Slashdot Mirror
Computer Crash Reactions Examined
dankinit writes "MSNBC has an amusing story about research showing how people react to computer crashes and losing data. Among the numbers, 7% of those surveyed hit the computer, 13% yell at first, and another 13% try to "sweet-talk" their computer. The article also has results from a study done at the Univ. of Maryland. In that study, "One restaurant manager who was so upset with his laptop that he threw it into deep fryer. That destroyed the laptop ... and deep fryer, too.""
Nothing for you to see here. Please move along.
Whenever this one happens, I just hit F5 a few times.
I'll turn into a supernova and burn up everything. Well I'll turn into a black little hole and you'll turn into string.
Damn computer, and I thought I had frist psot, but somebody was faster!
My desktop at work: I do a dance of joy! Finally I get a new linux machine. Thankfully all my data is on the server so my desktop is no loss.
My home computer that hasn't been backed up in ages: I smack my head until I pass out. When I wake up I smack some more. I gnash my teeth as I lament the demise of my Diablo2 level 46 druid! Oh and all the pictures of both my kids.
The server at work: I start with a huge sigh as I restore data followed by snarls at users bugging me asking every ten minutes when the server will be back up.
The server at work that has bad backups that never got verified because everyone but me thinks the tapedrive is a magic box that never makes bad backups and I never get time allocated to manually verify them or time/money to come up with a better solution: I start smiling at the users as I fervently start hoping my home computer doesn't crash before I get home and print my resume. Where are the good backup tapes the users ask? Oh yeah, I took them home for offsite safekeeping, let me clean out my desk and go home to get them.....
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
What's that? I run OS X. :-)
Mark A. McBride -- OmniNerd.com
oh wait. it just crashed. #$%^& piece of $^&%&*^
Guess the rest reinstalled the OS and called it a day...
Anyone use poetry to regain favor with the PC god?
I formatted and put on a Linux distro. Been using it ever since.
Are there any statistics/studies into how often this happens as opposed to how many people throw their laptops into deep fryers?
I hear the same manager threw his laptop upon seeing Goatse.cx for the first time.
Again, the deep frier was destroyed!
I support many many users who are by no means savvy. A common reaction is to simply burst into tears. I have yet to find a gentle way to tell them they shoudn't have saved to c: without them losing it totally. It always sounds like Ha Ha!
I lost one of my email subfolders yesterday. when I realized that, I started sweating, not swearing, but perspiring. Personally I don't have time to react on the machine, my brain will be analysing what I have in the crashed hardware and what do I have to lose, then I react accordingly.
I wonder if different OS crashes induce different responses?
Rock that crushes, Paper & Scissors that don't matter.
... while 100% cursed Microsoft outloud.
if my computer crashed I'd send the memory dump and dmesg in to the OpenBSD team. Of course that never happens.
Trolling is a art,
How the hell do you destroy a deep fryer? I worked at a restraunt, of all the stuff in the place the deep fryer was like a burning pit from hell. It was something that CAUSED destruction but never took it!
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I hit/swear at/sweet talk my computer all day long...
The Answer
I hit the monitor, not the computer. I've never gone as crazy as this guy.
'SBEMAIL!' is better than a goat!!
I once worked at a computer store and had a customer bring in a pc for warranty work because he kicked down the stairs.
We told him he may need to set an automotive body shop first.
Personally my keyboard and desk get the brunt of my furry.
I had a friend that would always punch the monitor (ouch!). I told him that was probably not the best thing he should do when he gets upset at the computer.
Does this remind any of you of that video that was circulated years ago, with the guy in the cubicle going nuts on his computer, and throwing it at the wall, outside of his cubicle?
< quiet & devious > "I'll burn this place down one day."
YOU'RE WINNER !
Another lame blog
Where does the computer's "mind" go when it "crashes"? I always thought that it was JMP'ing between two memory addresses pointing at each other, maybe with some garbage between, or maybe it HALTs. What is the CPU actually doing right after the computer is crashed?
--
make install -not war
"One restaurant manager who was so upset with his laptop that he threw it into deep fryer. That destroyed the laptop ... and deep fryer, too."
Mmmmmmmmm...deep fried PowerBook. *drool*
"How like you to drag your keyboard to a gun fight." - Aaron Bedard (BANE)
Has got to be hard drives.
The day hard drives are replaced by 'solid state' technology will be the end of the frustrations not to mention the last chain of slowness of computers.
Something like FlashRom or Magnetic Memory hopefully.
installing Linux. Solves most of my problems.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Virus = very yes!
WHAT?!
FLAGRANT SYSTEM ERROR:
The System is Down. I dunno what you did, moron, but you sure screwed everything up.
When Linux crashes, the user is at fault.
Free MacMini
Among the numbers, 7% of those surveyed hit the computer, 13% yell at first, and another 13% try to "sweet-talk" their computer.
It's like beating a dead horse, but without the smell.
You can't take the sky from me...
On my Powerbook laptop, and SuSe desktop, I panic when my system crashes.
Why? With OS X and Linux, its usually a hardware failure.
Which is a pain in the wallet.
On Windows, you hear people talking about crashses all the time, but the answer is always just to reinstall Windows.
Well, 1% of the time its a hardware failure.
WhiteWolf666 an exBush supporter. All you new-school,compassionate,save the children Republicans can rot in hell
I say and a push reset with great zeal... Less than a minute and everything is back to normal... I never work on anything important enough to be upset about losing... That's the secret...
Anyways, I usually keep a pile of dead hardware just to take my frustration out on... usually smashing it or lighting it on fire.
I'll Find You Peer, If It's The Last Thing I Do!!!!
I told him I had an iron deficiency, not a silicon deficiency. Dammit.
I sweet talk my computer all the time, but not because of a crash ... oh wait .. was that out loud?
AirSpeak - http://itunes.com/apps/AirSpeak
In case of a crash, I still have a stash of old dead-tree pr0n.
The phrase "computer crash" has become a generic term, referring to anything that makes the computer freeze or stop operating. But the term actually refers to a mechanical breakdown. When a computer hard drive literally crashes, the head mechanism that reads the data physically crashes into the spinning platter that stores the data.
Is this really true? I'm sure I heard the term around 1980. I believe hard disks were pretty rare then.
Is Betteridge's Law of Headlines Correct?
In college, I used to keep tally of people who attacked their phones when receiving bad news. It's fascinatingly sad to watch: "The phone gave me bad news! I must destroy the phone!" By the end of the year, I swear I had a total of 35 confirmed phone attacks--but it was probably way above that.
Monster Zero is the reason we cannot live on the surface, but must live forever live underground like this.
"There was one restaurant manager who was so upset with his laptop that he threw it into deep fryer," Norman said.
Cave man throw laptop into deep fryer. No need use the.
The pervasive use of Microsoft products makes people believe crashes are an intrinsic characteristic of computers, almost like a necessary evil.
Reinstalling all your software, being infected with spyware and having your computer crash daily are part of popular culture. They're seen as events that one just has to live with.
