Game over man!

Hey guys, it's time for another episode of Space Welders. Episode 75, recorded 3rd of March 2017. Game over man! That's it man, game over man, it's game over!

With your hosts Mike Wise and Steve Rogers, sad news about Bill Paxton this week, be greatly missed. Twister fans everywhere, just disappointed. Titanic fans confused, because everyone in the media was saying that was his biggest hit. Or was I wrong?

He's in Titanic. He is, he's in Titanic. As what? No he wasn't.

Screamy Idiot 12. Screamy Idiot 12, now that was a Poseidon adventure. No, well he was in something, but you know, he was getting a credit on Titanic, like as if that was big. Oh yeah, that's right, he was the dude on the ship in the future part.

Yeah. Yeah, the kind of wrapping section. Well they had kind of like, you know, the stereotypical nerd, computer nerd, who was explaining the history, not, oh jeez, yeah I have seen Titanic, I remember it, but yeah he was in that, but I think he's more. With the simulation that's now incorrect.

That's right, yeah, largely wrong, so science be damned and movies. The, well it was later discovered that it was a bit different, anyway, so yes, he was in Aliens, and he was most remembered for his famous line, game over man, and. I think it was like one of his first, that was one of his very early ones. Big roles, big roles.

It wasn't exactly a breakout role though. No, but he did get some memorable lines, and he was, you know. He's done a lot of bit parts, if you look through, of course, I mean the main one that I know especially is Apollo 13, that was kind of his, and Twister, that mid-90s where he was just owning it, Mighty Joe Young, Vertical Limit, and of course Spy Kids 2 and Spy Kids 3D. You're just sad because you haven't had a role in Spy Kids, no one's asked you for, you know, turn up in Spy Kids.

Spy Kids so old that they're past puberty. They're up to about Spy Kids 46 by now, aren't they? Spy Kids 46, are you kidding me? Speaking of space, SpaceX are going to send some tourists to the moon, well around the moon, slightly near the moon, but somewhere around the moon.

Can we like just nominate people just to be shot at the moon and crash onto the moon? Rather say, you know, do they need to come back? Politicians. Yeah, they don't need to come back, right?

No. They just kind of, oh, we missed. And they keep on going. It's pretty hard to miss the moon, but if you try, SpaceX will take you there.

They're not actually saying how much for, it's disclosed at the moment. They're saying a substantial payment. Right, $2.50 would get you to the moon, but tourism in space is not unusual. Do they have like a 10-trip card, so the 10th trip is free?

Freaky flyers. I wonder what the duty-free is like at the International Space Station. The selection is out of this world. Oh, yes.

So, Russia has been tripping folks with lots of cash to spend $20 million, splash it, and you too can go to the space station and then hopefully make it back. NASA has done similar things before, but now, you know, I think it's interesting. Is it the first time that they're going to be using, they've not actually had any astronauts or anyone physically inside there as a payload, or how are they going up? On SpaceX's?

Yeah, well. No, they haven't done any manned flights as of yet. Presumably they will do low-Earth orbit manned flights before manned flights to the moon. So I'm confused about the media on this one.

Shouldn't we have gone through the step of manned flight on... Well, this is just gathering a bit more funding, isn't it? It's true. Elon's just gone, shit, it's costing a bit of cash.

Quick, get some more money. Why don't you just kickstart it? Yeah. Everyone pay treefitty for your own trip to the moon.

Do you think there's like a separate kickstarter for other super rich dudes who, you know... Isn't it called the stock market? Oh. Yeah.

What's interesting about this with SpaceX is they're kind of pissing off NASA a little bit with it, because NASA has their own plans with the Space Launch System to go back to the moon by 2020, I believe, or Space Launch System is scheduled for 2020, something like that. 2025. It's, you know, a few more years yet. Otherwise known as manned cannon.

