history is hard

[Fred Cisin]

On Wed, 27 May 2020, Peter Corlett via cctalk wrote:
> I would be most intrigued to see what a hardware lock and soft-eject for a USB
> key would look like.

Eject would require fairly precise fit for a solenoid follower around the 
perimeter.
Are the square holes in the USB-A top and bottom side standardized?
Are they strong enough to discourage ham-fisted users? (needs to also 
ba a flashing light surrounding the port!)
Would red/green lights be enough to help mitigate the problem?

Win7 does sometimes erroneously report a device in use when all 
application programs that accessed it have been closed.   I am unaware of 
how to query "WHICH program claims to still be using it?"
But the memory leaks and a few other problems are enough that WIN7 can 
benefit from periodic restarts.  It, at least MY copies, are definitely 
NOT a permanently ON OS.


> Fortunately, there now exist robust filesystems which ensure that partial
> writes are not visible and that only the last few seconds of uncommitted data
> still in the write queue is lost. Unfortunately, these tend not to be used much
> because they're "slow"[0] and/or because it's on removable media formatted with
> a joke filesystem because of Windows.

A joke operating system doesn't provide much CHOICE of which filesystems 
to use.
And it dates back decades, even to "advice" columns in magazines 
recommending to turn VERIFY off in DOS.
(NOTE: for those unfamiliar: "VERIFY" (both DOS and Int13h) was not a read 
after write compare of content; it merely confirmed that each sector that 
was written was readable.)

> [0] For anybody who values throughput over durability, may I recommend
>    /dev/null for the ultimate in performance?