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General discussion (archive)Why do disk drives have so much power?(43 posts)(43 posts)
(43 posts)
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This is my favourite topic
Posted September 16, 2013
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hedwards: A misplaced comma is one thing, but your post is pretty much unintelligible. I've known Australians and they generally speak English.

The point is that if you want a response that answers your question, you should show sufficient respect to us to give us something to work with. You posted English words, but I don't know what they mean because the grammar is all bollocksed up.
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PetrusOctavianus: Funny, I had no problem understanding what he meant, and I'm a "foreigner".
That's relatively common.

Because English is pretty strict about the S-V-O ordering, we don't have to keep much in our working memory, as a result sentences like the ones the OP used are incredibly hard to parse. We just don't have the working memory necessary to sort out the information that has nothing to do with the sentence.

The purpose of grammar itself is to be kind to the audience. Now, if I really cared, I probably could have gone back, and struck out 2/3 of the writing to get cogent sentences. However that's too much work just to find out what favor I'm being asked to perform.

And yes, I know I write very long sentences, but they're not usually filled with irrelevant details.
Posted September 16, 2013
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mystikmind2000: The kind of freeze I'm talking is not the kind where you can hear and or see the CD doing things. If its clearly active then its just a matter of waiting, and usually you can still override it (but not always) if you wanted too. What I'm talking about is where the CD freezes your computer and goes inactive or starts looping the same behavior over and over and you cannot do anything but restart. Anyone who has allot of contact with dodgy disks will know what I'm talking about.
If your CD locks you up, I feel bad for you son:
You got 99 problems, and your OS is one.

;)
Posted September 16, 2013
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hedwards: A misplaced comma is one thing, but your post is pretty much unintelligible. I've known Australians and they generally speak English.

The point is that if you want a response that answers your question, you should show sufficient respect to us to give us something to work with. You posted English words, but I don't know what they mean because the grammar is all bollocksed up.
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PetrusOctavianus: Funny, I had no problem understanding what he meant, and I'm a "foreigner".
Thanks! But also i forgot to account for the fact that I'm posting here while at work, and with constant interruptions, phone calls and, well, WORK! so i have to cut corners
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mystikmind2000: The kind of freeze I'm talking is not the kind where you can hear and or see the CD doing things. If its clearly active then its just a matter of waiting, and usually you can still override it (but not always) if you wanted too. What I'm talking about is where the CD freezes your computer and goes inactive or starts looping the same behavior over and over and you cannot do anything but restart. Anyone who has allot of contact with dodgy disks will know what I'm talking about.
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TheEnigmaticT: If your CD locks you up, I feel bad for you son:
You got 99 problems, and your OS is one.

;)
Interesting that every OS i ever used since Windows 95 to Windows 7 happen to have some 'problem' no one else has?
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PetrusOctavianus: Funny, I had no problem understanding what he meant, and I'm a "foreigner".
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hedwards: That's relatively common.

Because English is pretty strict about the S-V-O ordering, we don't have to keep much in our working memory, as a result sentences like the ones the OP used are incredibly hard to parse. We just don't have the working memory necessary to sort out the information that has nothing to do with the sentence.

The purpose of grammar itself is to be kind to the audience. Now, if I really cared, I probably could have gone back, and struck out 2/3 of the writing to get cogent sentences. However that's too much work just to find out what favor I'm being asked to perform.

And yes, I know I write very long sentences, but they're not usually filled with irrelevant details.
If i want to write a letter to the Queen, I'll give you a call, meanwhile, seriously??
Post edited September 16, 2013 by mystikmind2000
Posted September 16, 2013
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mystikmind2000: The kind of freeze I'm talking is not the kind where you can hear and or see the CD doing things. If its clearly active then its just a matter of waiting, and usually you can still override it (but not always) if you wanted too. What I'm talking about is where the CD freezes your computer and goes inactive or starts looping the same behavior over and over and you cannot do anything but restart. Anyone who has allot of contact with dodgy disks will know what I'm talking about.
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TheEnigmaticT: If your CD locks you up, I feel bad for you son:
You got 99 problems, and your OS is one.

;)
You've been reading too much rap. :P
Posted September 16, 2013
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TheEnigmaticT: If your CD locks you up, I feel bad for you son:
You got 99 problems, and your OS is one.

;)
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scampywiak: You've been reading too much rap. :P
I needed to get into practice for my mad rapping skillz, yo.
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TheEnigmaticT: If your CD locks you up, I feel bad for you son:
You got 99 problems, and your OS is one.

;)
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mystikmind2000: Interesting that every OS i ever used since Windows 95 to Windows 7 happen to have some 'problem' no one else has?
I've not had my computer lock up from a dodgy CD since, oh, about Win 95. Maybe you have dodgier CDs than I do, but an OS should not allow a failure from a data source like a CD drive to cascade into a crash. That's just...no. That's bad.
Post edited September 16, 2013 by TheEnigmaticT
Posted September 16, 2013
To address some of the technical issue here:

A basic (older) computer can only do one thing at a time. Lets say you are playing a DOS game. This game needs to get data off a disk/disc. The computer will sent a command to the drive asking it for the data. Now generally the program will not wait for the data to come back, as this will stop everything like you descripe, instead the program will keep running while the drive does it's thing.

Problem Number 1:

If the drive doesn't get the data in time for the next bit of the game, the game has to stop until the data is ready. This is a big problem on optical drives that have to spin up/down.

Once the drive gets the data it has to send it to the computer (which is now off doing something else). The drive can only hold a small amount of data at a time, so it needs to off-load the data so that it can start reading the next bit. This is where the drive sends an _interrupt_ to the computer. An interrupt causes the computer to stop everything and pay attention to the drive.

Problem number 2:

Every time the drive triggers an interrupt nothing else can happen.

