Why is there a screen that says “It is now safe to turn off your computer”?
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blogs.msdn.microsoft.com
That is, if a physical power button (often a toggle switch on the power supply) is close, I'll toggle it off.
Most of the time, I'll hold the reset/power/whatever button down until the device clicks off.
Linux and its filesystems have made this a (generally) safe thing to do for many years. I started doing it after I read a lwn.net article, ages ago, about how ext3's crash recovery path was discovered to be a bit faster than its normal, clean mount path. If I recall, that happened because so much more of the focus was put into that 'bad' path that it ended up more efficient than the 'good' path.
Full disclosure: if I wish to do the crash thing immediately after a bunch of relevant file writes, I will type 'sync' on one of my many terminals first. (:
Story: some time ago, I tried to hook up an SATA hard disk into a desktop PC which had an SSD connected, while the machine was running. When I did so, I got errors in dmesg about the SSD failing and being reset automatically. I rebooted and grub took ~30s to load the kernel then the boot hanged in the middle. Luckily after some power cycling the issue was gone but I honestly taught I lost the SSD. Apparently disks don't like losing power. Possibly this was even worse because it was just a temporary voltage drop (the disks were connected to the same supply cable).
Thing about spinning platters is that it takes a fair bit of initial juice to get them spinning. Thats why some USB HDDs come with y cables to get those few extra miliamps from the second port.
But even then hotswap was never meant to ensure data consistency it just allows the controller to reinitialize new disks without a full reset.
Linux distros are heading into Windows-ville in that sense, firing up all manner of daemons just in case.
I started doing the 'crazy thing', determined to do it until something problematic happened. I was in kind of an ornery mood.
Now, after many hundreds...perhaps thousands...of forced crashes, nothing bad has yet happened.
Amazing, really.
This has been happening for 11+ years[1] and is getting worse lately.
Since the visual appearance matters here more than being searchable by "", drawing the shape in CSS would be more consistent: http://aamirshahzad.net/moon-with-css3/
EDIT: Pretend there's a moon in those quotes. HN strips some Unicode characters, including that one.
[0] http://users.teilar.gr/~g1951d/ [1] https://packages.debian.org/jessie/ttf-ancient-fonts
The property that made this possible was that DOS had little "state" to save before going bye bye.
And these days you get much the same with ChromeOS.
Heck, was there not someone in the -sec community arguing that state was to be considered bad?
Seeing that original browser only UI makes me nostalgic.
Explaining better: any program should have the information saved when you click it to save, or at some specific time. If I don't save, ok, no problem loosing it. But opening a word processor and then turning the computer off shouldn't make the processor crash, or go through some recovery, or complain about something.
The patch I made tried to speak the text of the error message. It turned out that worked fine, if you opened a SpeechChannel before the crash (we had one open, anyways, and patched a zillion calls, so it worked first time round) and you were lucky (the System Error Handler was the part of the OS that was designed to show system errors, making as few assumptions as possible on what part of the OS was still functional; without memory protection, a crash could, for instance, mean that the memory manager data structures got corrupted, or that font data got overwritten, so there was no way to guarantee that the MacinTalk voice data wasn't corrupted)
The day our beta tester excitedly reported that the test Mac SE (one of the few Macs at the time that couldn't switch itself off in software) spoke the text of that alert when you selected "Shut Down" in the Finder, I learnt that that alert was a system error alert.
(http://www.guidebookgallery.org/index is a nice site for the nostalgic, by the way)
And yet you own at least one device which is FAT32 to this day. You nearly have no choice.
Two class-action lawsuits I'd like to see: Open NTFS. ext4 support on all versions of Windows.
Supposedly one reason Google do not have SD slots on their Nexus devices is to avoid getting into a patent quarrel with Microsoft regarding FAT.
And as for patents...again, the way to deal with that would be to wait for Microsoft to sue for patent infringement.
Lawsuits aren't some magical tool you can use to shape reality in your image.
FAT32 is a real problem. Most cameras and such manage to do an orderly shutdown but one of these days...
I remember the orange bitmapped letters of 95, that color and the jagged letters stayed in my mind.
I've used Windows NT, various versions, but somehow suppressed the memory of the final screen. Anybody knows which version(s) of Windows NT offered "Restart" after the shutdown?
NT 3 and 4 did, and you always saw them since it didn't support soft power-off (although I vaguely remember there was a registry key to enable it but didn't work for me).
Win2000 removed the button (and looks like it was just showing a bitmap, rather than keeping the window system running)
http://www.guidebookgallery.org/pics/gui/startupshutdown/shu...
My brother went to a website that had a link to a pdf he wanted to read but adjacent to that link was an "install acrobat reader" button that looked more inviting. He kept on clicking and installing acrobat reader assuming that it would eventually go to the link he wanted. He eventually complained to me that his computer didn't have acrobat reader and no matter how many times he tried he couldn't install it. It was only after I went to the website that I realized what the problem is.
win.com mode co80
that way "shut down" windows would put you back at the dos prompt (if not you could just type "mode co80" and start using dos)