I reboot, curse Microsoft, and my university for requiring Microsoft products (IE is required for many class websites). Then I longingly look at my boot loader and wish I could just go into my Linux partition instead of having to continue work in the Windows partition. Finally, upon completing my work (or more likely in the middle of it) I go shopping for a Powerbooks while waiting impatiently for Tiger to be released.
How about just bringing the machine back up again, spending a few minutes making sure the same p roblem won't take down the machine again (iff you know the cause), and being happy that you set your editor to autosave every few minutes?
That being said, my primary machines (Solaris/x86, Mac OS X, Linux/PPC) almost never put me through that, so I don't have to do it often. I can see how one would get upset if it were a weekly/daily thing, though.
unixkb.com -- articles on practical Unix issues.
And then you get the "Let the experts handle this, you just need to pay your protection money" angle:
Finally, we read an open disparagement of "individualism," which is apparently the wrong attitude when dealing with a computer:
Note the last bit -- where the support people are to blame for training people not to ask for help.
Gee, no mention of the OS involved being responsible for any of this. And where's this story running? MSNBC?
"Fundamentalism" isn't about divine morality. It's about human authority.
From TFA: "few computer users haven't considered tossing a misbehaving PC out an office window at one time or another. One respondent in Norman's study did just that, but left out an important step.
"His mistake was he forgot to open the window," Norman said."
Heh, one of the boarding students at my high school had a similar experience. What saved him was that he forgot to unplug the computer!
So, I think we've all learned some important lessons here. (You know, open the window and unplug the computer before throwing it to the death it so justly deserves...)
Things to do today: See list of things to do yesterday
I recall a case at a major Canadian brewery (think it was Molson, but it might've been Labatt's):
The sysoperator ran a batch process to reconcile inventory databases. Seeing that nothing was happening, he submitted the batch process again, with the deleterious result being two conflicting processes corrupting the database.
Half the beer shipments in Canada were put on hold for a few hours while they sorted the mess out.
just hit 'stop' and 'restore'.
---
Is this the MPAA? Is this the RIAA? Is this the DMCA? I thought it was the USA!
PC Load Letter? What the **** does that mean?
It would be interesting to understand how much of this
is due to the underlying computer infrastructure failing and how
much is due to a particular application's failure. Certainly, there
has been technology available for decades to make the platform
reliable.
I'm wondering how it is we've managed to lower our
expectations to the point where we thought such failures
were anything but outrageous?
-- Scott
What do you do when or if your computer crashes? 1) Hit the computer 2) Swear 3) Coax computer into giving your data back 4) Sigh and reboot 5) drop into kdb 6) Call Cowboy Neal for Tech support Then the comments section could be flooded by Mac/Linux fanboys who say "What? Crash? What's that? My leet system is t3h sold OMGLOLROFL!1! " On second thought, maybe the poll's not such a good idea.
Sometimes violence is the answer.
An old monitor i once used had a habit of turning the picture green once in a while. The only knwown remedy was a good whack at the side, turning it evenly balanced in RGB again.
Had the harddrive failed I probably would have whacked myself for not making a backup. And then the guy who sold it to me. For being alive.
Cost.
For now, the major reason keeping solid-state machines from taking over other media is cost. A 200 GB HDD costs about $100. 200 GB of flash will run you about $20 000. Plus, flash can only be re-written a limited number of times. It's 10k - 100k times, but then it's "lights out" for your SS media.
Hmm. I wonder what Joe Consumer will buy, considering they can't even put any quality into the drives, lest the cost goes up and JC doesn't buy it.
---
ECHELON is a government program to find words like bomb, jihad, plutonium, assassinate, and anarchy.
I read the initial blurb as:
Among the numbers, 7% of those survived hit the computer, 13% yell at first, and another 13% try to "sweet-talk" their computer.
I was wondering for a moment how many failed to make it.
liqbase
Some folks react by having a bender and posting a picture of a squirrel.
"In fact, Norman thinks companies could benefit from instituting 15 minute 'frustration breaks'" Ha! I'm so far ahead of this Norman guy! My computer already has "frustration breaks" from my fists. Me: 1 Consultant Guy: 0
I went to my bank's ATM, and the lady in front of me was arguing with the machine.
"That's not TRUE!"
"WTF do you mean, insufficient funds?!"
"I did put it in!"
For a second I had a flashback of that movie Slapshot when the guy inside the vending machine opens the door...
I bet it missed those who decided never to use a computer any more.
Tyranny isn't the worst enemy of a democracy. Cynicism is.
I was considering what could cause the deep fryer to become destroyed and came up with only one possible conclusion:
It was "The One Laptop". Only a deep fryer could really destroy the laptop being that it was the evil that the laptop was created from. And when the laptop was cast into the fryer the fryer erupted from the critical mass of evil and proceeded to destroy everything around it.
(apologies to Tolkien, Oppenheimer, and Jackson)
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
Most people react just like Michael Bolten does...with a bat!
And no,he has no relation to that "No Talent Ass Clown"
OpenSource is only free if your time isn't worth anything
Why doesn't this surprise me that MSNBC did the survey? ...34% have no clue what happened and call their company tech support. :)
If I do something stupid (real-life example: rm -rf /mnt/floppy/ * when the CWD is ~): Hands into face. Scream or cry.
If the system does something stupid that makes me lose data (hasn't happened since I switched): Hit the machine. Hit something else. Repeat until tired.
If the system just crashes: Meh. I can fix this.
This is a true story...about 3.5 years ago I bought a brand new Dell laptop to take to law school. In my second semester I had to write a brief for my legal writing class. It was getting close to the deadline and I really had barely started. I was sitting in my girlfriend's apartment typing away and BRAIN FREEZE. I couldn't think of what to type next. I literally just sat there staring at my computer. After about 20 minutes I was getting very frustrated and I balled my hand into a fist and slammed it onto the keyboard. Why? Who the hell knows - sort of one of those throw-the-controller moments. The screen went black. I was horrified. Not only had I been unproductive, but the entirety of my paper was stored in this little device that was no longer functional. At this point I almost threw the laptop out of a window. But I thought better of it thinking I could at least salvage the hard drive if I had to. After about 10 or 15 minutes (when my girlfriend stopped laughing at me and I had calmed down a little) I tried the power button again. Low and behold the little bastard worked! To this day I still have that laptop, it works just fine but there is a fist-sized dent in the keyboard. Whenever someone asks I suggest that my keyboard needed to be more ergonomically designed so I could type better.
Anyway. From then on, I swear by Dells.
I firmly believe there is a panic chip installed in every computer ever made. I discovered this chip quite by accident during my days as an undergrad. Regardless the system I was working on it would function fine until an hour before my program was due. Without fail the system would choke and in the process corrupt/lose/overwrite/hide all my data (Mainly my COBOL compiler). Of course how do you tell an undergrad from a grad student. The grad student saves his work in more than one place. At one point I considered switching to finance or something. It never occured to to have backups of my programs.
~CrnbrdEater
...so you used the dusty old one from the closet to post that?
Somehow I think that'll crash faster; you'll really be swearing then. "#$%^& dusty old piece of dirty $^&%&*^"
You can hold down the "B" button for continuous firing.