Yep. So SpaceX, because NASA's been essentially funding SpaceX since their beginning with paying them to take supplies up to the space station and launch satellites when they don't, when the rockets don't explode on the pad. So there are some people putting forward that they might be pissing NASA off a little bit by basically saying, yeah, we don't need you, NASA, we're just going to do it ourselves. But then NASA kind of needs to move into, with the rise of private spaceflight, this is not a new opinion, NASA really needs to move more into a kind of regulatory and safety agency as opposed to doing it themselves, because they just don't have the funding to do this kind of thing, what the private companies do.

So NASA moves into, okay, we're going to facilitate people going to space because we've got, you know, 60, 70 years of experience in this. Here's some guidelines and some regulations on how to do it safely. You know, what kind of engineering requirements your shuttle or your capsule needs to be at to be suitable for manned flight. And also here's some government contracts to take some satellites up.

Yeah, I think they should also, you know, maybe, you know, they're controlling the territory as such. Well, they essentially... Space, space. NASA kind of should become more like the FAA or CASA, they should become the regulatory body as opposed to the regulatory body and doing the actual flights themselves, because they're spreading themselves too thin and they don't have either the funding or the political will to maintain what little funding they have.

You know, people say, why bother with space when there's so many problems on Earth, which is a stupid argument. Imagine the pitch from the people who make the Shorts 360. Like they would know... It's not exactly aerodynamic.

You can't send a lunchbox into space. There's rules. It's got to be sleek. It's got to have stripes, maybe some wings.

Go faster hulls. Go faster hulls. It just doesn't look cool, because then you get the Volkswagens of space out there. And that's not...

The space bus. Well, wasn't that in 2001? That was like a... Not a pretty thing.

That was an aerodynamic space bus, wasn't it? Yeah, and then you want the Uber of space, you know, I'm on the moon, you know, sitting in one of the various oceans. And they call you up and say, where are you? I'm on the moon.

Oh, I'm in Mercury. Oh, no, you took a wrong turn. Sort of, yeah, you know, very expanse. The Uber of space travel.

Yeah. That's going to work. You know what's not happening, Steve? What didn't happen this week?

Something. Everyone woke up... I didn't win 10 million dollars? No.

Everyone went to, is it down right now? And then suddenly discovered, is it down right now? It's actually connected to something else, the knee bone, which is the knee bones connected to the... to S3, it turns out.

And it turns out there's a shit ton of stuff connected to S3 right now. It's pretty much the trash can of the world and the internet. And so somewhere during this week, Amazon had an outage of S3. But what it did reveal, apart from the later on providing an explanation of the North Virginia or otherwise known as the U.S.

East 1 region failure or disruption, was the amount of companies that actually rely on its uptime. In fact... Apparently solely on that region. And big companies that should be able to afford, you know, a failover.

Maybe you could buy closer to your region. Well, if you're utterly relying on cloud service for your entire business, so companies like Airbnb, Uber, Slack, Adobe, if this than that, Pinterest, GitLab, the United States Securities and Exchange Commission, which is odd, apparently don't have any kind of failover to other regions, which is the number one thing that they tell you when you're deploying this kind of thing, to have multi-different region failover, which Amazon supports reasonably straightforwardly to automatically failover to different regions in EC2 and S3. Apparently they haven't, although it fell back a bit. Maybe it didn't go completely offline.

But S3 operates pretty much like a giant-size hard drive, a web-style hard drive for these sites. So the idea... I'm sure it is actually a hard drive somewhere. Yeah, well, there's subsystems.

The data's got to be somewhere. They describe that one of the subsystems, which hasn't been indexed for a very long period of time, had actually caused the outage and was a suggestion. Well, sort of. Or was a typo.

Yeah, but basically the Amazon S3, or Simple Storage Service, it's basically a web-based post-put-get system, while driven over HTTP commands, very much like old WebDAV. It shares a lot of similarity. It's the new hotness. It's the new hotness.

But what it does that's interesting is that you can put... It's an object-oriented-based storage system, which is all fangled and interesting, but you can put meta-information against the objects that you store inside of it. So it's not like a document system, where it's just JSON key values, which are parent-child or anything like that. You can actually store a file and then store attributes against it.

