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Ants Invade iBook
xkranda writes "Seriously ... this is off the Apple Discussions site. Apparently some poor sap's iBook became infested with ants. All I have to say is ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!!!"
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Funny because a colony of Ants is kind of like Mother Nature's Beowulf Cluster.
Also, please don't mod me into oblivion for making a lame joke =)
OS X is full of bugs.
iAnts? *rimshot*
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
I looked down and saw the ants on my computer.
I was like... hnuh...
The ants de-voured my computer.
It was a really good computer.
---
Ellen, once you feel the ants crawling on your skin, darling, it's time to seek help.
Ants are supposed to have a strange sense of magnetic fields and electric fields. Electronics give off a lot of stuff, animals are especially attuned to it. They have been known to short out traffic lights etc., by crawling inside and bridging connections. They use these fields for navigation and stuff. They are pretty precise.
big deal. What's next in the news: Birds fly into Windows server?
Come on, editors, watch those duplicate posts.
======================================
Writers get in shape by pumping irony.
All I have to say is ew! Ew! Ew! Ew!!!
It's ok, you can get down off of the chair now, Daisy.
I know more than you drink.
Maybe the iBook was just on acid.
My deviantArt site
Thats one rotten apple!
True story -- I remember a report a dozen years ago of a person who took in her buggy Macintosh SE. It was full of cockroaches, eggs and everything. I have no idea how that could happen, or what the owner's concept of hygeine was. Maybe she left too many muffins sitting on top to warm.
I heard once about a problem like this before. A few cities in the southern US were having. Apparently, red ants would get into traffic lights' circuitry and completely destroy the stuff, costing a great deal of money.
It turns out that a few ants had got in there and fried. Upon their deaths, their bodies released pheremones, attracted more ants, who promptly got fried, releasing even more pheremones, attracting more ants... You get the idea.
I use to keep a P133 out in the garage workbench. I One day, I went out and the screen was black. I powered down for a hard reboot and got a few odd beeps and nothing else. I live in the middle of the Arizona desert and expected dust would eventually kill the machine. Turns out a fat ass black widow spider decided to melt her fat self on my processor.
Heh, I was browsing the apple discussion boards when things slowed down to a halt... So I thought, hell, I'll just read slashdot while I'm waiting for this to clear up... Lo and behold, I found the reason. ;)
— darco
iMac: Colonize Different.
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
i used to have a 7200/120 that housed a roach family. that was pretty fucking gross.
i eventually had to take everything in my house and shake it out over a plastic tarp that i ringed with roach killer. some stuff had to be submerged.
moral of the story: never pay $180 a month in rent, anywhere.
go get it
Imagine if it were infested with nmake!
When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a skull.
I had something like this happen once before to me to a cordless phone charging stand that was in my kitchen. Something with sugar in it got underneath the charger and the ants made the charger their home. I'd guess someone left something sweet was around the computer. I haven't seen the comment since Apple's site isn't responding.
:)
I just take the charger apart. Sprayed it with Lysol (yes this will kill ants). Put it in a plastic bag and left it. Next morning lots of dead ants. Then came cleanup followed by lots of drying. I also had to keep spraying for ants
until eventually they quit coming back.
However the charger is still working nicely for me.
I just remembered, the second (or was it third?) big game released by Maxis on the Mac, long before the PC, was "Sim Ant"...
Revenge is a dish best served with mandibles and insect appendages...
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Maybe the ants were in fact PC enthusiasts, set out to destroy every Mac in sight. Thank god this guy was able to stop the invasion in time, or this would have been the end of Apple.
VIVA LA REVOLUTION!
You're getting an infestation!
Just because you can mod me down, doesn't mean you're right. Shoes for industry!
Anybody see the independent movie PI? The mathematician's "super computer" gets infested with ants in the beginning and prompts him to make a deal with someone for the best chip out there in return for research into the magic number (sort of like the unified theory but different).
Was this guy looking for order in chaos? Did it spit out a 216-digit number before the ants infested it? Does he have intense migraine headaches?
No they just try to sell you car insurance.
and I was building a new colony in this Thinkpad, and, uh, like someone put a floppy disk in and it was like, beep boop bop, and our colony was, like, gone...
this sig deleted by another sig
they're features.
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
Better than finding a worm in your Apple.