That's one of the most pervasive design errors in today computers. Really, a good computer design should trear user input as sacred - because everything else can be recomputed, but user data is unique and precious.
Come on guys. We have transactional databases, we have huge space in hard disks, we have no reason to lose a single keypress from the user. Do we enjoy having jokes on how people react when all their work of five hours is lost forever? Is "press the Save Button often" the best solution we can engineer?
Singularity: a belief in the "God" idea with the "demiurge" relation inverted.
who was so upset with his laptop that he threw it into deep fryer
...) is faulty and no wonder they will let their anger out on it. It's the typical "throw out the baby with the bath water" effect.
Thing is, some software developer-vendor companies [no, I won't name any] achieved a somewhat outrageous point where sixpackjoes think that when a software error causes a hardware hangup and data loss (and a _huge_ part of hangups is caused by bad software, that including drivers) then the whole stuff (computer, laptop,
But what else can be expected in the world where the blue "e" still means "internet" for the vast majority.
Thing is, IMHO, this is not their fault. In an ideal world the people should not experience any such drawbacks even if they don't know the difference, and don't know that sw and hw are not the same and are not glued together for eternity.
And the argument "don't use that SW or OS, use this another" isn't going to work in such cases, and it shouldn't either, because they don't care about such things: they paid a lot of cash for the damn thing, and they - rightfully- expect it to work at least as flawlessly as other "home appliances". They don't - be the cause HW or SW - and well, that is usually hard to explain to the average grandma next door.
And now, at the end, after trying hardly to be quite impartial, I have to tell: if I don't count hw failures (not so often, I handbuild my machines and I'm good at it), I've been in heaven since I trusted my data to my debian box on xfs for quite a few years.
I am putting myself to the fullest possible use, which is all I can think that any conscious entity can ever hope to do.
I own two computers, an "old" one (400MHz) and a "new" one (2,53 GHz). The hardware of the old one is really bad (CD-ROM player doesn't work half of the time, it makes a noice like a Boing 747 taking of when it tries to read the harddisk). My maximum uptime is 10 days (it's a router/server). When it crashes, I just press the reset button, it like a routine now. The "new" one is dual boot. I neve use Windows, but the other users often complain about the frequent crashes. I never had one using Slackware, so I don't really know that "crash-feeling".
From TFA: "Yet the first step for many computer after a computer crash is to hit or yell at their machine"
;)
I must have some sort of special computer, when it crashes it just freeze, I have never seen it yell or hit itself.
I can see the new computers yelling AT their users, because well all know the no1 reason for computer problems is the user
I work in sustaining, mainting Linux kernel drivers. Hopefully I get something to analyse (like a crash dump or other useful messages).
At least it isn't a hang, or a performance issue.
Where law ends, tyranny begins -- William Pitt
What about us members of /. who are sick of stupid LoTR jokes? Where's our apology? :)
Gamingmuseum.com: Give your 3D accelerator a rest.
That movie ("Godzilla vs. Monster Zero") should be required viewing for anyone interested in special effects as an example of how not to do stuff. Maybe for budding actors as well:
"The unpleasant noise coming from your radio is not a mistake. Please do not turn off the sound but instead turn it up as high as possible!"
"What a Controller?"
"You rats! You stinkin' rats! What did you do to her?"
I've never seen anyone do any of that when their computer crashed. Or heard of it. Other than in movies. But then, I don't live in any of the countries (Read: USA) where the 'research' was conducted.
It's in the Duke Nukem Forever credits, the Infinium Phantom port atleast.
If you think education is expensive, you should try ignorance -- Derek Bok, president of Harvard
I once had a customer (back in my small computer business days) who had bought a brand new, top of the line 486 Acer laptop. It came complete with a cool-ass trackball and COLOR screen!
Anyway, after a few days, the trackball started sticking on the guy and he called us. We cleaned it, but it would still stick - and he was starting to get pissed. We called Acer and got the usual tech runaround where they insisted they would get back to us. The customer finally called them and they told him the same thing - they never did.
So one fine morning at breakfast, the guy sits down with his laptop and cup of coffee in the kitchen and the trackball sticks on him again. Not just a little glitch either, I mean the pointer simply isn't moving. With one sweep of his hand, the coffee cup goes flying and smashes to small pieces on the floor. His wife looks the mess with disgust and says, "Why don't you take out your aggression on your computer instead?"
And the guys yells, "Yeah? Well, I think I will!" And slams the laptop to the ground and starts JUMPING UP AND DOWN ON IT!
Sheepishly, the guy comes back to us with the laptop in many pieces and tells us this story (and we had to try not to laugh about it). We called Acer, and finally got through to the president of the company and explained what happened. Believe it or not, Acer profusely appologised and sent us a brand new model (sans trackball of course)!
"...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
Yet the first step for many computer after a computer crash is to hit or yell at their machine
See, computers also have to deal with other irate computers. I've seen computers attacking other machines before too, it's not pretty.
Enjoy an e-piphany
I can see these same people saying to eachother "Hit the pc to add Ghz!"
I reject your reality and substitute my own.
if this computer i am currently on (windows xp) crashes, i hit the reboot key, and head upstairs to use my fedora box which has yet to die on me.
oh how i love those skull and cross bones.
I keep all my major stuff on a flash drive. Whenever the computer I use screws itself over (no I didn't do it I swear!) I sigh and reinstall windows. Though that hasn't happened much. Never happened with my XP machine.
My girlfriend HAS indeed said that Bill Gates is cute. I'm waiting for my computer to get struck by lightning or something.
You have been warned.
fuck! rodrigo@worium.com.br
One restaurant manager who was so upset with his laptop that he threw it into deep fryer. That destroyed the laptop ... and deep fryer, too
Yes, but how did it taste???
Irritable, left-wing and possibly humorous bumper stickers and t-shirts
According to the survey, more people commit some act of computer violence than call for help when faced with a crisis, according to a survey conducted by New York-based Ontrack Data Recovery.
If anything deserves -1 Reduntant...
... hasn't done much of anything since the days of dirty switch-knob tuners in TV sets. But the habit is hard to break, especially since the practice is somewhat satisfying, if not remedial. See, what computers need is some old fashioned electrical (not electronic) potentiometers and switches so that hitting them might actually do SOMETHING.
Research shows that 67% of those who use the term "research shows", are just making shit up.
You should apologize to the rest of us, too.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Quite obviously, this is why people *phone* you to give you bad news . . .
hawk
...that is not a small number!
"Creativity is allowing ones self to make mistakes. Art is knowing which ones to keep" - Scott Adams
And the real nerds of the world break out their backups and or computer forensics tools. Then get everything back.
I guess Linux/Unix/Mac users are more psychologically stable then, since they are less prone to this kind of trauma.
Wouldn't it be funny if windows users filed a class action suite against M$ because Windows crashes led them to psychological trauma which may in turn lead them to harming other innocent people!
I admined a high school computer lab for a while. We had a bunch of Win98 boxes with very flaky hardware - out of 15 machines I usually had to reformat and reinstall one every week or so. We did have a linux box for permanent storage, but largely, the proper solution to file storage was "bring a floppy" or "email it to yourself" or "upload it to geocities".