But haven't we done that before? Think like iTunes with your mp3 collection. And then iTunes goes and deletes your entire mp3 collection when you update it. So there is storage below the storage.

It's just a representation above the storage. There's a hard drive somewhere, and then they have another layer on top to give you more information and access to the data. And they presumably cache it and spread it across a few different servers. Well, presume no more.

We know that in some regions it just completely, fatally will take you out. So if you're sitting in one region, that's your fault. Don't sit in one region. Oh, the other is interesting.

So Netflix also experienced some outage with it. One of the things, parts of their service didn't die because they utilized the entire stack. So one of the things that they do to optimize the performance of S3 in terms of a lookup. So you can't get onto S3 and just look it up.

You've got to index the thing yourself. And what they do is they send it across to DynoDB to index what's there. So if you wanted to go, oh, the last Bill Paxton, you want to have Bill Paxton a thon, and you hit Netflix, it would actually go to DynoDB first, run the query, and then tell you the system where the S3 files or the files are located on, and probably turn out your luck it's in US East. So yeah, I think it was kind of interesting because they did their response to it, which they've put out in a blog post recently describing what's going on.

But I don't think, you know, they did say at the bottom here that they have had, their uptime and track record is quite amazing for what they do. For all of the issues AWS has had in the past, I don't know, I can't think of a time when S3 itself went down. It's usually EC2 or some of their DNS servers. Back when Reagan was president.

Had issues, yeah. So, yeah, I mean, they released a blog post basically saying what happened, and it was that they were, an authorized S3 team member was executing commands to remove a small number of servers, and incorrectly entered the command, and a larger set of servers was removed from the intent. RM-RF. Yeah, they forgot a semicolon or something, didn't they?

Oh, shit! So that then caused a cascading failure, basically, where those servers that were removed supported two other S3 subsystems. One of those subsystems was the index subsystem, which manages the metadata and location information, which serves all of the various HTTP requests, and the second subsystem manages the allocation of storage. So they all kind of relied on each other, and basically the chair legs got kicked out from underneath them and everything just collapsed.

But it was interesting because all of the other things looking at it failed as well, like the service dashboard. It's kind of good in a way because they now know if this happens again, what do we do? We talked a few weeks ago about Chaos Monkey and the testing that they do, or Netflix does anyway, to test when these things fail over. That's probably why Netflix had a reasonable response.

So Amazon obviously now knows what can happen when some of these things happen, and maybe they'll decentralize their dependencies a little bit. But again, it's another indication that for all the talk and the hype about the cloud, at the end of the day, it is just someone else's computer in a data center somewhere. And if the data center goes down, then so does your server. And nothing is infallible.

It can be that the power plug gets kicked out, or a sinkhole opens up and swallows the data center. You can't rely on one single location only if it's actually critical to your performance. It seems, speaking of critical to performance, Nintendo Switch is coming out this month, so we're in the March period. It came out today, Mike.

Well, first of March. I haven't seen, like, has it splashed all over the internet? Literally today. Literally today it's come out.

And Zelda's been being reviewed, or has been reviewed, by folks? Yeah, this is Nintendo's new console, the kind of one-two-switch, put the thing in, take it out so you can play Mario Kart while you're pooping. Launched today, this is the successor to the Wii U, the Wii U that never really did well because people never understood that it was a separate console to the Wii, and neither did I when it first came out, and I was like, how is this different? And it does make the enjoyable click, like a few YouTubers...

Well, we talked about that, it had to. All the hype around the click, if it didn't make an actual click noise when you put the controllers in, there would be hell to pay. And so it's come out to kind of, the console itself has kind of had middling, fair to middling reviews, because a lot of the reviews came out before the actual release day, so some of the online features and day one patches weren't available. For the most part, the console's kind of standard Nintendo fare, it's got cute little sound effects and it's easy to use and it's all pretty and you get little clicks when you move around, I think it's fairly standard stuff these days for a console.

