We benchmarked three of the popular Optane NVMe SSDs about three years ago. There was a short window when they were on clearance and a popular choice as a cache SSD in TrueNAS.
You can compare their benchmarks with the other almost 400 SSDs we've benchmarked. Most impressive is that three years later they are still the top random read QD1 performers, with no traditional flash SSD coming anywhere close:
They are amazing for how consistent and boring their performance is. Bit level access means no need for TRIM or garbage collection, performance doesn't degrade over time, latency is great, and random IO is not problematic.
Agreed... 5) is minor and just the result of saying "We're not going to bother trying to track if a file goes from having unsaved changes to not as a result of undo/redo - once a file gets marked as having unsaved changes, the only way to 'clear' that is to save the file again."
That option is much better than getting the undo/redo vs unsaved changes tracking wrong and allowing unsaved changes to be easily lost, like notepad does. :-P
So many NVMe/SATA drives that are locked/frozen during boot, and it turns out this is because the drives are actually behaving incorrectly when "security operations" are blocked on the drive. When "security operations" are blocked, you should not be able to set a password on the drive, but should be able to format it. So that's bug 1.
Most modern motherboards, on boot, will block "security operations" on a drive where the security password is set to the default (because it hasn't been manually set by the end-user). They do this to prevent malware from being able to set a password on a drive that hasn't had its password set. (Malware could set the password and I believe configure the drive to effectively brick it.)
But many (probably most) motherboards fail to correctly block "security operations" on a suspend/resume. This is bug 2, and makes suspend/resume often an effective workaround for a drive with bug 1, as well as a theoretical opportunity for malware to easily inflict damage on all drives that support "security operations".
So one generally ends up stuck and unable to securely erase their drive when it has bug 1 and is installed on a motherboard without bug 2. In this case, you have to hope your motherboard has a feature in its BIOS to, on next boot, not block security operations. Otherwise you're stuck and need to find another motherboard if you want to sanitize your drive, or hope that a firmware update for your drive resolves bug 1.
There was a lot of hype and momentum around Silverlight back in the day, until their wasn't. You got a cross-platform (Mac/Windows) WPF-like UI and C# programming environment, which was powerful.
I had the fortune to be involved developing the LEGO Mindstorms EV3 programming software. Under the hood, it was a small web browser shell (using Mono on Mac and WPF on Windows) around a Silverlight Out-of-Browser app. Anything beyond the permissions of the Silverlight app (e.g. bluetooth/USB comms) was an RPC from Silverlight to the shell.
After completing the Mac/Windows app, LEGO wanted to deliver a similar experience on iPad. There was no Silverlight there, and it was clear there never would be. But we were able to leverage Xamarin stuff to reuse most of the same codebase, just with an iOS UI on top.
By chance, do you happen to know if the Mindstorms NXT (the old one, before EV3) software was based on the same toolkit? I always wondered what UI framework it used, it had an unusual look.
It was not... it actually was, IIRC, a LabVIEW program with some tweaks here and there. The UI was basically a LabVIEW VI front panel with a LabVIEW 2D Picture Control. Most of the program logic and the compiler to the NXT was LabVIEW G code.
I wonder if the same kind of thing is at play when I ask my Google Home Mini to play a song (on Spotify) and it plays a version by a cover band instead of the real thing, despite my stating the song and band name.
For example, I'll say: "OK Google, Play 'Hey Jude' by 'The Beatles'". Sometimes I'll get that song. But many others I'll get "Hey Jude" by a Beatles tribute band... I wouldn't be surprised if the version by the tribute band is cheaper to play.
I think this is just Google Assistant being Google Assistant - It's awful at playing music, I've had Google Assistant play remixes, cover versions, or the right song but playing out of a 'Top Hits of x Year' or whatever compilation album instead of the original album.
However, whenever I used Spotify's own voice control via my Spotify Car Thing before they bricked it, it got me the exact song I wanted every single time, so I doubt there's some nefarious scheme on Spotify's part.
Someone in another comment said that artists don't even get paid if they have <1000 streams. I wonder if Spotify does anything to spread things around to try to keep as many artists as possible under that 1000 streams cap so that they don't have to pay for them.
Indeed! I just came back to post the exact same adjective after purchasing one as a Christmas gift for my teenage son. I think he'll love it, and I'm excited to get him such a cool present that he doesn't even know exists! (Though as spiffy as this is, there's a good chance that's not true by Christmas.)
Congrats on the launch and bravo on such a well-polished everything - product, UI, website, etc. Very impressive.
The one degree angle, while a little unusual, isn't what blows my mind. It's the disappearance after a small scroll. That's enough to make you think you were imagining things, might need to go to the eye doctor, etc...
Agreed. Spent a couple minutes trying to figure out how I was reading it wrong for several of the categories - sometimes it is correct, but often it is not.
https://pcpartpicker.com/forums/topic/425127-benchmarking-op...
You can compare their benchmarks with the other almost 400 SSDs we've benchmarked. Most impressive is that three years later they are still the top random read QD1 performers, with no traditional flash SSD coming anywhere close:
https://pcpartpicker.com/products/internal-hard-drive/benchm...
They are amazing for how consistent and boring their performance is. Bit level access means no need for TRIM or garbage collection, performance doesn't degrade over time, latency is great, and random IO is not problematic.