Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

Comment by Silhouette | Hacker News Reader

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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.

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.

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.

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