Zelda, which is basically one of the two launch titles, the other being a tech demo for the Switch called one-two-switch, this is Zelda Breath of the Wild, which is the new open world Zelda, we haven't, well, every Zelda's kind of open world, but this is Skyrim-esque open world where, like with Todd Howard with Skyrim saying if you can see that mountain you can go to it, so Zelda's like this now. And it's essentially getting 9.5 to 10 from everybody, so this is, it is the game to get, it's the only game to get, but it is the game to get. This to me would be the only game, but Metacritic is giving it 98 right now out of 62 critics, that's pretty good. Yeah, it'll be interesting to see how it stabilises, you know, these kind of things, obviously being Zelda it gets a pass on a lot of things, so I can imagine over time people will, any issues with it will come out, any problems, any annoying parts of it will come out, so over time that score will stabilise.

I mean, Zelda has been going down for quite some time, if you look at the history of Zelda game scores, they've peaked at the Ocarina of Time period, Majora's Mask, and then kind of been steadily going down, so this is really a return to form, but yeah, we'll see if that comes down a little bit as more people play it. So you famously have had, well, Pokemon's your thing, and you play Pokemon on just about whatever you've got. If they brought Pokemon on that thing, would you get the Switch? It's cheap, it's a really cheap device.

Well, they've just released Pokemon Sun, so they're not going to do a new Pokemon for a little while, so I don't know. I don't know if they will, I don't know if this will, being a portable device essentially, is this now the new 3DS? It's the new 3DS. They just released the new 3DS last year, or the year before, so the Nintendo handheld is coming for a refresh, but is Nintendo going to be thinking, well, you can take it with you, so why do we need two product lines?

That may be pushing it a bit, because Nintendo has always been about their home console and a handheld, with the Game Boy originally. Yeah, I don't know, it would be quite a coup to bring a Pokemon game to a home console, because it's never been on anything other than a portable device. Yeah, and this is all Tegra-backed stuff as well. Apart from Pokemon Snap, obviously.

Pokemon Snap. Nvidia recently had their announcement of the 1080 Ti, 35% faster than previous. All the numbers. Yeah.

Every number you can want. I don't know what any of them meant, but it had a lot of numbers. It's just a lot faster, according to Jensen, but that's going to fall down to mobile chipsets for them. So I'm hoping with the Switch that they just keep revisioning it, maybe, because they've gone down the path of, basically it's a big, giant mobile phone, without the mobile phone bit.

So come to do what we've been saying about the Xbox and PlayStation, where they just iterate the specs. That's right. And don't ever release a new one. Yeah, I can see that.

Well, the issue with this, I mean, all of the hardware is in the tablet. What's interesting is people have been saying that Zelda runs better in handheld mode than when it's in the dock, because when it's in the dock on a TV, it's at 1080p, and when you take it out of the dock into handheld mode, it's 720p. So the dock hardware can't cope with 1080p Zelda, whereas the handheld hardware can cope with 720 just fine. Yeah, well, dynamic resolution scaling may not be implemented in this thing just yet.

So that could well come. I think you'll find that over time they might have some sort of thing. It'd be interesting to see what sort of technical reviews then come of this. Like people can...

the embargo's lifted, obviously, so they could talk about... some of the technical implementations behind this, what, you know, some of the rendering techniques, the anti-aliasing techniques that may be employed in this, because it's interesting if they're moving between a LCD type screen to TV, anti-aliasing techniques would change depending on the context of which it's being displayed. Nintendo's never really been big for anti-aliasing, have they? Yeah, well, it's- They've always had the very blocky low poly count textures, which has allowed them to have lighter hardware.

Yeah, this works in this format. That makes a lot of sense. So they're probably just practiced it a lot on like mobile technologies like iPhone and like Android. So there's plenty of that.

So I gather that that's probably what they've been doing. So Steve, a little bit of entertainment news. This week I've watched, I can't explain it. You just have to go watch Gantt's Zero GA and TZ Zero.

If you're into manga, there's a manga for you on Netflix these days. You can go and watch Gantt's Zero. It's pretty weird. It's based on a manga comic, which has got the usual tropes of manga fair.

