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Run any consumer device for more than 4 weeks and it'll slowly accumulate all kinds of weird bugs. I've seen smartphones unable to receive SMS because they simp

Run any consumer device for more than 4 weeks and it'll slowly accumulate all kinds of weird bugs. I've seen smartphones unable to receive SMS because they simply ran too long without reboot, a Windows PC where selecting files wouldn't work anymore etc. > we'd be hearing anecdotes of one-character diffs appearing out of nowhere all the time On consumer devices it might simply be a small "attack" surface. A server running 24/7 serving countless requests would probably see more issues than a laptop running idle 95% of the time and loading a website every few minutes. Also a bit flip isn't guaranteed to cause a noticeable bug - and if it does it might not stand out from the usual noise of janky software oddities.

taneq 3y ago
We're perfectly capable of being bad enough at software to do that without invoking cosmic rays and quantum weirdness. How long would you expect to have to run memtest on any desktop computer in good condition before you observe a memory error? Because I would expect the number to be somewhere between 'weeks' and 'forever.'
dspillett 3y ago
> a Windows PC where selecting files wouldn't work anymore etc. That is just Windows Explorer being shite. They even have a specific “restart” button for it in Task Manager for when it leaks into itself so much it stops functioning usefully.
- accoil 3y ago
  Isn't the restart there because explorer is also the desktop? If it was just killed, you'd have to know how to launch shutdown.exe from the task manager etc.
  - dspillett 3y ago
    I think it is a relatively recent (Win8?) addition, and explorer has been the shell since '95. I take adding a specific button for it as an admission that Explorer is getting increasingly buggy, so users are needing to restart it more. Before then you could do the same thing from the same task manager just in two steps: kill the existing explorer.exe and start a new one from the Run command in the menus.
semi-extrinsic 3y ago
IDK what you mean by consumer, but I've routinely had desktop computers running 24/7 for several hundred days without noticeable glitches on Linux (BTW I run Arch).
sidewndr46 3y ago
I find this kind of difficult to believe, because I have machines with >6 months of uptime and never see any issues. Always just running regular consumer grade hardware.

taneq 3y ago

We're perfectly capable of being bad enough at software to do that without invoking cosmic rays and quantum weirdness. How long would you expect to have to run memtest on any desktop computer in good condition before you observe a memory error? Because I would expect the number to be somewhere between 'weeks' and 'forever.'

dspillett 3y ago

> a Windows PC where selecting files wouldn't work anymore etc. That is just Windows Explorer being shite. They even have a specific “restart” button for it in Task Manager for when it leaks into itself so much it stops functioning usefully.

accoil 3y ago
Isn't the restart there because explorer is also the desktop? If it was just killed, you'd have to know how to launch shutdown.exe from the task manager etc.
- dspillett 3y ago
  I think it is a relatively recent (Win8?) addition, and explorer has been the shell since '95. I take adding a specific button for it as an admission that Explorer is getting increasingly buggy, so users are needing to restart it more. Before then you could do the same thing from the same task manager just in two steps: kill the existing explorer.exe and start a new one from the Run command in the menus.

semi-extrinsic 3y ago

IDK what you mean by consumer, but I've routinely had desktop computers running 24/7 for several hundred days without noticeable glitches on Linux (BTW I run Arch).

sidewndr46 3y ago

I find this kind of difficult to believe, because I have machines with >6 months of uptime and never see any issues. Always just running regular consumer grade hardware.