Or half a worm for that matter.
Ba bum bump
Take a look at her switch ad. The second I read the parent, I was LMAO. Oh, if only I had points to mod it (+5,Funny).
Probably the first time a bug-induced crash was fixed just by turning on the Raid, rather than vice versa.
Come on, it's funny. I hear you snurfling...
"The pie shall be cut in half and each man shall receive.....death. I'll eat the pie."
Another Steve Jobs company attacked by Antz.
Is Dreamworks responsible?
What are the odds?
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
the first shippments of xboxes had roaches in them. my girlfriend works at funcoland, and when they cut into the boxes to unpack them roaches came skittering out and scared the shit out of them.
I want 2D games back.
I had a buddy of mine ask me to take a look at his computer. It had begun to make thumping/ticking noises when he would turn it on, and would not stop till he turned it off. I cracked the case, to find a quite dead and petrified rat inside his case, that thumped against his cpu fan. fuckin sick.. how it got in, and died in such a way to not stink to high heaven, I will never know, though I suspect someone put it there..
I'm a little tea pot.
Mike Myers was introducing another segment of "Germany's most disturbing home videos" when his computer was found inoperable, lying on the ground. He turned it over to find....Ants!
Game: Player 'Donald J Trump' now has AI skill level 'experimental'.
Date: Tue, 28 Nov 2000 09:07:26 -0800 ...
...
From: TechSupp
To:
Subject: RE: ants in omniview switchboxes
Thanks for the feedback. This is a new one to us. If you have any problems
down the road let us know and we will replace them. I have forwarded this
info to the President of Belkin and the Product Managers.
Technical Support Manager
Belkin Components
-----Original Message-----
From:
Sent: Monday, November 27, 2000 10:24 AM
Subject: ants in omniview switchboxes
came back to work from the holiday weekend. noticed a stream of ants
going up the cables in the back of a rack in the server room. oddly, this
stream of ants was carring larva up the omniview cables, and appeared to
be entering the omniview via the dip switch hole, and then exiting withot
the larve. I traced the stream out of the building, then traced a smaller
stream down a hallway and to another room with another system with an
omniview. here as well ants were streaming in from outside with larve,
depositing them in the omniview, and exiting. I took both omniviews
outside and opened them. hundreds of ants and hundreds of tiny white ant
larve were in each omniview, apparently storing and guarding the ants
under the bottom circut board. nothing was hurt, so I shook/knocked/blew
the ants out, dissasembled the omniview, coated the case with ant spray,
let dry, reassembled, reinstalled, everything works fine.
it dosen't appear the ants were after food in either case. I think
something about the omniview gave them a home they felt compelled to store
their larva in. I just can't explain why they would pick those, and how
the so effectivley found the only two omniviews on that side of our
building. the omniviews involved are both SE 4 port, and are still
working fine.
-J.R.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
Back when I was a Mac hardware repair guy, this person came in with an SE30 that would fail "only in the mornings". We thought it might be an odd time-sensitive extension like an anti-virus app, but we opened it up, and it had some big bug habitat in there. Even though the bugs seemed absent, their nests would collect the morning dew and short out the board.
So, I was doing my time, paying my dues and doing what I could to bring quality to the lifeless void that is a Best Buy black shirt technician (well, we became black shirts while I worked there). Anyhoo, this "woman" brought in a very old packard bell that was covered in yellow dust. A smoker. Some of the worse shit comes from smokers. As soon as she walked in the door, the AV tech told me to tell her to go away. My manager heard this and got pissy. She later recanted.
She brought her computer up and slapped down her PSP that had 20 or so days left and demanded a new computer because this one would no longer turn on. So I said okay, checked it in and put it in the back. When we opened it, a whole cock-a-roach family came running out. I almost vommited right then and there. It took WEEKs to get rid of those fuckers, adn even then we knew they were not gone.
Aparently about two months earlier this same nasty lady came in to the av area with a vcr for a "cleaning." When the AV tech opened it he found a dead mouse and silverfish. To this day you can find silver fish in that best buy :
The ultimate network admin tool needs HELP!
when you leave an apple laying around.
Napalm, daisy cutters, nukes, bio and chem weapons have no effect on Fire Ants. You can't kill them, you can just make them move. It's almost like they are natures version of lawyers.
