> Please consider dropping the adversarial attitude.
A debate is by definition adversarial. I do tend to be more passionate when debating certain topics. If I've come across to you as aggressive I apologize. It's just my style of writing and you can freely ignore any aggression you see in it.
> > Only if the programmer or his management were incompetent
> This is just short of a personal attack, which is against the rules.
That comment wasn't about you so it can't be a personal attack against you. It was about a fictitious programmer and his fictitious management used in our examples.
Attacking what you've written is not a personal attack against you. I will rip your words apart, try to prove they are wrong, show where you've either made a faulty assumption or an error in logic. That's what a debate is.
I will never, ever under any circumstances attack you. If you can see that distinction I will gladly continue to debate with you.
This whole thing basically ballooned from this statement of yours:
> The antivirus basically unplugged the disk. What can it do to recover? There's nothing to be done.
Those are the words I'm challenging. You have two points there. The first is that the antivirus unplugged the disk. While I know you're not being literal you're not being accurate either. It locked one or more files.
The second was that there was nothing the program could have done. To this I gave an example of a program that does handle this exact situation and more.
From your other comment replying to someone else but still quoting me:
> > Think of your torrent software. If you crank your firewall to block it while it's running it will not crash. If your disk fills up it won't crash.
> No one was saying it was okay for the program to crash.
This is the example program I'm talking about. I wasn't implying that you think it was okay for the program to crash. I was giving you an example of a program that can handle disk and network error conditions without the need to restart itself (automatically or manually) nor crash itself or the system.
> GPUs are bastards. They ignore what programmers want, almost by definition. And as someone who has spent way-too-many years wringing as much performance as possible from them, I assure you that this is a realistic characterization of a possible outcome.
I believe you in in that situation. GPUs have been designed with speed in mind and that makes for a very complex interface to them. But that reinforces a few arguments made by others in regards to this story, that being should medical equipment be using hardware not specifically designed for the purpose.
But going back to my comment of:
> > As for displaying random data, why would the programmer want to do this?
Based on your GPU comment above we may using different definitions of random data. I took your "random data" as "looks right on the screen but the numbers are wrong". If the programmer knows that his data source is temporarily unavailable, showing stale or corrupted data is the last thing he should do.
A debate is by definition adversarial. I do tend to be more passionate when debating certain topics. If I've come across to you as aggressive I apologize. It's just my style of writing and you can freely ignore any aggression you see in it.
> > Only if the programmer or his management were incompetent
> This is just short of a personal attack, which is against the rules.
That comment wasn't about you so it can't be a personal attack against you. It was about a fictitious programmer and his fictitious management used in our examples.
Attacking what you've written is not a personal attack against you. I will rip your words apart, try to prove they are wrong, show where you've either made a faulty assumption or an error in logic. That's what a debate is.
I will never, ever under any circumstances attack you. If you can see that distinction I will gladly continue to debate with you.
This whole thing basically ballooned from this statement of yours:
> The antivirus basically unplugged the disk. What can it do to recover? There's nothing to be done.
Those are the words I'm challenging. You have two points there. The first is that the antivirus unplugged the disk. While I know you're not being literal you're not being accurate either. It locked one or more files.
The second was that there was nothing the program could have done. To this I gave an example of a program that does handle this exact situation and more.
From your other comment replying to someone else but still quoting me:
> > Think of your torrent software. If you crank your firewall to block it while it's running it will not crash. If your disk fills up it won't crash.
> No one was saying it was okay for the program to crash.
This is the example program I'm talking about. I wasn't implying that you think it was okay for the program to crash. I was giving you an example of a program that can handle disk and network error conditions without the need to restart itself (automatically or manually) nor crash itself or the system.
> GPUs are bastards. They ignore what programmers want, almost by definition. And as someone who has spent way-too-many years wringing as much performance as possible from them, I assure you that this is a realistic characterization of a possible outcome.
I believe you in in that situation. GPUs have been designed with speed in mind and that makes for a very complex interface to them. But that reinforces a few arguments made by others in regards to this story, that being should medical equipment be using hardware not specifically designed for the purpose.
But going back to my comment of:
> > As for displaying random data, why would the programmer want to do this?
Based on your GPU comment above we may using different definitions of random data. I took your "random data" as "looks right on the screen but the numbers are wrong". If the programmer knows that his data source is temporarily unavailable, showing stale or corrupted data is the last thing he should do.