What, like turning off the power during a critical operation?
I think there is a lot of value in designing systems, that recover gracefully, even after having been switched off (this could also happen due to a power failure). Journalling file systems is just one example of of OS technology meant to support this.
Many applications have over the years been designed to frequently save their state, and thus minimize the impact of crashes, but it would be nice to see a lot more. The coding effort involved is not all that big either, and with the speed of modern hardware the overhead should not impact usabilty all that much. There really is no excuse!
I remeber when I was using the GT40 graphics terminal back in the 70ies they had a game called moonlander - it featured a McDonald's on the moon!
I found a link describing it - http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/dec/g t40/ - try to grep the source referenced on the page (http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/dec/ gt40/software/moonlander/rtlem.mac) for MACDONALD
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I think there is a lot of value in designing systems, that recover gracefully, even after having been switched off (this could also happen due to a power failure). Journalling file systems is just one example of of OS technology meant to support this.
Many applications have over the years been designed to frequently save their state, and thus minimize the impact of crashes, but it would be nice to see a lot more. The coding effort involved is not all that big either, and with the speed of modern hardware the overhead should not impact usabilty all that much. There really is no excuse!
I remeber when I was using the GT40 graphics terminal back in the 70ies they had a game called moonlander - it featured a McDonald's on the moon!
g t40/ - try to grep the source referenced on the page (http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/dec/ gt40/software/moonlander/rtlem.mac) for MACDONALD
I found a link describing it - http://www.brouhaha.com/~eric/retrocomputing/dec/
Why not post the link to the CNN Story to help others.