Thrawn

I have always seen the soft/hard sci-fi as a sliding scale. I imagine it is like the mohs scale for minerals with diamonds as a 10.

Stuff like 2001 A Space Odyssey is a solid 10 until after HAL is shutdown and even with the bizarre ending it is fully in the "sufficiently advanced tech is indistinguishable from magic" and still something like 8.5-9

Star Trek is pretty good about being internally consistent and having day to day stuff be pretty grounded but there is so much purely nonsense trecknobable that I only consider it a 6 out of 10.

Very different story and world but I would rate Stargate about the same. Maybe actually a bit higher. Mostly because it is a newer series that was better able to track its own weird stuff it had claimed and keep it consistent.

Star Wars something like 4.5. still gets ok because of mostly internal consistency but definitely leans strongly the fantasy elements that are mixed in.

Absolutely. Used to work at a small MSP. Got ultra unlucky in that we got chosen as the rest case target for a zero day that leveraged our Remote Support tools so our own systems and all of our client systems that were online got hit with ransomware in a very short time frame.

Some clients had local backups to Synology boxes and those worked ok thankfully. However all the rest had backups based on Hyper-V. The other local copy was on a second windows server that also got hit so the local copies didn't help. They did also have a remote copy which wasn't encrypted.

So all good right? Just pull the remote backup copy and apply that.... Yea every time we had ever used the service before had either been single servers that physically died and took disks along on the death or just file level restores.

Those all worked fine. Still sounds like not a problem right? Nope. We found both that a couple of the larger servers had backups that didn't actually have everything in spite of being VM images. No idea how their software even was able to do that.

And the worse part was that their data transfer rate was insanely slow. About 10mbps. Not that per server or par client. Nope that was the max export rate across everything. It would have taken literally months to restore everything at that rate.

I hate to say it but yes we did in fact pay the ransom and the. Had to fight for several days going through getting things decrypted. Then going through months of reinstalling fresh copies and/or putting in new servers. Also changing our entire stack at the same time. Shockingly we handled it well enough we lost no clients. Largely because we were able to prove we couldn't have known ahead of time.

If you read through all that I'll even say the vendors name. It was StorageCraft. I now have a deep hate for them.

Also one more is that with the old Apple HFS+ filesystem based time machine backups it would sometimes report as a valid self checked backup even if it had corruption. It would do this as long as some self check confirmed that it could fix the corruption during a restore. However if you tried directly browsing through the time machine backups it would have files that couldn't be read, unless again you did a full system restore with it.

Nearly lost my wife's semester ending before finding it worked that way.

I can't confirm it but seems it is fully fixed with APFS and might be one of the reasons they spent the effort to make that transition.

Also a self reply to add that I don't use the downmix because I got lucky and in addition to free old PC hardware which most people in the USA at least can also get free or cheap if you are creative with old business hardware. The addition is I got an AV Receiver just barely new enough to support HDMI so I do have the full range of channels on very cheap speakers.

Having used Kodi elsewhere the downmix seems to work just fine and a lot of current and still fairly cheap sound bars can interpret surround mixes directly.

Nope although it has that as an option as well. There are two options I use. The first is to boost the center channel on surround mixes since the voice is almost always on that channel.

Then more specifically in Kodi there is both a main volume option and a separate volume boot option that if you look into the documentation says that it is able to increase volume differently by moving up the middle of the audio while reducing the dynamic range. In other words reducing the difference between the lowest and highest sounds so it can increase it without clipping.

I basically change the main volume to what I want and then since both main and boost use the same numbers I reduce it by the exact same number I increase the boost level. End result is moving the bottom and middle of the audio volume closer.

In an ideal setup like a literal quiet audience in a full IMAX or with studio monitor grade headphones etc. the dynamic range is nice. Let's you hear talking normally and then get blown away by the action right at the top of the safe listening range. Or for classical orchestra music the quiet solot small instrument then a full booming with the entire band going.

But in reality I have five kids running around. Even in stuff like Pixar I still like having a fairly aggressive setting for the boost. It lets me set a default fairly aggressive one and then only occasionally need to edit it manually from the default for particular movies.

Every time I see a thread like this I feel the same way.

