Slashdot Mirror
Possessed Technology?
gordlea asks: "Has anyone ever had a gadget that has acted in a seemingly possessed manner, or that seemed to have a personality of it's own? We once owned a Panasonic fax/phone/answering machine. This thing was crazy, it would randomly call up people who had called our place recently and play back messages other people had left for us. Occasionally it would even record our conversations and play them back to people who called when we weren't around! So do you have any good anecdotes along similar lines? I'm looking forward to hearing them!"
Chuckie, the art lab's old Mac II-something-or-other, which had a defective power supply. The thing would turn on by itself randomly, and someone changed the startup sound to be "I'm ALIVE!"
May we never see th
Yeah, I had this PC once and it was like beep beep beep... it was awful.
PC LOAD LETTER?!?!!? What the fuck does that mean?!?!?
THERE IS NO DATA. THERE IS O
heheh, ok although all thease fake stories are funny it would have been better if they had temporarily set it to show everyone as haveing bad karma (though not so it affected the weightings of posts just showed as being bad :-)
posessed technology..... ehhhe
Slashdot - The one stop shop for procrastination
Yeah.. we had a webserver, and for some reason, it kept letting some random group of editors keep posting really bad stories.
:P
We kinda liked the server, but found the email addresses of the editors and spammed them to death.
-
ping -f 255.255.255.255 # if only
I once had a television set that would turn itself on or off every night at 2am, then again 9 minutes later. Accept on May the 7th for some strange reason. It died in my last move and did not give a rats ass about time zones or daylight savings time. So the time it did it's thing would flux with what ever was going on time zone wise. Just to kill your ideas of what was going on, this tv did not have a remote or any kind of digital timing device or service. It was just your run of the mill tv.
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
Despite today's date, this is a true story. If I was going to make something up, I wouldn't have chosen a story this lame.
My grandmother suffered from senile dementia, so she would forget that she was talking to an answering machine. Well, every time it hung up on her, she would call back to yell at my mother (whose voice was on the answering machine message) for hanging up. The end result was that we would leave to go to dinner (yes, I was living with my parents, but I was seven, so it's not forgivable), we would come back and there would be twenty-some messages from her. Well, for about a month after she passed away, any time we would go anywhere, we would come home to find twenty odd messages on the machine. They would all be blank, but it was still kind of creepy.Yeah, sounds like they're sending out packages with the evil bit switched on. Check RFC 3514 for more info.
I watched C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.
I had an intro to programming class once, one of the assignments was to demonstrate random number generation- randomly generate an x,y,and color for a pixel, then draw it.
The person sitting behind me started theirs up and it drew a perfect nazi flag, except the background was white and the circle was red, instead of the normal way
-- 'The' Lord and Master Bitman On High, Master Of All
Yep, answering machines seem to be the most commonly possessed household appliances. My parents' machine still gets really strange noisy messages recorded on it at random. They sound like something out of the exorcist... Laughing, moaning, crying, and voices speaking backward. Of course, I could have imagined it all. It was mostly just hissing and white noise. But if you listened closely enough....
A few years ago, my father purchased a big LazyBoy recliner, that would affectionately be nicknamed the "Superchair". A few weeks went by and we were all enjoying the chair when dad wasn't around. Built in butt warmer, vibarating back massager, very nice indeed.
So one day at about 1am I come home from hanging out with the some friends, and pass by the chair to head off to bed.
As I walk past the chair it begins to speak directly to me in a soft, stoic, womans voice.
"Stephen, this is Judy. How are you? I haven't spoken with you in quite sometime."
At this point I freeze, I have never been so scared in my life, a chair, the SuperChair is talking to me, and it seems to know my name. I turn slowly towards the chair, part of me wanted to run as fast as I could out of the house, and part of me want to confront my four legged stranger.
I didn't run, I stood frozen for a few more second and then proceeded slowly to the chair.
No more speaking, but the silence was just a erie. I turned on a small light and began to examine the chair.
Ahah! As it turns out the chair had an answering machine built into the flip-up armrest that my dad must have hooked up to the phone line. We've never had an answering machine, so the thought never crossed my mind. The woman was friends mother called about an offer I made to help choose a CD player system...
One thing we didn't ever figure out, why did the chair start speaking right when I walked past it?
So now sometimes when the wind blows just right and SuperChair is feeling a bit alive, you can hear the words swirling around my living room:
"This is Judy.... This is Judy... This Judy...."