It's worth pointing out that there were signs all OVER the room, including one on each computer, reading "do not save your work on this computer, save on the Linux server or ask a tech for help".
And so inevitably, one day a computer melted down as usual (Windows just wouldn't boot) and, as was usual at this time, I didn't bother trying to fix it because it just wasn't worth it. Wipe, reinstall, done.
And then a day or two later I ended up with a teacher yelling at me because someone had written a paper on that computer and, natch, saved it on the hard drive, despite all the warnings. She demanded that I retype it from him ("retype"? Turned out he'd written it on paper, then merely typed it in on the computer - he still had the original!) and I refused.
It's worth pointing out that I wasn't just a volunteer. I wasn't even an official volunteer. They had no real admins at this computer lab - I was just a highschooler who had gotten tired of only having two working computers out of 20, and had taken it on myself to make the lab work again.
But no, apparently just keeping the lab working, linux box and all, wasn't enough. Now they wanted me to copy all possible data anyone could want off the hard drive, and keep it forever. Including favorites, other apps, documents - everything.
(Which I said "no" to, and also said "no" when they decided to require a two-week paperwork process for fixing any computer, and eventually they kicked me out of the lab and half the computers were broken in a week. Lab never was the same after that.)
But there you have it. Lost data? Don't say "oh, I was warned this wasn't a good place to save things." Don't say "well, shit happens, I'll go retype it from my paper version." Just try to make someone else redo it for you.
Pfft. People.
Breaking Into the Industry - A development log about starting a game studio.
The only time I have a problem with computer crashes is when its my work system. Since I no longer work in the IT department, I don't have admin access anywhere. That means I have to call *other* people when my system goes down.
Don't get me wrong, our IT department is courteous and professional and knowledgeable. It just feels so... wrong to sit there and let someone else work on my computer. I imagine thats how it must feel to sit there while some other guy makes out with your girlfriend.
It's the land of the brave, and the home of the free
Where the less you know, the better off you'll be.
That's why a year-end terminal bash is necessary, like we had in my university. A controlled environment where people take turns to apply an lumberjack axe to a specifically assigned terminal, not that we discriminate this terminal against the others.
The online poker game I was playing caused a crash, and the thing got a blue screen every time I rebooted. Took until about 3AM when I finished cursing Bill Gates's name in every language imaginable. Turns out I had to uninstall all the drivers for my USB devices and reinstall them one by one. Of course I had to uninstall my keyboard & mouse driver, and tear the house down trying to find the install CD's that I had so recently cleaned up and organized.
I don't think there's anything that can induce more rage than Microsoft operating systems.
Male computer hitter seeking female computer sweet-talker for a co-dependent relationship.
-Peter
"One restaurant manager who was so upset with his laptop that he threw it into deep fryer."
One laptop computer $1500
One commercial deepfryer $3000
The realization that not only have you destroyed your computer, but also a vital means to your restaruants busniness and your business and personal information due to a split second of impulse anger.... priceless
If you mod this up, your slashdot background will turn into a beautiful sunset!
My laptop went click, click, click, click, click... Flash drive to the rescue! Backed up my important data. A few minutes later it went click, click, click, finally froze, and then blue screened. Since it was under warranty and no data was lost I didn't have to hit or yell at it. :)
When "these things" break, stored frustration can explode into rage, particularly when people spend seven or eight hours each day in front of a computer, Norman said. In fact, he thinks road rage might be the result of what he calls "computer rage." After a long, hard day of computer crashes, one unfriendly driver on the way home can set off a person who is already near the edge.
:-)
See? Using Windows has repercussions beyond just bad UI. It has turned us into a nation of homicidal maniacs on the road.
I always wondered why I was a much better driver than most people on the road. Now I know - I use a Mac!
Apple. Is there anything they can't improve?
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
I had one CEO for a dead networking company that had 'anger issues' and destroyed 5 laptops in one year. One he put under the backwheel of his porche and peeled out. Another he smashed with a hammer because the recharge light was blinking, no joke. The best part is he would take the remains back to our IT dept and berate them for buying shoddy laptops. Yet another time I was happy I was not in Desktop support..
My wife had her laptop crash while working on here thesis. She looked at the screen and it said something like "Application Failed, exiting" and an "OK" button. She said: "No, it's not OK. I want a "Not OK" button!"
I'm tired the engrish in stories of slashdot
True story, the deadline for a paper I was writing was closing in fast (i.e. the next time the sun comes up). I had compiled a ton of raw research in a single file, "notes.txt", and was in the process of going through it, combining redundant data, and copy/pasting in a logical order into a second file, "outline.txt" to base the first draft off of.
I forget exactly what it was, but one of my (nonessential) programs was acting up. I went into the task manager and futzed around a bit until I got it killed.
All was well....I thought.
Running on nothing but caffeine and determination, I wasn't in the clearest state of mind. Turns out that I had managed to kill the text editor I was using on outline.txt also, and I hadn't saved my changes for a while...oops...
My raction went something like this...
This is actually the most complicated reaction to a crash I've had that I can think of. It seems like my reactions vary wildly depending on the situation...
For crashes with less severe consequencs, or ones that are completely obvious (power failure, etc), I usually jump straight from normalcy to damage assessment. Afterwards, anger comes first and then reflection on what caused the crash.
Sometimes I'm almost completely calm. This is usually when I'm already expecting Bad Stuff to happen, I've already accepted the consequences and know what I'm going to do. The last time I had a hard drive crash on me, I got a little worked up because I wasn't expecting it to happen right then, but it was an older drive and I had long since moved anything irreplacable off of it.
An Attempt at Insight
Remember though that people like you and I understand more about computers than most people, and we don't tend to focus our anger on the computer itself. A lot of people have no idea how computers work, they might as well run on fairy dust and wishes for all they care, so when they experience problems they feel helpless, they get mad at the computer, "ugh...computers suck they always fuck up like this and they're so hard to use", which results in the stories of people deep frying computers. The average nerd doesn't feel so helpless, he thinks of computers more as tools that he has complete command over, not insurmountable obstacles to his life, so he's probably not as likely to da
Nyntändo-Schock!
"One restaurant manager who was so upset with his laptop that he threw it into deep fryer. That destroyed the laptop ... and deep fryer, too."
...Too often I feel like the system is being the boss...
Perfectly normal reaction. When the system is designed wrong and the computer becomes the boss, it's the most uncompromising and militaristic boss you will ever have.
you do it without being in front of a computer as well, so that doesn't count.
You can't handle the truth.
Opps! Wrong story.
Windows machine at home: crashing that box is about as commonplace as ... well, logging in and using it for 2 hours, so my reaction is resigned frustration as I lean over to hit the reset key.
Linux machine at home: a big stupid "O"-mouth expression as I wonder how I, knowing precisely Jack and Schite about Linux, managed to crash it. This has only happened once and it didn't really crash. KDE just locked up on me.
Work machine: Bagel time.
"I have never won a debate with an ignorant person." -Ali ibn Abi Talib
Here's the hardware abuse link, I don't think it's shown up here yet.