Once the interrupt is triggered the computer gets to decide what to do with this data. If it takes a while to deal with the data then everything else will have to wait while this goes on.

Problem number 3:

If you have poor interrupt handling, interrupts can stop you for a long time.

Now let's move to Windows. We can now do multiple things at once... ish. If you have explorer open and try to open a disc, it will need to get some info off the disc. Clearly this needs to stop that explorer window but:

Problem number 4:

One thread being IO locked stops others

It is very tricky to program threads and processes to run well even when others stop. Explorer really likes to die in a hole when one thread gets locked waiting for IO. This is true even in Windows 7.

These days the problem is almost always problem 4. I have never had this problem (to any serious degree) on a Unix based system, so I don't agree with your commend that OS doesn't matter. Not using Windows Explorer matters.
Posted September 16, 2013
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mystikmind2000: ...So my question is this... Why the hell can a computer/player be so fixated on an iffy disk that it won't accept any further commands from the user????? ...
I guess it has to do with the importance of input/output in the early days of computer design. Computers then did mostly one thing at a time and they had to wait often because input/output could potentially take a long time and if somthing unexpected happened in most times they had to crash because the consequences of missing data were severe. I guess that's why also modern computers are still programmed in such a way to some extent.
Posted September 16, 2013
As for the nitpicking:

I found the post to be understandable, I'm not a native english-speaker, but I got the meaning without irritation so I got completely surprised by the negative respond in the second post.

Second, the remarks about hackers skipping the hassle of writing a virus and just getting into a store to scratch disks and a spy infiltrating to insert a bad cd-rom to disable a vital computer system were actually funny and what would life be without people making jokes and getting us laugh now and then.

Thirdly, there's no such thing as a dumb question, it's smarter to ask a question if you don't know something than to derise someone less knowledgeable than you are.

'-1 for irrelevant nitpicking!' (as a matter of speaking, I never down-rep a post, don't worry)

*edit: -1 to GOG for not having a preview option, 'Post my message' is my preview pane.
Post edited September 16, 2013 by DubConqueror
Posted September 16, 2013
So much meta-talk...

I was reminded back in the 90s or so some Amiga fanatic claiming how poor Windows is as you can't even format a floppy on it without it halting the whole system (ie. you can't do anything else while formatting the floppy), like you can on Amiga. I don't recall if he was complaining about Windows 3.1, or Windows 9x, or both.

Anyway, I found that peculiar and tried it myself both on a Windows 3.1 and 95 PC, and sure enough, no problem whatsoever I could see. I could happily do pretty much anything while Windows was formatting a floppy in the background, so what the heck was he talking about?

Someone clarified it later that apparently it depends on the IRQ that the floppy drive is using, or something like that. Like that if it is IRQ9 or higher, then no problem with multitasking (or was it that then you have the problem?). So it seems it depended on the PC configuration whether "multitasking while formatting a floppy" was possible or not.
Posted September 16, 2013
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_Bruce_: ...Problem number 2:

Every time the drive triggers an interrupt nothing else can happen. ...
Not sure what you mean there. If these drive triggers are implemented in a nice way (call backs in a multithreaded environment) I don't see why nothing else can happen at the same time. It's just an IO operation like sending data over the internet or waiting for a key to be pressed.
Posted September 16, 2013
This kind of hangup is the software assuming that it will get a reply to a disk request and not handling the case of that request taking a huge amount of time (or not returning).

On Windows I think that Explorer has this problem, and since Explorer.exe also managed the Windows desktop (a part of it, at least), a CD that doesn't respond can cause Windows to look frozen. In my experience it's often possible to use alt-ctrl-del to get the control panel, kill explorer.exe and get your PC interaction back.
Posted September 16, 2013
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_Bruce_: ...Problem number 2:

Every time the drive triggers an interrupt nothing else can happen. ...
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Trilarion: Not sure what you mean there. If these drive triggers are implemented in a nice way (call backs in a multithreaded environment) I don't see why nothing else can happen at the same time. It's just an IO operation like sending data over the internet or waiting for a key to be pressed.
You are assuming you can run more than one thread at once. Doesn't matter how many threads you have you can only execute one per CPU core (note I was talking about old/simple systems).
Posted September 16, 2013
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Trilarion: Not sure what you mean there. If these drive triggers are implemented in a nice way (call backs in a multithreaded environment) I don't see why nothing else can happen at the same time. It's just an IO operation like sending data over the internet or waiting for a key to be pressed.
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_Bruce_: You are assuming you can run more than one thread at once. Doesn't matter how many threads you have you can only execute one per CPU core (note I was talking about old/simple systems).
Even on one CPU core you can slice the time and do multithreading. I think it's more the asynchronous IO design that older systems hadn't. Nothing should be blocking per se. Every thread should decide by itself if it wants to wait and how long.
Posted September 16, 2013
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mystikmind2000: TV CD player did not like a movie disk i put in and totally froze.
You should buy a DVD player, CD players tend to be for music. :P
Posted September 16, 2013
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_Bruce_: You are assuming you can run more than one thread at once. Doesn't matter how many threads you have you can only execute one per CPU core (note I was talking about old/simple systems).
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Trilarion: Even on one CPU core you can slice the time and do multithreading. I think it's more the asynchronous IO design that older systems hadn't. Nothing should be blocking per se. Every thread should decide by itself if it wants to wait and how long.
You can, but depending upon the scheduler and how many processes you're running, it can cause problems One of the more annoying things that can happen is that it can cause the cache to cool making the processor request information from the RAM in order to execute the instruction.

And on some computers where the scheduler isn't very good, you can have a few tasks hogging the processor time even though they're not that important.
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General discussion (archive)Why do disk drives have so much power?(43 posts)(43 posts)
(43 posts)