So you've got your sexuality in there. You've got your weird technology with people going constantly. So if you're used to the 80s Astro Boys and Battlestar type stuff and everyone going, you've got it back again in Gantt's and it's weird. There's a moment in there.

I urge you, you can come back to us on info at spacewilders.com and tell me that moment in the movie where you just have an holy shit moment. And I can tell you where it is precisely the frame that it occurs on. It's like Fist of North Star all again. And if you're into manga, then go watch it.

Manga or anime? It's manga or anime, but it's- It's very important to make that difference, Mike. Never get into an argument with an anime fan. No, no, yeah.

So it's very much like Spirits Within, which was one of the first sort of big manga style anime or manga style rendered, 3D rendered animation movies. But this takes the cake. It's absolutely gorgeous to look at. It's incredibly well done.

The lighting, global illumination, everything you can think about they've done in this movie. Crazy go nuts. So, but it is holy shit. It's manga, so you just have to watch it and go, oh my God, it doesn't drag on for that long.

It's quite, it's an interesting idea. You don't have a three week long fight like Dragon Ball Z. No. How boring.

Yeah, or, you know, what's his level over? Was it 9,000? So no, you don't have anything like that. It's just people going, and the annoying bit of it, the main character just bumbles around.

Like it's always the, you tell me what's going on. It's like, I could sit down and explain it to you in a minute, it's pretty easy, but they don't. They prolong this with endless battles with the weirdest, the most amazing weird creatures you've ever seen in your life. Just go watch it.

No other explanation. Also this week, the Oscars best picture, of course. La la la, sorry, I mean, Moonlight. How awkward.

Garfield the movie, whoops. I mean. I mean, the guy. You had one job.

Everyone must have seen it by now. The guy literally had one job, which was to give, was it Warren Buffett? Who was the guy that read it out? An old guy anyway, the right envelope for the final award of the night.

So, how? Warren Beatty, not Warren Buffett. Isn't he a politician or something? But even if you eliminated all other envelopes.

But it was the last award of the night. How did he give him the wrong envelope? Yes, I know there's two envelopes, one on either side of the stage, but still, it's the last award. And the fact that it took them five minutes to correct the award, to let all of the La La Land producers be finishing their speeches before they come running out and saying, oh, actually, wrong, wrong one, whoops.

You think that someone should have just ran out and grabbed him by the arm and pulled him back. But no, they didn't get all that way to announce. The reason that they have two partner accountants from PricewaterhouseCoopers, one either side of the stage, they're the only people that know who the winners are. And the reason they're either side of the stage is in case someone reads the wrong name, they can immediately stop it and correct the problem.

So, how did it take them so long? The guy who did it has since been fired. Has he? Oh, yeah, obviously.

I mean, that's a pretty big cock up. That's pretty harsh. Yeah. How did you lose?

You can't just put that on LinkedIn. We could put that on LinkedIn. Why did you leave your last job? So, I mean, La La Land won quite a few.

They won best director, best actress. Casey Affleck won best actor for Manchester by the Sea. It's typically a few winning the same. Zootopia won best animated film.

I want to do a call out to Hacksaw Ridge, which won best sound mixing, done by a bunch of Australian guys who have worked with one of my friends down in Melbourne at Soundfirm. So, shout out to them for that. Congratulations. That's excellent.

I didn't really like the movie, but it certainly does have good sound mixing. Well, as long as that happens. And then Arrival won best sound editing, and there is a difference. Editing is the overall sound mix, whereas sound mixing is the kind of individual sounds in it.

So, what's that mean? So, for Arrival, you've kind of got the background boom, boom, boom, boom, boom type noise of the spaceship, or is it? So, sound editing is the creation of sound effects. So, because there's a lot of CGI, and you've got the ships and the aliens in Arrival, that's sound editing, whereas sound mixing is mixing sounds maybe you've recorded on the day, or foley work, or things like that.

So, there is a difference. La La Land won a lot though, cinematography. Suicide Squad won best makeup and hair styling. So, Suicide Squad is now an Academy Award winning film.