Oooo! I know the answer to this one, because it happens to some kinds of dolls, too.
The answer many common plastics make use of "food" components, including corn solids and syrup. Here's a listof things made with corn, including plastics.
Plastics "separate" over time, with components migrating to the surface. It's the organic parts of plastic that cause problems like mold/fungus on plastics, as well as make them tasty for bugs.
This reminds me of the November 4th entry (scroll down a bit) on Paul Lujan's site entitled, "Ants Ate My Hub!". Pretty funny(?)...
--
http://www.aikiweb.com - AikiWeb Aikido Information
1) Power on laptop
2) Wait for smoke and insect screams to die down
3) Ventilate Area
Slashdot comments can be accurate, highly modded, or posted quickly. Pick two.
Maybe they were stealing his time?
Lars T.
To the guy who modded me down from perfect to terrible Karma - Apple haters still suck
I fix iBooks in the computer store for Brown Uni and we had someone bring in an iBook that apparently had been vomited on copiously at some party. ALL over the keyboard, and inside the circuits. For some reason, it wasn't working! And they brought it in about 3 days after it happened....
shame on us / for all we have done / and all we ever were / just zeroes and ones
They're undocumented creatures.
When I was doing my time as a bench tech, a guy brought in his IBM desktop, complaining that it had turned itself on, smoked and will not work anymore. We figured lightening. When he brought it in, it had the yellow staines of a smoker, but nothing else to tip us off. I opened the box and dozens of roaches came pooring out. We had to bag it up and call the guy, telling him that we couldn't work on his PC under warranty because IBM refused to pay for bug bomb! The roaches had curled up in his power supply, nested there and started eating the cables. To this day my skin still crawls when I see one of those IBM desktops.
www.linux-skunkworks.com
I think it's pretty obvious why the ants went for the iBook. Whenever i go on a picnic, the ants always go after the fruit first, especially APPLES. I'm going to get modded off the board for this.
You like your new Mac more than you like me, don't you, Dave? Dave? I asked...She said Yes.
The reason that ants will infest electronics is because they are attracted by the heat generated.
Excellent! Now all I need to do is put electric baseboard heaters around my outside walls and the li'l bastards will march right into fiery death!
Trolling is a art,
Mice are also attracted to aging plastics, probably for the same reason -- after a certain stage, the plastic smells like "food" again.
One guy on the Apple forum was wondering if he should remove the ants or just kill 'em in place (by freezing or whatever) -- definitely remove them. Ants are quite acidic, and a pile of dead decomposing ants WILL corrode susceptible components. I've also seen computer cases pretty well rusted from accumulations of dead cockroaches.
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
For those being invaded by streams of ants (who most often enter a building looking for water):
Ants will NOT cross a swath of diazinon granules (corncob-base *only* -- the newsprint-base type like Ortho doesn't work) and the few that try it won't survive the attempt. Also, two tablespoons of diazinon granules dribbled around the entrance to a hill is enough to kill the ENTIRE colony overnight -- and this even works with those aggressive mound-building fire ants. You can also use it to block their path thru cracks in concrete floors, etc. (Not recommended for any unventilated spaces where warmblooded creatures sleep, tho the weird smell goes away after a day or two.)
Borax is also reported to work, tho I can't attest to that one personally.
I like ants.. fried or in chocolate or anywhere OUTDOORS!!
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
When you ask a Mac user to set up a "honeypot" machine.
A friend's old Powerbook (500 series) became a hive. They didn't know it, but all of the ants that had been infesting their kitchen were roosting in their laptop set up on the kitchen counter. When the machine finally died from the generations of life that had lived in their machine, they had another friend open it up and discovered that it was packed full of ant-hive. The ants themselves had moved on by the time they had the machine looked at, as it had been turned off since it began to malfunction.
Further, I myself have a power supply for my speaker system that from time to time becomes infested with the tenacious little bastards. This thing is packed with them, I tell you. To get rid of them, I always just unplug the power supply for a few days.
[Cmdr Taco] The next posting was sent in by Lucas Bamberger of Mac-baden. Here he has come across an Apple Powerbook, which in itself is not so disturbing. Until it is turned over to reveal... ANTS! ANTS! ANTS!
[Cowboy Neal]
Now that's an ant farm of a different color!