← Back to context

Comment by ryandrake

3 years ago

Or a computer you can actually power off.

Used to be: You throw a physical switch on the computer, it interrupts the power circuit from the power supply, and the computer went off instantly.

Today: You have to do it in some software menu, but invoking this, you're not even powering it off. You're requesting your computer to "pretty please, with sugar on top, turn off my computer when you're not too busy." Then the OS goes and does god knows what, maybe it decides to flush some caches, maybe it decides to do an entire operating system update, who knows--you're not the driver, you're just along for the ride.

Even the physical power button on the computer doesn't break a circuit anymore. It... you guessed it... sends a software signal begging the almighty operating system to please shut down.

And when you point this stuff out, all the excuses start coming out: "Bbbbut the OS has to flush its caches! Bbbbut the filesystem needs to write things to disk that are in-flight! Bbbbut applications need to gracefully shut down and free their memory (which is about to have the power cut). Bbbbbut there may be a critical background task still running that needs to...." I don't fucking care! I didn't command my computer to do any of these things.

It's gotten to the point where if you want to shut your computer down instantly, you need to pull the power plug or remove the battery. I expect we software engineers will fix that one some time soon, too.

16 comments

ryandrake

Reply
vageli  3 years ago

> Today: You have to do it in some software menu, but invoking this, you're not even powering it off. You're requesting your computer to "pretty please, with sugar on top, turn off my computer when you're not too busy."

This captures my sentiment towards current trends in technology so aptly. I went to turn off a Windows machine the other day and the only options required allowing an update to be performed. There was no way to shut down or restart without allowing an upgrade. Fortunately I could bypass via the command line but this level of mediation is unwanted and abhorrent.

billyjobob  3 years ago

ACPI was introduced in Windows 98, so when you say “today” you actually mean “the past 25 years”. In fact it probably took longer staring at the “windows is shutting down, do not unplug your PC” screen than it takes today.

mtVessel  3 years ago

Oh, how I miss physical switches. It's not so much the lack of control, but why, oh why, does every action have to lag so horrendously?

bruce511  3 years ago

On my pc motherboard (and all the ones I've had forever) if you hold the power button in for like 4 seconds it does a hard-power cut.

Just don't complain the next time you start it up that disk files you were writing to when the power failed are corrupted.

  • jodrellblank  3 years ago

    Why shouldn't I complain? Transactions and snapshots and checkdisk were invented lifetimes ago, and building resilient systems out of fragile parts is so ancient that Joe Armstrong is dead and buried and "cattle not pets" is the mantra of the era for cloud scale computing.

    Holier-than-thou victim blaming may be a good excuse in FOSS land but we pay Microsoft money for Windows and Apple money for macOS X, and both companies are capable of building stuff which can recover from interruption. Even JETDB is surprisingly resilient when you force-reboot an Exchange server these days, so is SQL Server, so is Active Directory, so is NTFS.

  • throwaway684936  3 years ago

    > Just don't complain the next time you start it up that disk files you were writing to when the power failed are corrupted.

    That should never, ever, ever happen if your OS and filesystem are even remotely quality software.