Here's a snippet of what I see following the link with Lynx:
y ?_..?hZ-|n?T6NtM~g=nm K~*fp1'Q!i}[;?e4}Dm2o Wr=>),>Jy1Kw(5w?5feq
388
`I%&/m{JJt`$@HiG#)*eVe]f@?{{;N'?\fdlJO"!?~|?"Eyxg
``xI>UtQ?1J7?XiSOn6l|cZ]fu/|>K?mhXg8v#M>>tpWXybG;
cAg.3#a_%JqQVOwm6)q({I|!VlV,/7?{R(O`>/lAh3}w9?mQy
A1YZl%&A~fcO/v[K_#:oh]+yGGjE5^ 364
Yes, keep telling yourself your choice of OS (OSX) can magically prevent hardware failures.
;-)
Lightning hit my house (or near enough) a few years back, it came through the modem and fried my G4's motherboard's ethernet. I had to buy a network card. The computer was turned off and unplugged as soon as I heard the thunder, but I didn't think that the phone jack was a risk. I know better now.
Your hardware failure comment made me feel like bragging that my mac (mostly) survived being hit by lightning.
You can't take the sky from me...
When my box crashes I kind of enter a berserk mode. Literally, I could bite someone's head off. Practically, I've actually done a good deal of harm to my right hand as I was pounding on the wall, as not to kill the box. I had a broken memory chip and I knew it, and it was the ONLY memory chip I've had, and I had some really important work to do. Like 10 000 worth of dollars. (possibly)
:P
After a few minutes I see red stars and stripes on my wall and my hand being extra-large. Under the blood several spots with crushed cement and the wallpeper torn off were seen. Ouch, I still have scars on my hand, though I don't remember any pain... all was so purely white. Even now my fingers hurt when I bend them... Damn nANYA.
Man, I meed to take anger control courses before I do that with my head or go out on the street and beat someone to death.
So, it wasn't a crash. But one day, my 98 box suddenly stopped playing sound.
Odd. Checked the speakers, they were fine. Hmm. Oh, I'm an idiot, check the volume controls. No, those are fine too. Very odd. Oh, what the hell, check that 98 still believes the hardware is there. Yep, hardware's there. Drivers read fine too.
Dead soundcard? Hmm. Reinstall the drivers.
Sound! Ahh.
Two days later, no sound.
Reinstall the drivers. No sound.
Reinstall again. No sound.
Reinstall again. Threaten to install RedHat on the box as it boots.
Sound. And never another problem with sound as long as I had the box.
Real techs just threaten to install Linux on misbehaving Windows boxes. Hitting them doesn't do anything; they're already into bondage and masochism.
cause if it's not seated, it won't have any data.
Then I throw the cat against the wall, just for good measure.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
And if you consider it important enough to spend money on, you can buy a gadget to insure exactly that. (Thanks to Dan Rutter for his reviews of this and other cool geeky toys.)
//Information does not want to be free; it wants to breed.
I recall during my first week here at my university (another one of those *IT's), I suddenly heard a loud "CRASH!!!" outside of my window. Someone threw their monitor out the window. Another person ran into our room thinking we did it... It was rather humorous to see people out there with a shopping cart collecting the pieces.....
In undeveloped countries, the consumer controls the market. In capitalist America, the market controls you.
Caused the user to lose work
Had no workaround
To a Lisp hacker, XML is S-expressions in drag.
"One of the most overlooked advantages to computers is... If they do foul up, there's no law against whacking them around a little."
-- Joe Martin
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
In that study, "One restaurant manager who was so upset with his laptop that he threw it into deep fryer. That destroyed the laptop ... and deep fryer, too.""
...
...
Darn, there go the Freedom Fries
Of course, maybe if he was using BSD or Linux he would have Freedom Fries
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
Last time my computer crashed (thanks to Win98), I responded by meeting my first girlfriend and making out with her for hours.
:'(
Now I run Linux on my PC... I guess this means I'll never have another girlfriend.
"And I'd rather be a nobody that's a somebody than a somebody that's just a nobody. Or something. Point is -- you suck!"
So you would rather be you than Darius Rucker?
Find coupons in Greeley
> produces a Greater Than symbol (>)
< produces a Less Than symbol. (<)
And I'll be rescinding your geek card now. Thank you.
--LordPixie
An hour before a programming project was due, I misused the jar utility. In my state of exhaustion, I typed
...
.jar file name.
:)
% jar cf GraphicsTest.java ConsoleGraphics.java
instead of first specifying the
Oops.
jar ran, and expectedly axed my source file. I stared at my monitor in disbelief. My breathing got irregular and I seriously started to panic. Not fun.
Fortunately, when source is in your head and your adrenaline is pumping, you can rewrite a few hundred lines of code pretty quickly
-- n
Never underestimate the power of percussive maintenance.
I concur! Who hasn't had a HDD with a little bit of "stiction" that needed some gentle persuading to spin up?
The old 80MB (With an 'M') Seagate I had on my Amiga 500 (Trumpcard, baybee!) had that problem. While the computer was up and running, all was right with the world, but if I turned it off, I would literally have to whack the hard drive to make it go again. Fittingly, I rested the disk on a paperback copy of the Necronomicon so it wouldn't scratch my desk.
Besides, don't most people hit the monitor? Like the poor CRT had anything to do with the problem!!? People are a lot less likely to hit a LCD flat panel, though...
I'm sorry for you. :P
Just a Tuna in the Sea of Life
When I was at university, the non-essential stuff on the local hard drive was wiped clean every time someone logged out.
Seems the solution isn't to say "You *might* lose your data on this machine"; it is to have a sign saying "All your data on the C: drive *will* be erased when you log off of this machine- please store on drive H:". Or whatever.
(It might be desirable to have a warning allowing the user to transfer their locally-stored data to their online drive space when they log out. Maybe not..)
Anyway, doing it that way cuts out the excuse to take the risk (as many people would do) and keeps the consequences closer to the action.
Not that I'm blaming you for not doing this, nor saying your school weren't behaving like assholes...
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
last time my mac crashed was when i overclocked it from 600MHz to 800MHz, kernel paniced straight, dont think i have ever in my 8 years of mac ownership had my mac crash unless i was overclocking.
my reaction: general muttering as i pull out my soldering iron to put those pll resistors back into place.
Brings back fond memories of my 16 ounce fine tuning wand.
Apocalypse Cancelled, Sorry, No Ticket Refunds
Is invariably my reaction when a computer crashes for me.
My Linux, FreeBSD and MAC OSX machines don't waste my time with crashes, viruses etc.
windows is not the answer. Windows is the question. The answer is NO.
I fired the video up to watch it for old time's sake, and just when it started playing, my MP3 rotation got to Strong Bad's techno song.
"The system... is down. The system... is down. DUN DUN DUNUN DUN DUN DUNUNNN!"
Nice timing, I thought.
I know a friend who had her entire graduate thesis in a FLOPPY. She'd save her work again and again, and again.
In the day BEFORE the deadline, her floppy began showing errors - she couldn't open the word doc anymore.
The article made me think - people just see this black box that who knows what's got inside, and by magic, things work.
I miss the days when computers were only for geeks - the books had VERY NICE intros on what was a hard disk, what were the tracks and sectors of a floppy, etc.