No, just for makeup. Yeah. Jungle Book won best visual effects. I would agree with that.

That's a good movie. Hacksaw Ridge also won best film editing. So, yeah, an interesting award night as always, although terrifically boring, usually. Yeah.

It's just very self-congratulatory, the Oscars, isn't it? Well done, us. Well done, us. And I think Jimmy Kimmel, who presented it, he did a pretty good job.

It wasn't as, you know, it could be- He did a good job when they stuffed up the end as well. And that was an embarrassing bit of TV to watch. It was really cringe-worthy, but he was- They handled it as good as they could have done. Yeah, he was tweeting at Trump live on stage, you know, and they were all just, you know, anti-Trump this and anti-Trump that.

And, you know, fair enough. That's great. You know, but it is a bit sort of feedback loopy as well. So, yeah, you know, most people just ignored it.

So, we ignored it. Well, I didn't watch it. I just read the winners, like I've just done now, and go, oh yeah. And then I'll watch the video.

If you haven't seen the video of the best picture announcement, watch it because it's funny. Zootopia won something too. It won best animated film. Best animated film, yeah.

I mean, it's a Disney film. I think Disney and Pixar alternate their film release years so they know that they're going to get the best picture. But Star Wars didn't get anything. Nope.

It's not a terrific movie. Oh, well. It's not an Oscar movie. There's a certain type of movie that's Oscar-baity movie, isn't it?

Yeah. And a film like Star Wars these days is never going to get the big best picture Oscars. It might get like effects and technical Oscars, but the movies that win best picture, I mean, well, the nominees of Moonlight, Arrival, Fences, Hacksaw Ridge, Hell or High Water, Hidden Figures, that's meant to be very good. La La Land, Lion, and Manchester by Sea is a very specific kind of movie that's in contention for best picture.

And Star Wars is not one of those. Damn it. A shout out to Leon who created a, well, I'll have a link to his T-shirt. I think it's amazing.

It's basically Jar Jar- Words don't do it justice. No, Jar Jar Binks. But it's done in a way where he's looking away wistfully with Star Wars in, I think, I would have liked if he went with Comic Sans because then that sort of would have added to the jarring nature of that imagery. You can't get it out of your head once you've seen it.

So shout out to Leon. Well done. And shout out to Joseph Cooney. Recently, API Days is done and dusted.

Slap the hands. We're done. We'll have to look forward to his video, hopefully when it comes out in about two years' time. So well done, Joseph, for API Days.

So Steve, if you wanted to tour the space world of Space Station, what would you need to do? Do you have to pay us a lot of money? Yes. Just send us, by Western Union mail order, $50 million, and we'll take you to us, to your space station.

We will have to blindfold you for the journey because we don't want you seeing all of our secret inner workings, but rest assured we will definitely take you to the space station and definitely not a cardboard set in the garage. And we won't use comfortable ropes. No. Alternatively, just head over to www.spacewelders.com where you'll find show notes for this and every other episode, and so you can see and click along to what we're talking about, why don't you?

You can follow us on Twitter, twitter.com slash spacewelders, facebook.com slash spacewelders. You can follow Mike on Twitter, twitter.com slash michael underscore wise. You can follow me on Twitter, twitter.com slash the skeptical dev. You can subscribe to the show, iTunes, Stitcher, and SoundCloud.

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I think there's a few that are progressing ahead nicely with a couple hundred votes, so there's still time for us. It's otherwise known as skyrocketing, Steve. Yeah, and finally, if you have questions, comments, or feedback, good or bad, email us info at spacewelders.com. So thanks once again, and we love producing the podcast for you guys.

We're up to episode 75. Who would have thought it? That's nearly 100. That's nearly a century.

It sounds better when you say century, Steve, rather than 100, because there's just extra zeros and a lot more complication in that. When you say century, people just gloss over and think it's amazing. Anyhow, so we'll keep pressing on, and we'll see you in the next one. So it's Mark out.

Steve out.