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Comment by ScottBurson | Hacker News Reader

I have no love for Microsoft -- but any application that doesn't do auto-save to protect the user from crashes and power failures is broken.

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On the flip side, any OS that restarts without explicit user confirmation is broken.

I agree, the OS shouldn't be adding to this problem, but there are plenty of ways for an application to close unexpectedly. OS crash, application crash, power outage, the computer locking up etc. Any application that keeps a user's partially completed work open for long periods of time should be durable to all of these situations. An OS restarting itself should never be more than a hiccup.

If MS' motivation is to protect against intrusion, then the most invasive thing they should do, after whatever internal countdown, is to simply drop the internet connection.

I don't disagree at all, but it might be easier to get a better app than to get Windows to stop doing crazy shit.

There is a lot of state that gets lost in a forced reboot, not only in terms of things that could easily be auto-saved like files. Not to mention this is something an application has no control over, so you still lose whatever you did since the last auto-save; and I believe this (being suddenly terminated) is something an application should not need to care about either --- requiring that every application care about saving and restoring state is ridiculous. The OS is the one terminating processes, it should be responsible for restoring them.

If a "reboot" simply meant a few seconds where the computer is unusable, and then you get put back in the exact same environment with everything being exactly the same as before, I would probably think it acceptable, but the reality is very different.

I agree that forced reboots are unconscionable, but there's nothing the OS can do about power failures, as long as we're using volatile DRAM for main memory. There's also the possibility of crash-causing bugs in the app itself. I think any app used for content creation has to do auto-save.

(I worked on a micro-Emacs-clone, Mince, in 1981, that ran on a 64KB CP/M machine and had very usable auto-save -- on floppies! You can't tell me it's too hard.)

any application that doesn't do auto-save to protect the user from crashes and power failures is broken

That's a cop-out. I'm about to start a number-crunching process that usually takes about a week to complete. Is that supposed to have some magic facility to be interrupted at any point and restart from where it left off, or at least somewhere close? How much of my time should I spend on that, given that I wrote the scripts so I'll be the one implementing any auto-save as well? Should I also reimplement the dependencies that are doing a lot of the heavy lifting, given that calls into some of that functionality can take considerable time to complete?

Oh, wait, I don't have Windows 10. Never mind.

Is your number crunching program geared towards a mass market; or a 'once in a while' report run by a single company?

I would expect the two markets to have very different requirements.

Is your number crunching program geared towards a mass market; or a 'once in a while' report run by a single company?

Neither of the above, though this specific type of work might be unique to the project in question for all I know.

I also don't know how many other projects with unusual or unique long-running tasks are out there. However, given that there are hundreds of millions of people, if not billions now, with personal computers, I imagine the answer is well into "quite a lot, actually" territory.

I don't have to care about this on Linux, why should I on Windows? What good does it give me, the user?

I would expect to be able to plug a router into my computer and flash it without Microsoft deciding to potentially brick the device on basically any operating system.

A lot can happen in a week. Periodic state dumps or checkpoints can save a lot of wasted time if there's a power interruption 5 days in.

Periodic state dumps or checkpoints can save a lot of wasted time if there's a power interruption 5 days in.

True enough, but so can a UPS and automatic sleep function in the event of extended power outage, and we already have those routinely installed anyway.

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