Ah, the nostalgia...
I get that regularly with older monitors here. Somebody is having a problem with a monitor... I calmly walk over look at it a moment... and then smack the everyliving crap outta it.
Quite often this nicely fixes misbehaving monitors, and the reaction from the other staff members is rather amusing as well.
..just for this purpose: but I never use it.
I immediatly throw in the knoppix cd and start a NEW freecell game! Seriously though, my first thoughts are useing a knoppix cd to see if I can see what went wrong and if I can salvage anything.
People say my sig is the best thing about me.
Last time I heard he had been shipped to a US department and forced to taste-test American beer. He may or may not have killed himself by now...
One day (using windows by then.... that was a long time ago) my PC crashed as I was listening to an Audio CD. The CD continued playing, so I remained there until the end of the music. That lasted 20 minutes.
:IIRC that was beethoven's violin concert by Menuhin&Furtwängler. 1953 version.
PS
War doesn't prove who's right, just who's left.
1995 -- Anguish: In order to deal with a backdoor-exploiting hacker (I eventually closed them all but one, and honeypotted it), I hid the real forum databases in a system'd directory. When it came time to backup everything and move to a new drive, I ziped it all up and fdisked the old drive.... only to discover that pkzip didn't see the system'd directory. I was very upset at the loss of many high school conversations, and many logs. In addition, I lost many conversations my ailing mother had taken part of (when she was housbound, the BBS became her outlet to the world).
.5TB RAID-5 for storing all of my photographs. It has never been backed up (that's, what, 20 DVDs?). If I loose that, I loose many long hours of enjoyment, and a significant chunk of our family's history.
1996 -- Satisfaction: I started working for a low-cost retail software company that bought out a shareware reseller company (3rd largest in the world!) from Medford. I frequently lamented that we needed a backup (all shareware images were stored on a single Novell server). Finally, the server died, and all images had to be recreated by hand (hundreds, if not thousands, of 3.5" disks, one at a time). The server "clean" room had it's ventilation intake in an office... used by a chain-smoking accountant. The manager smoked in the Rimage disk-duplication clean room, tapping cigarrettes onto the floor. Those were some of the dirtiest machines.
2001 -- Anger, then Resignation: My mother had recentl passed away, and I took posetion of her hard drive. She was quite a prolific writer, and was very insightful, but never had much published. Towards the end she started self-publishing. As I hooked up her hard drive to back up all of her work over the past decade, my machine sparked to life with the drive partially plugged in, shorting out something on the controller board. All of her work, minutes away from safety, lost. Not much you can do. I still have the drive, for when I have the spare money to send it in for recovery.
Future -- Dispair: I have a
You quitting proves that the karma kap worked. The most annoying of the whores shut up. --CmdrTaco
It seems to me that a lot of frustration could be avoided if the developer of the most popular consumer OS took the issue of backups a bit more seriously.
As things are, the first time Jane Average is introduced to the concept of backups comes after she's lost something important. Oh, in some cases, a techie friend may have mentioned in passing the importance of backing up, or she may have seen some box labelled "Ultra Backup" in a store. But for most people, if they get any message at all telling them they should do backups, it will be very little. I think Jane could be forgiven for thinking that anything they punch into a computer will always be there and of backups as some sort of optional extra you can buy.
What is needed is for the idea of backing up to become a core part of the OS in a way that tells users regular backups are a normal and necessary aspect of computing, and reinforces the message. At the moment, a stock machine will nag a user about petty things like removing unused icons from their desktop, but never ever tell them that they ought to do a backup. If only more programs like Wordpad did auto-saves (transparently and as a default option, of course), if only Windows XP had a rudimentary backup program and reminded users every so often that it's time to back up their files to some form of removable media (similar to the way it now reminds people to check their virus definitions are up-to-date), there would be far less lost data and far fewer irate calls to tech support.
Certainly there are BOFH-types out there who derive pleasure from lusers losing hours of work, and "tough love" types who would view Jane's loss of precious wedding or baby photos to a HD disaster as a result of her own ignorance. If a user ignores the message and prefers to learn the hard way, fair enough. But as stewards of the industry who are well aware of the importance of backups, and well aware of users' default ignorance of the issue, what do OS developers do to send the message that backups are important? At the moment, not even the bare minimum.
If you ever had an Amiga or spent some time within earshot of one, you know they perpetually "click" their empty disk drive(s). The head's moving between tracks 0 and 1, eager to mount something.
I don't usually talk to computers, but I swear my A1200 instantly obeyed the one time I hissed at it to stop the damn clicking already. It hadn't crashed, and the disk drive was still working and recognising disk insertion - it just wasn't clicking anymore. Must've been the Intuition in its ROM, I dunno.
I never dared to repeat that "experiment", though; it would only have shattered my illusions.
(End of boring story.)
With Knoppix.
"Reality is that which, when you stop believing in it, it doesn't go away." - Philip K. Dick
"That's one of the most pervasive design errors in today computers. Really, a good computer design should trear user input as sacred - because everything else can be recomputed, but user data is unique and precious."
Byte magazine covered that a couple years back. Basically it can be summed up as economics. Computers can be as you say (mainframes), but that runs counter to "cheap as" (Dell). If people want that, then they'll pay for it.
My brother is bad a golf and takes it out on his clubs. I get him a new putter every xmas.
I personally have crushed D&D dice for not rolling correctly at a critical time.
Logically we know it isn't the objects fault but it feels good to personify it and exact revenge none the less.
Techie: What are these dents in your case from? Me: Euh, speed holes? Seriously folks, I've destroyed 3 hard disks from the shock damage of me hitting my comp when it crashes in the middle of an important task.
Fucking Lite-on dual-format DVD burner won't read half the fucking DVDs I feed it - acts like they're either full or aren't even in the drive.
And these are Fujifilm Taiyo Yuden DVDs, too - top of the line in quality.
This piece of shit is OUT OF HERE as soon as I can afford to buy a new drive.
You wouldn't believe the cursing I've done today.
Threw a half dozen DVDs against the wall.
Christ, I hate the fucking IT industry!
Bunch of goddamn monkey-ass morons who make shit!
Assholes!
Goddamn incompetents!
Oh, wait...
I'm in the IT industry...
Never mind.
Oh, hell, it's all true...
Fucking, moronic, stupid, primate...
"Nothing works and nobody cares." - Woody Allen, 20th Century's greatest philosopher, in summing up the human condition in five words.
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
Pull up a chair, and let me tell ya a story. Let's say there's this lady named Alice. Now, Alice decides on her own one day that she wants to start eating bagles. So, she meets this man (we'll call him Bob). Now, Bob convinces her that he's a bagle-connoisseur. So, she decides to follow his lead. For the next few days, he leads her through eating bagles with rat-droppings on them, old disgusting bagles, soggy bagles from having been dipped in Dr. Pepper rip-offs. After a while, Alice manages to take some of the bagles that Bob gives her, scrapping off the disgusting parts, and salvaging the parts of the bagle that she likes.
