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by pavement 3214 days ago
If I don't like what a computer is doing, I will frequently just yank the plug, pull the battery, flip the circuit breaker, and fuck the rest.

All this buffering and fault tolerance is bullshit at the consumer level. If the disk's file table gets fucked up, then let it burn.

I'll format the disk and re-install your stupid operating system as I see fit, whenever I want, and keep my actual data safe and sound far away from someone else's stupid hung process, until it produces actual results that I can copy into place, whenever appropriate.

These are lessons I learned throughout the late 90's, in the face of countless blue screens, before migrating to linux.

   It is now safe to turn off your computer.
Indeed.
3 comments
glangdale 3214 days ago
There was a nice paper a while back on the topic of 'crash-only systems'. That is, the idea would be that no software system was permitted to have a dignified shutdown path at all. Every system would be turned off with the equivalent of the power switch or "kill -9".

https://www.usenix.org/legacy/events/hotos03/tech/full_paper...

The point that was made was that frequently the recovery paths were on net faster (for a shutdown/reboot cycle) than the "durpee dur, I am slowly shutting myself down paths" and that you have to build a good crash recovery path anyhow.

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lathiat 3214 days ago
There's a storage vendor (hilariously for thread context) that took this to heart. They don't have a power button, just a switch. You turn it off.

I think it was Tintri?

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pixl97 3213 days ago
I'm pretty sure Dell MD3200's are like that.
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Clubber 3214 days ago
I remember working at a rather large company (that you've heard of) in the 90s. It was a guy's sole job to reboot all the NT server every night for stability.

A common practice (I believe from MS) was to have C: dedicated to your OS and D: dedicated to everything else. The logic being: a rebuild would be a lot less complicated.

Ah the good ole days.

FWIW, I usually do a complete Windows reinstall every 6 months or so.

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hackbinary 3214 days ago
I think you meant:

It is now safe to burn.

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