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Date: Sun, 11 May 2025 19:14:29 -0700
Message-ID: <CALy05zvSgMpBw7=B9HyDV53BjYg0j2faDNHtbmNUdqGN5hAMvw@mail.gmail.com>
Subject: Re: Clipboard paste on SHIFT-INSERT no longer works for me
To: cygwin AT cygwin DOT com
From: Backwoods BC via Cygwin <cygwin AT cygwin DOT com>
Reply-To: Backwoods BC <completely DOT and DOT totally DOT trash AT gmail DOT com>
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On Sun, May 11, 2025 at 5:28 PM Soren via Cygwin <cygwin AT cygwin DOT 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.

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