Now, during all this time, Bob is also way overcharging her for these bagles. So, let's say a few years pass. We take another look at Alice, and she's no longer buying bagles from Bob, but she's either creating her own bagles, or eating other bagles. Keeping in mind that she decided to start eating bagles on her own, should she thank Bob for getting her into bagles, or should she smack him for causing her to eat disgusting bagles, and probably slowing down her adoption of bagle-eating habits that much longer?
Long story short: The stuff that Microsoft did to help the industry would have happened with or without Microsoft. The pain, set-backs, and such that Microsoft caused probably wouldn't have. Microsoft does not deserve my thanks, and while I respect Bill Gates, and Microsoft as a company (mostly for their skills at manipulating the market, but also because *now* there are some very decent idealists working there), I think the market would have moved along at a much increased rate without Microsoft. We would be better off today if Microsoft had never existed.
Disclaimer: I do use Linux and Mac OS X. However, I do not think that everyone should be running Linux today. It's not ready for that, plus, people have different tastes.
I hold up dead computer parts (sutably butchered), and tell my computer how horrid it's life could get if it doesn't start working properly :)
Are you sure you belong here? :-)
Author, Shell Scripting : Expert Re
Assuming I have my important data backed-up, I look at computer crashes as an opportunity to upgrade hardware! Much faster CPU, bigger harddrives,etc. While the computer is running fine, I cant seem to get in the right mindset for an upgrade. But after its broke, Yeahhhhhhh-Haaaaaaaa! New stuff!!!!
Imagine a beowulf cluster of these.. with dipping sauce!
-David
Ah, this is obviously some strange usage of the word 'brief' that I hadn't previously been aware of.
You can identify a Windows user because they're the ones who thinks two weeks of uptime is something to brag about.
--R.J.
Electric-Escape.net
crash different.
did ALL of those things: Hit, yell, sweet-talk
... and deep fryer, too."
plus in marathon and wash-rinse-repeat mode:
-- rub it like a Genie bottle
-- take the name of god (or God) in vain as if daring and willing suicide by blashphemy (think: suicide by cop) for everything that did and will go wrong in this and other lifetimes
-- pound the living shit out of the surrounding and supporting furniture
-- cry
-- cry some more
-- fling the disk across the room
-- fling the disk across the room, again
-- attempt audaciouss, irreversible, instant suicide by persistent, vehement, non-repentent blasphemy, again
-- Clench-fist-shake like Kirk in the Genesis Cave, forehead veins bulging, howling:
"Gooooddd!!!!. Gooooddd!!!!. Gooooddd!!!!",
while trying to find a suitable place to hurl that disk like a mo-fo without it richocheting into forehead or window (both expensive to fix if hit by a disk flying at 25 MPH... The gray MATTER is NOT as durable as the silver PLATTER) (No, not ALL of those in this bullet happened to me, yet...heheh...)
-- (and, if a tecchie working too far into the night, smashed the hell out of the drive but then and hour after the fact realises the data cable was never connected, though power was, or vice versa...) (no comment...)
-- save the disk for a decade, in the hopes that some new, non-rotative technology will vacuuum the data off the platter
===========
The part that if had to joke about after reading this:
"One restaurant manager who was so upset with his laptop that he threw it into deep fryer. That destroyed the laptop
was, "That drive WAS FRIED!".
And, "THAT laptop really did have a CORE MELTDOWN!"
And, "Unlike "Therminator", this disk will NOT "... bee bohkk.."
And, I wonder if the EPA was called for the toxic site cleanup. I wonder if he was standing before a vat of a "veal pond" (think: the CA man whose property developments were held up by environmentalists over some scum on his property... it was really just scum, not a new life form...)
After all, if a cigarette butt in water qualifies as a toxic site, then a laptop dropped into a deep oil/fat fryer would gunk up the pipes and be all too hard to miss when the *trol/Horbart/whatever company rep comes to fix it.
Some duty to reporting environmental hazards, ehh?
David Syes
Previously: "Linux... Toward the Sunrise..." Now: "Linux... Toward the-- No, now, part of Every Sunrise"
The percent of us who use this on it.
Table-ized A.I.
Take a look at this http://www.experts-exchange.com/Operating_Systems/ WinXP/Q_20916214.html story about someone who got screwed but then worked to unscrew himself. Pretty interesting I think especially since even the experts didn't think he could get his data back.
this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom. -- Lincoln, Gettysburg Address
Gee, it was about 18 months since I had a crash, strangely thats around the same time I switched to Linux full time. Coincidence?
But most system "crashes" really are software bugs, making the system unresponsive to all attempts to regain control. Even control-alt-middle finger won't get the system to respond. Nothing to do except hit the reset button (or pull the plug, if your system is "modern" enough to lack a reset switch) and curse loudly while it reboots. The user doesn't care why, all they know is the damn thing just wasted a lot of their work again, while the boss is breathing down their neck about making a deadline...
One of my favorite things is to use old CDs for target practice. It's so cool to watch a CD explode on impact.
Funny thing though, the bullet just seems to bounce off Windows CD's. It happens on Win95, Win98, WinME, Win2K (both professional and server), and Win XP disks. I've shot them all with a 357, and a 30-06, and no dice.
I'm wondering if all the bad stuff happening to my computers have something to do with this (random crashes, hardware failing, all the way to smoke pouring out the back of one of them).
Oh well, I'm off to church now...
TDT
Well, maybe it's not quite that simple... but you can always get a Mac. I used to hate those things, and then OSX came out. Beautiful interface, fast response, and best of all, it's BSD. Hell yeah.
I think the OSS community should collect some kind of fund for advertisements. I know you've all seen those, "How did one company lower its TCO? It switched from Linux to Windows" advertisements. Why not make up similar advertisements all over the newspapers and magazines, telling people, "How did Joe Shmoe end his frustrations with lost data, crashes, slowness, popups, spyware, malware, adware, keystroke loggers, reboots, etc? He switched from Windows to Linux."
And then, on the bottom of the page, it'll say, "Linux. Higher TCO, and worth every extra penny."
7) Turn three feet to the right, mount the network shares on my Linux workstation, and continue working away happily, all while secretly praying that god damned XP workstation never ever comes back to life. Helpfully point out to boss that Crossover Office is cheaper than a hard drive.
They'd all do better to hit themselves.
On an old 486 I had a long time ago, the keyboard on it was flaky. Everytime the computer started to boot, it would give me the keyboard error POST with the message:
Press F2 for setup
Press F1 to resume
This of course yielded nothing as the keyboard wasn't accepting input.
After getting pissed off at this, out of sheer frustration I hit the keyboard, and it proceeded to function. From that point on, I realized that if I drop the kb from about 6 inches above the desk, it would begin to function. I started to use it as a security feature. No one believed me until they saw it for themselves, but this worked everytime, without fail for the life of computer. True Story!
Progress is man's ability to complicate simplicity!
As with most typical guys, my PC has a girls name..
:p
Usually used to start start with a "oh come on now.. don't be a dirty little tart.."
Then the Sweet Talk..
Then the insults.
Then the threats.. Then the promises to practice whatever new surgical procedure we learnt that week.
