When The Expanse was cancelled on the SYFY channel, I somewhat expected it as it was too good for that network (I was shocked something so good was ever on that channel in the first place). Then when I found out it was picked up by Amazon, I had mixed feelings. While it meant the show would continue, it also meant that it would not persist for more than 3 additional seasons. I really wanted to see a Magnetar class ship on the screen but alas it was not meant to be. So, with a few exceptions, why is it that a show doesn’t persist more than 3 seasons on a streaming service?

When Netflix started its streaming service, people got used to binge watching a show. The trend increased when streaming services started their original series and would drop and entire season of a show simultaneously. In the past few years, these services started spreading out the release of episodes in a season for some shows but that doesn’t mean people will watch the episodes on the same schedule. Instead, most people will wait for the entire season to be available so as to not get caught up in the story and be stuck waiting for the next episode.

I got new internet service in the past month. Frontier ran fiber into my neighborhood and I’ve been enjoying the benefits ever since. As you can see I have symmetric gigabit.

New Router

This change did require that I get a new router. Previously I had a Netgate 3100 which was supposed to be able to handle faster than gigabit speeds but in reality it didn’t. It was even worse when you used VLANs, maxing in the ~600Mbps range. I found at least two different threads asking Netgate about this and both with unanswered. Interestingly this device appears to no longer be for sale. I wonder if lack of performance is why.

If you’ve ever installed Xcode via the Mac App Store, you know it can take an hour to install. The reason is not due to its size but the large number of individual files. What if it didn’t have so many small files? Could optimizations made here apply to other apps as well?

Overview

The idea is simple: instead of storing apps as a constellation of individual files, instead store a disk image with its own filesystem. The idea isn’t new and has been used elsewhere and so much of what I’m going to outline here is what one familiar with the idea might expect. So instead of an app being a directory, its current representation, the contents of that directory exist in a read-only filesytem stored in a disk image. Then the app is really a single file, the image itself. Accessing contents within the app is simply traversing the filesystem within the image.

It’s no secret that Apple’s Time Machine backup solution is clunky at best. For those who are unaware, it backs up a Mac to an HFS+ filesystem using directory hard links. The biggest problem with this is that HFS+ was an old filesystem when Time Machine was first designed and it’s gotten even older since. These days Apple uses APFS as their filesystem on computers and iOS devices but the Time Machine backup still uses the fragile HFS+ filesystem for its backups. If you select a backup target that’s not HFS+, such as a network share, it creates a sparse disk image there and creates an HFS+ filesystem in that image. I question whether there was a better way. There is but I wouldn’t expect Apple to bother actually implementing it because, well, they don’t actually seem to care about quality anymore.