don’t remember exactly what I was planning to use them for. So I went to the local camera store and asked the clerk there if I could just buy like 20 or 30 empty film canisters figuring they’d have a fair few lying around. This was, of course, in the days when 35mm film was still the predominant photography standard, and consumer grade digital cameras that could even achieve one real world megapixel were very new, very exciting, and very expensive.

Apparently I was right, because they guy said, “Good god, please take some” and gave me an entire shopping bag full of the damn things. For free. Apparently just to be rid of them.

I was using film canisters to store everything and anything for years after that.

I don’t think anyone has much issue with our current write speeds, even at dinky old SATA 6/GB levels. At least for bulk media storage. Your OS boot or game loading, whatever, maybe not. I’d be just fine with exactly what we have now, but just pack more chips in there.

Even if you take apart one of the biggest, meanest, most expensive 8TB 2.5" SSD’s the casing is mostly empty inside. There’s no reason they couldn’t just add more chips even at the current density levels other than artificial market segmentation, planned obsolescence, and pigheadedness. It seems the major consumer manufacturers refuse to allow their 2.5" SSD’s to get out of parity with the capacities on offer in the M.2 form factor drives that everyone is hyperfixated on for some reason, and the pricing structure between 8TB and what few greater than 8 models actually are on offer is nowhere near linear even though the manufacturing cost roughly should be.

If people are still willing to use a “full size” 3.5" form factor with ordinary hard drives for bulk storage, can you imagine how much solid state storage you could cram into a casing that size, even with current low-cost commodity chips? It’d be tons. But the only options available are “enterprise solutions” which are apparently priced with the expectation you’ll have a Fortune 500 or government expense account.

It’s bullshit all the way down; there’s nothing new under the sun in that regard.

Current ones also store multiple charge levels per cell, so they’re no longer one bit each. They have multiple levels of “punch” for what used to just be one bit.

Yeah, a shotgun is probably a better choice.

It’s bully for the device if it knows, but that doesn’t help the user who has just pulled one identical looking cable out of many from the drawer and will have no idea until they plug it in whether or not they will get a picture, nothing, near-undiagnosable partial functionality, or smoke.

I wish manufacturers would bother to mark the capabilities of their otherwise identical looking ports and cables, so we could figure out what the hell we were looking at when holding a Device That Does Not Work in one hand and a cable in the other.

INB4 locked.

…Do people still say that? Is it still a thing?

FSLPT: A staggering variety of everyday objects can be used as a weapon if you are sufficiently motivated and/or pissed off.

I am certain, for instance, that I could do someone quite a mischief if I whacked them with my ThinkPad.

That wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest. For what it’s worth, it wasn’t even part of an arcade. Just standing forlornly by itself in the center of the concourse of a largely empty section of the mall. I know these things are typically privately operated and not part of the mall itself or whatever establishment they’re in. There may or may not have been a bank of gumball machines behind it, I don’t remember.

Anyway, that mall got bulldozed a couple of years ago and given the state it was in, I wouldn’t be surprised if that machine were still in it at the time. And good riddance.

Pelicans have stupid stumpy little legs, basically no talons because they have webbed ducklike feet, and are able to apply very little biting force with their beaks due to the length. Pelicans feed by scooping things up and swallowing them whole. They don’t bite, tear, or chew. I’ve never seen one try to peck anything. They’re certainly not built for that.

If you grabbed a pelican by the beak I think there is vanishingly little it could actually do to you aside from squirming and flapping feathers all over the place. You should be fairly clear to yeet the thing into the ocean at your own convenience.

Here’s the story about those damn cut-the-string machines I repeat every time I see one of these.

There used to be one on my local dying mall. Noticing this, and being the clever dick that I am, I came by one day with a powerful laser and cheesed it by slicing the string in half right through the glass.

I subsequently found out that the iPad box that was dangling from the string was, in fact, empty. No “call this number and use this coupon to redeem your prize.” Just, empty. Too bad about your fifty cents, kid. Get fucked.

Do you know, I don’t feel bad in the slightest about cheating that damn machine.

Wow, I can’t believe I get to dredge up this ancient photo again:

(Obviously this is satire. I furthermore still haven’t quite made peace with the fact that every single item on Daniel Rutter’s web site can now be considered “retro.”)