On Fri, Jul 26, 2013 at 12:54:57PM -0700, Walter Bright wrote: > On 7/26/2013 10:25 AM, deadalnix wrote: > >You emphasis it quite well, and that is certainly true for a car, a > >plane, or anything potentially dangerous. > > > >Different tradeoff apply when you talk about a video game, a media > >player or and IRC client. > > Of course. > > There is a cost of failure, though, to things like video games and > media players. Annoying your customers. I've dumped using many media > players because of their tendency to freeze up. I like to set my > music on in the morning and run it all day. Having to regularly > restart it means "abandon it and try a different one."
Yeah, I had that experience with my old iPod. There was no (obvious) way to control what's running, so every once in a while, some wayward app would start consuming all system resources and the music would start to skip and eventually the thing would freeze. It was very annoying, especially since there was no way to tell *what* was causing the problem. I stopped using the iPod as a music player (sigh...). On my new Android phone, things a slightly better -- at least there's a task manager that I can use to kill off misbehaving programs or apps known to exhibit erratic behaviour, before I set up the music to play all day. That way, things are less likely to fail. > My current media player freezes about once every couple weeks. It's > infrequent enough to be tolerable. The Ubuntu one dies about once an > hour. I gave up on that long ago. That sounds pretty bad. I think my HTC phone only ever froze once since late last year when I first got it. Every couple weeks sounds almost as bad as my iPod (which I no longer use). T -- Computers are like a jungle: they have monitor lizards, rams, mice, c-moss, binary trees... and bugs.