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
I had an OS/2 box that froze up for ten minutes, after which the printer spit out something I wrote a few months before but had never printed.
Is it Halloween yet?
Anyway, the system would randomly call not only the vendor, but the cell-phones of the road-warriors, too. Made for some horrific bills.
So I am at work late one night, programming my little heart out, and my telephone rings. I pick it up, hear the clicks of lines being accessed, and then hear ringing.
"Hello."
"Hello."
"What did you want?"
"Did you call me?"
"No. You called me."
"Actually, my phone rang, and I picked it up, and am now talking to you."
"I'm hanging up now."
"Good night."
"(click)"
The whole dictation thing lasted about a month.
And then I have the story about it prank calling me every 60 seconds while I was on receptionist duty....
"The most sensible request of government we make is not, "Do something!" But "Quit it!"
That hasn't been rebooted in 3 months. Does that count?
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
My Linux box is possessed by several daemons, as is my VR-3 Linux-based PDA ...
... okay, I'll go sit in time-out now.
oh
utter rubbish
No you dont. Move along. Nothing to see here.
This is a short summary of a true story, whether or not the rest of my scientific-based-method friends believe it. I once had a TI-86 calculator type messages to me in the text editor on the calculator. The raw text would appear as if someone was pushing the letters without hitting the "alpha" key twice to lock the letters. So, it looked like a bunch of garbage on the display, sort of like this: E944-0-+23/| My friends would find a garbage looking message on the calculator and hit the alpha key twice, push the sequency of letters on the screen, and messages would come up saying "You must avenge my death. You are my troth. You must kill (insert random person here)" To that effect. We (friends and I) would type questions into the calculator, set it down on the table and stare at it for 2 minutes, and then pick it back up to see the response. Nobody was typing in the messages themselves, and we made sure of this by observing who handled the calculator and what they typed (score 1 for the scientific method). Every time we looked for a response, there was something more written there. One time I wrote in some equations to my calculator for a test, and as I was taking the test I was using those equations. Well, half way through the test my whole equation cheat sheet got deleted and replaced with the words "DON'T CHEAT." A friend sitting next to me looked at me at the same time with a confused look on his face. He asked if something had just happened to my calculator, because his just flashed the words "DIE" on the screen for a moment. Just a tid-bit I thought I'd throw in there. This scared the hell out of everybody, including a few teachers who witnessed the events over a course of 6 months (hopefully those teachers didn't witness those equations I wrote in my calculator ;). The thing that possessed the calculator didn't really say anything useful, just said it's name was "doomood" and it was obviously pretty upset because it wanted my friends and I to go kill people for it.
I eventually started ignoring it, and it eventually stopped typing messages on my calculator.
I'd say in the end, it was both entertaining and scary to everyone who encountered it. Some people don't believe the store (I'm sure some of you are like that) but everyone who was a first-hand witness won't deny it. Freaky TI-86's. Thank goodness I upgraded to the 89.
Well, I didn't just magically upgrade to a new one. In my previous post, I didn't mention that it wasn't only the calculator that was writing strange messages. This was at least 5 years ago now, but I kept good documentation on everything so I could remember what happened later.
;)
My computer was also acting funny. For example, I'd come home to play a game of good old Warcraft II, and one of the computer opponents would start attacking the other computer opponents (something a skilled Warcraft II player would know doesn't happen). The computer started typing binary messages on the screen (which I took screen shots of). I started typing back to it, telling it to talk in english, and it said the same thing as my TI-86... go kill someone, you must avenge my death, blah blah blah, you will die, you must surrender immediately, etc. etc. etc. It was even calling me by name. My computer wasn't even connected to the internet, so it wasn't someone else getting into my machine. The computer ended up cheating a lot (i.e. ogres in the first minute of the game, that really pissed me off) and I got freaked out and deleted the game. Yes, it was a sad day. Never had any trouble with starcraft though
So the point of telling you all that was to show that it wasn't only my calculator that was getting possessed, but also other electronic equipment around me (printers also went nuts when I walked into a computer lab, room, etc.) Well with the calcalator, I started to resist the temptation to translate the messages on my screen and started deleting them. After a week or two of doing this, I started getting fewer and fewer messages, until finally it kind of just stopped happening. I continued to use my TI-86 calculator for quite some time after that, until that fateful day when it fell off my desk and broke the screen. That's when I decided to give in and get the TI-89.
Moral of the story: Don't talk back to electronic equipment, because everyone's gonna think that you and the 10 people that interacted with it are all nuts.