I think I might have put my g/f name in place of my computer at one time or another.. needless to say, no g/f anymore.
now.. I got a mac
first you get the mac, then you get the uptime, then you get the chicks..
There's one option you probably had with your server but you haven't covered here - network backups at the co-lo site. They're not perfect (if the colo facility burns down, you're screwed) but a heck of a lot better than nothing.
I currently do network backups of the whole system to storage at the colo provider (I'd do monthly tapes, but they don't have a DLT or LTO tape drive). I do network backups of the server's configuration every week. I do network backups of the server's criticial, fast-changing data (CVS repositories, mainly) to local dated snapshots every day.
Admittedly I do have a 1.5TB server at work where I can stash the snapshots, but failing that one could use an ageing scheme.
--
Craig Ringer
Yesterday,
All those backups seemed a waste of pay.
Now my database has gone away.
Oh I believe in yesterday.
Suddenly,
There's not half the files there used to be,
And there's a milestone hanging over me
The system crashed so suddenly.
I pushed something wrong
What it was I could not say.
Now all my data's gone and I long for yesterday-ay-ay-ay.
Yesterday,
Need for backup seemed so far away.
Seemed my data were all here to stay,
Now I believe in yesterday.
You make the mistake of thinking you can educate the fundamental stupidity out of people. You can't.
As of win2k (and NT4, but really ... who used that on workstations?) Windows does seem acceptably solid. I find it reasonably reliable if I'm very careful to stick to quality apps and restrict what the user can do (e.g. MSIE set to a proxy that always rejects and "allowed" sites in no-proxy list; max security settings except for "trusted sites"; user can't install software - even browser plug-ins.).
The real problems seem to arrive with desktops where software has been added and removed over time, less-than-ideal quality software has been installed, etc. The OS is still much too easily broken by crappy 3rd party software. If you avoid that, you should be fine.
Careful use of XP's features like System Restore can further improve things.
I still think it's pretty sad just how much vigilance and skill must be applied to keep a Windows box running reliably, but it's easier than it used to be. The Win9x boxes at work seem to go insane after a couple of years no matter what I do.
I can't say I've had that sort unfortunate experience, so I'd be interested to know which distro you're using and what 3rd party packages.
My own experience is that the vast majority of crashes in both Windows and Linux come down to bad hardware. The balance seem to be mostly crappy drivers, with a dose of spyware and virii thrown in for Windows and a shot of crap 3rd party packages for Linux.
My own experience has been fairly positive with Fedora Core (1 & 3), Debian (Sarge, Woody, and before that Potato) and Red Hat (6.2 -> 9), all of which I've run or admined systems with at various points. I've also had very good results with Win2k (my Win2k install eventually broke utterly, but it was my fault - I stopped a service I thought was unimportant and COM/ActiveX stopped working. There doesn't seem to be any coming back from that) and WinXP, when carefully operated.
Just walk way for 3 to 4 hours it will come back or linux autokill killed the program.
Note I have 2 boxs and a keyboard and monitor switch so one runs root and the other is when I am doing other stuff.
Windows does not recover it is truely the difference.
My gcc complier has caused me to have 2g of swap files just so linux will not kill the complier.
Why don't people buy a 2nd computer just for backups?
I don't know how easy it is to automatically synchronize two Windows, but it would remove all the headaches of system crash and loss of data.
I remember buying a Mac IIcx more than a decade ago that cost as much as 4 PCs nowadays. And I was a poor student living in a dump to save enough to buy a Mac.
What was more notable is that the government tried to push a luxury tax on Mac owners. I don't know if anyone remembers that.
The point is, computer cost compared to a decade ago is so cheap that an extra PC or laptop can be thought of as a reasonable investment in a backup system.
I too am amazed by what some Linux zealots are willing to call good. I've seen some such people recommend new users who just want a working desktop try out Gentoo. Because compiling your own OS on your ancient PC is fun! Yay!
Riight.
Barring bad advice from total morons, I'm surprised you've had that much trouble. Even with older distros it should be pretty easy to get a desktop that "just works" rather smoothly - probably as of RH8 or so. There is the issue of hardware support though - if you have certain classes of troublesome hardware (including some common ones like software modems), then yes it can be a total PITA and probably not worth it unless you have a resident guru.
Frankly, I find all the systems I run "just work":
<ul>
<li>The NT4 server
<li>The Linux servers
<li>The SCO OpenServer box (though I have to run a cron job to restart it's lpd daily)
<li>The Win9x desktops
<li>The WinXP desktops
<li>The Linux thin client desktops (they're more trouble than the WinXP boxes though TBH)
<li>My home and work Linux desktops
<li>The MacOS/X machines (more trouble than both XP and Linux here, but that's partly because we need classic apps and need to talk to ancient networks)
</ul>
Actually, everything except our MacOS/9 machines "just work". The MacOS/9 machines seem to soak up all the problems from everything else and deliver them in an un-ending stream of crashes and misery.
With good hardware and some basic knowledge about the OS you're working on (Windows, Linux, OS/X, whatever) you should get pretty good results these days. Even MacOS/9 can be reliable if you don't hook it up to a network, are extremely careful about font selection, and don't run QuarkXPress.
you forgot that one
Arrggh!
What doesn't "just work" is posting on Slashdot. Surely there must be an option to change the default post format from "pure evil" to "plain text" somewhere...
Linux: Restart the email program, it crashed *again*.
Windows: Restart the OS, the email program crashed for the first time in the year you've been using it.
Mac: The email program can't crash, you have to find a good one first.
For all the pesky southerners, ignorant of the second verse, I shall recall it as best I can:
Michael, Michael, here is your answer dear,
I can't cycle, it makes me feel so queer.
If you can't afford a carriage,
Call off the bloomin' marriage,
For I'll be blowed if I'll be towed
On a bicycle built for two.
For instance, last month I had a disk crash in my PC at home. It was probably my fault. It was a PC that I built, and I had 4 HDs stacked right on top of one another, and I guess in hindsight, the ventilation was insufficient. When I got an email stating that the disk had crashed, I took it out and it was hot as all hell. I guess this is a bad thing. I spaced them out a bit and put the disk back into service. About 1 day after the RAID finished rebuilding, the disk started making really loud blender-like noises and I get another email that the same disk has crashed. This time I give up on the thing and go buy a new one.
Back to the topic at hand: My reaction to being informed that my disk had crashed was, "Aw, man. Why does it have to happen 1 hour after the stores close? I'm gonna have to run degraded for an entire day now."
What I guess I don't understand is with computers as falliable as they are, and protection as easy as it is to obtain, why do so few people use software RAID and rsnapshot? All I do to stay protected is run on a RAID in case of disk failure and burn my rsnapshot directory to CD every so often and leave the CD at the office. Whopee. Offsite backups. If any other hardware fails, I can just replace.
I fear no computer crash.
"Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
- RAID
- Automated offsite backups
Use it or lose it."Avoid employing unlucky people - throw half of the pile of CVs in the bin without reading them." -- David Brent
My Journal entry covers a story of crash & restore.
Make even shorter URLs - 8LN.org
... my computer hung, and i hit it.. it automatically restarted.. Seems like a Windows friendly thing to do :)