Headworx

I mentioned briefly the issues fir Western Digital / SanDisk portable SSD drives losing all recorded data briefly in the July 2023 post . Fast forward a month now and we have lawsuits against the company saying Western Digital "engaged in a scheme to mislead consumers". It is impossible for consumers (or even professionals) to test / fully evaluate products for their true capability of delivering on the claims. But drives are meant to store data. This is fundamental. Of course they have their MTBF ratings and ultimately will fail over time due to mechanical or electronic wear, but this is not the case here. The SanDisk drives can lose all data at once even if carefully treated and rarely used. Typically most of us expect the companies value their brands the most, as a brand value is most tedious to build and may take a brief moment to collapse. Western Digital somehow does not understand that. Or they don't care, which is also a plausible theory, as they have already bee...

One big gap which exists in one of the most popular consumer device categories is the missing link between standalone cameras and smartphones. I wrote on this a number of times before . Of course the fundamental gap is the lack of a full-stack communications standard. One that would allow any phone to connect to any camera without a special dedicated app for that particular camera. It sounds super obvious and in the past there even was a digital camera working group at Bluetooth SIG. But that group never produced anything (any specification) reaching the adoption phase. Clearly members of that group did not have enough motivation to create the standard They clearly thought they would achieve better results doing it in a proprietary way. But even in a proprietary way - they failed. The cameras' smartphone apps are infuriating - writes Richard Butler at DPReview. Yes they are. This statement probably does not apply to the latest - meant by design to be connected - photo and video ca...

Software has been eating the world. On one end this is really powerful. The dream of a hardware product being continuously improved with "just" software updates. This has clearly worked for computers and smartphones. Of course to some extent, as there always comes a point when a new update is not enabled on "old" hardware. But generally everyone expects whatever they buy today will be a better prodict tomorrow. And in a year or two. The other side of the coin are products which simply should work as-is, and nobody is expecting any updates to come. Yet these products are very often too software-driven. And when this embedded software has bugs, the products may suddenly fail. There are many stories like that. Some examples: SanDisk Extreme SSDs abruptly failing (and the follow-up story ) Sonos Arc soundbar " pop of death " Mazda FM radio bricked Of course they are just examples what can happen (and does happen). The SanDisk issue is particularly nasty, as i...

Facing the loss of archived data - the last week's post - I needed a quick decision on the alternative solution. The straightforward way would be to upgrade the old Networked Attached Storage (NAS) server. It clearly has been failing and despite a bunch of bulged capacitors in the power supply unit (PSU), replacing the PSU did not solve the problem. Of four disks one was declared dead almost immediately after start and a second one was being flagged as dead shortly after. I could stuff the old chassis with new disks, but two disks dying at the same time smells like the problem is elsewhere. On top of that the software on the NAS has been no longer maintained (another civilization disease) and there have been issues using it with newer versions ow Windows (I think it was Windows 10 which officially declared the old SMB protocol fundamentally unsafe). But another angle of the NAS story is also important. Historically the NAS server was the home multimedia server with stored music an...

I somehow have sentiment to old digital content. I mean the one which I created, as this is something the Internet will not take care of automatically. Being lost in managing all the detailed files and directories with source code, experiments, configurations, photos, notes etc, I resorted to having sufficiently large backup storage to just "backup it all". Especially as even with digital photos contributing to most of the bulk, the economically accessible storage capacity outpaces my creation velocity. In short: today it is affordable to backup everything. The storage capacity increase unfortunately is not matched by the reliability increase. In other words: hard drives (and be it mechanical or solid state) still keep alarmingly failing. This failure rate is what makes the redundant systems alive - have a RAID disk array and it will manage your failing drives proactively notifying you about imminent failures and letting you replace the (inexpensive) drives on the fly. The q...

It turns out no matter how great you design a standard, there will be people finding ways around it. Flooding the market with crappy useless products which violate the rules while claiming (or implying) to be conformant. USB-C, which is a loose term for the connector and the numerous standards behind it (USB3.x multi-gigabit per second data transfers, alternate connector modes, and. last but not least, Power Delivery (USB-PD) enabling up to 240W of power (5A at 48V) over a USB cable, is teh prime example here. It is ingeniously designed, being ultra simple for the basic, backwards compatible features, while at the same time enabling a great variety of advanced features. One of the basic backwards-compatible features of USB-C is the 5V charging function. Something that has been available for previous USB generations since early 2000's . To make it work while at the same time enabling the other new use cases, USB-C makes one assumption: a power source (a charger) does NOT output any ...

We live in an instant world. Clik - post - click like. Click - buy - delivered today. Click, click click. This has certainly had a big social impact, especially on the young generations who just don't understand the concept of waiting. And very often not just passive, but active waiting - or - should we call it - developing. Our teams at Silvair have been analyzing market adoption of delivered product features. And the conclusion has been that most of the features have been failures. The real reason - they measured the adoption too close to release dates. Simply not giving the market a chance. While in the current state of product maturity, there are no things urgently and immediately needed. The world keeps going on, there is inertia in discovery and learning. As an example I must admit, despite passkeys being one of the most important internet development of 2023, I am yet to update my accounts to use them. Inertia. And laziness. And passwords just work. Kimon and Richard keep r...