Sure I have to admit there are downsides to it but oh my goodness the number of benefits from running something like Kodi is huge. If you are willing to take a hit to dynamic range of your audio you can fix all but the most extreme cases of audio level problems. I'm sure there are a bunch of other ways to handle it as well.

Control from a phone app once you have Kodi open works great.

Windows or Linux at your preference.

Only ever used old free hardware too so the complaints about the cost of a PC never made sense to me either.

Totally valid feeling but also monopoly was designed to intentionally be awful to get across the point that real monopolies are terrible for the world. So arguably it is exactly how you should feel about it.

Yea it is a case of found it years ago and worked so incredibly well I haven't had the slightest interest in using anything else.

Excellent track from CT. How about one extra since you like Mitsuda's work with Chrono Trigger.

This is from an orchestrated reimagining of some of the music of Xenogears. Not some fan project either, made by Mitsuda himself.

Xenogears Creid - 03 Balto https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UwnNVOl4fx

I would put something from the Kirite album form him but it is basically not available anywhere for streaming at least not in English searchable websites. I did find a torrent for it along with hundreds of other songs of his but didn't want to go that far in sharing on this sort of thread.

I'll add that I probably should have just posted a Chrono Trigger track in the first place since while I'm unsure of my favorite music the game itself has been my personal number one game for a couple decades now.

Theme Song for The Secret of Monkey Island (Using the Roland MT-32 which was an external and semi professional music synth device for those that aren't familiar)

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i3dB0qEcG20

And to show what the difference is and why I find it amazing here is a comparison with just a few seconds of the song on each of a bunch of different sound devices. This was possible with live synth at home in 1990 or actually earlier but this is one of the best examples.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a324ykKV-7Y

Like many people I'm not sure I actually have a real favorite but this is what came to mind first along with several songs from the Chrono Trigger soundtrack. Chrono Trigger is also one of the shining examples of taking a limited older sound device and wringing every last drop of capability out of it. So clearly an obsession of mine with music is created under technical limitations.

One of the top well known examples is Mr. Rogers. Very deeply Christian on a personal level but, to the best I'm aware, he never brought it up on his show.

I also agree that the fast talking Han messing with a hick kid is the better option.

However I have to at the same time admit that if you are going to make it actually hold up as something literally accurate then it is one of the best retcon jobs ever written to actually make it work.

Sadly it comes from one of the more painful old expanded universe series because Kyp Durron is one of the most insufferable overly perfect wonder kids ever written. Plus also being the books with the Sun Crusher which is fighting for the most overkill super weapon in all of Star Wars. Which is really saying something considering the huge range of super weapons through the franchise.

Ugh I guess I'm going to be this type of fan.

I like both universes but the "they will just get a transporter lock and teleport everyone" is an awful argument that shows a very bad lack of understanding of Star Trek.

There are hundreds of examples of transporters not working. Shields which even the tiny falcon does have are a constant example. Even past that there are tons of other cases. They don't work in storms, through thick rock, through unusual armor/metal, around jamming which is used basically universally in Star Wars on anything larger or more expensive than a Tie Fighter.

Those are just the ones off the top of my head and there are at least a dozen more. It is one of the top plot lines used in every series.

In a fight the falcon just runs away since even mid grade Star Wars ships have radically faster FTL.

Now if you ignore the running away yes the tiny falcon probably does lose to most or maybe even all of the Trek hero ships. It is a smuggler ship that can just run past blockades if it gets flagged.

Actual combat ships are far harder to figure out. Star Wars deals with a massively larger scale of ship size, total energy output, and FTL speed. At first glance that seems like an obvious win and in a full galaxy scale conflict probably does go to Star Wars.

But any single ship to ship combat especially with the hero ships the range of gadgets/tricks on the Star Trek side is massively in their favor. The rate they pick up tech charges probably would largely even out the tech difference in a galaxy wide fight as well. However that doesn't solve the scale difference. Maybe convince the Borg to produce ships with stolen FTL and hypermatter reactors so they can produce enough at scale quickly.

Edit - I just realized that while the transporter argument doesn't generally hold water it would totally work on all the cheap Tie Fighter pilots. LOL. That would be so funny to watch.