On Sun, May 11, 2025 at 5:28 PM Soren via Cygwin <cygwin@cygwin.com> wrote:
> Hello good readers, > > Yep, some saw this coming I'll bet. At the beginning of this thread (for > those who need a refresher), I wrote: > > The subject: of this message says it all. In minTTY I've lost the > ability to paste anything from the clipboard. I use this facility very > frequently, so much so, that my fingers are trained to do it > unconsciously > > Yep. It's back. SHIFT-INSERT now works again. I never retrained my fingers > to do anything else (I set mouse-right-click to paste, but I had to remind > myself to do that each time), so when it started working again I soon > noticed. And no, I didn't change *anything* for the last several weeks. > There's no logical explanation. It's nearly enough to make one believe > that boggarts or other supernatural beasties infest our computers > sometimes. > I apologize in advance as this is slightly off-topic, but may be what is behind this weirdness. Supernatural beasties? Probably not. Bitrot in files and memory (damn them cosmic rays!), background cleanup processes, and other mysterious things that happen out of sight are unfortunately very real. I suspect most people never noticed, but a few years ago the quoted error rate for unrecoverable read errors on hard disks degraded by at least an order of magnitude. It is now: Non-recoverable read errors per bits read <1 in 10**14 for a typical laptop drive (Western Digital). That sounds like an enormous number, but that drive also moves data at 149 MB/s (1.2 Gb/s) and if accessed flat out -- assuming half of all accesses are reads and ignoring seek times -- will blow through those 100 terabits in about 12 hours. I don't know if manufacturers provide error rates for the RAM in their computers, but it is definitely not zero. That really doesn't mean much in real terms except as a reminder that hardware errors DO happen and, in the pursuit of minimizing costs, we have largely chosen to ignore them (we don' need no stinkin' ECC memory!) so having things occasionally go BZZZT! PLOOF! with our data is a fact of life. The single biggest effect that this has on me is that I reboot my laptop (rather than putting it to sleep) every few days just to make sure that the things in memory are the correct things in memory. And I backup all my important data semi-regularly. This doesn't mean that I'd catch it if one of the OS files was corrupted due to bitrot, but I trust (probably unwisely) that the OS will catch that. PS: bitrot in RAM in low-power mode is much higher than when powered up. -- Problem reports: https://cygwin.com/problems.html FAQ: https://cygwin.com/faq/ Documentation: https://cygwin.com/docs.html Unsubscribe info: https://cygwin.com/ml/#unsubscribe-simple
