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A comment on Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1. Parent comment

Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by colanderman on Friday June 09, 2017 @10:16AM (#14521501)
Nitpick, I assume by "race condition" you mean "used lots of CPU". This is a common colloquial conflation, but race conditions [1] (which are not generally identifiable without aid of a debugger and the application's source code) and high CPU usage are unrelated concepts.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Race_condition

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Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by plexicle on Friday June 09, 2017 @11:32AM (#14522096)
What are you going on about here? I have never once heard someone confuse "race condition" with "high CPU usage."
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Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by colanderman on Friday June 09, 2017 @12:38PM (#14522522)
Now you have: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14522211
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Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by dpark on Friday June 09, 2017 @10:57AM (#14521826)
That's not a nitpick. These are entirely different things and calling high CPU usage a "race condition" is really confusing and misleading.

Do people actually do that? Where did that come from?

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Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by eric_h on Friday June 09, 2017 @11:23AM (#14522026)
> Where did that come from?

Maybe because it makes your machine's fans sound like a race car?

Honestly this is the first I've heard of this usage as well.

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Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by hackbinary on Friday June 09, 2017 @01:09PM (#14522723)
And also, please can we refer to computers as hard drives. Especially desktops.
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Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by mediaserf on Friday June 09, 2017 @11:49AM (#14522211)
You're right. I didn't throw a debugger at it. It seems to randomly ramp up CPU load and stay high until I kill the process.
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Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by JupiterMoon on Saturday June 10, 2017 @02:12AM (#14526356)
Do look up what a race condition is.
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Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by Dylan16807 on Friday June 09, 2017 @01:05PM (#14522689)
It's a subset of race conditions to be sure, but I think it's reasonable to look at a thread that gets stuck in a do-nothing loop while the app continues to run and guess it's probably the fault of buggy multithreading and bad luck on the timings.
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Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by JupiterMoon on Saturday June 10, 2017 @02:10AM (#14526353)
> which are not generally identifiable without aid of a debugger and the application's source code

Random behavior is usually an indication that there may very likely be a race condition without needing the source code.

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Re:Microsoft to retire Skype Linux app on July 1 by ericd on Friday June 09, 2017 @12:09PM (#14522358)
I've never heard of those two things being conflated.
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