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.""
installing Linux. Solves most of my problems.
Quality Hosting e3 Servers
Possibly it didn't physically destroy it, just contaminated it where health regulations wouldn't allow it to be used anymore.
I am sure laptops give off nasty chemicals when fried...
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
In case of a crash, I still have a stash of old dead-tree pr0n.
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.
Yes, keep telling yourself your choice of OS can magically prevent hardware failures.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.
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.
Yes, but as someone elsewhere in the thread already stated, almost all crashes are software related (that is to say Windows related). Very few crashes otherwise are caused by hardware. I have had one hardware related crash that I have ever dealt with in the last 11-12 years, since I got my first computer.
my pet machine
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.
usually it's a sign of very low IQ.
only really stupid people attack inanimate objects.
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!
Macs are the wieredest ones for crashing... Mine sits on the desk doing nothing most of the time (it's mostly a build server for the osx versions of my software.. it's got nothing installed but the basic osx + xcode) - I'll come to it after maybe a fortnight and the finder has gone into 100% CPU mode and taken most of the rest of the system with it... luckily the power plug is only a couple of inches away :)
The Win boxes stay up when not in use. Of course when you start to use them the story changes... it's *so* easy to bring down a windows box (my favourite is crashing the LSA.. it gives a 30 second countdown before falling over). [btw. before anyone asks that's not a virus I write software that integrates at quite a low level and the Win32 API isn't error checked at all at that level - the slightest error brings the whole thing crashing down].
Linux is *hard* to crash. Not impossible (fork bomb, even with ulimit, can sometimes cause the autokill routines to kill system processes like inetd). A runaway app at 100% CPU though doesn't do it, unlike Win and Mac.
The prize goes to AS400 which I haven't even been able to make break its stride even after trying hard. I can lock an individual login, but never had any effect on the stability of the system. Pity AS400 is such a damn awful piece of crap to work with most of the time...
If you are writing to Win32, then you are not programming to a low level. Which API function is not checked? All of them are, from my experience. I think you are full of it.
Never underestimate the power of percussive maintenance.
Absolutely. Depending on the fault, a considered thump in an appropriate location can in fact have a beneficial effect. CRT issues, stuck platters on an HDA, cards that have become unsettled, mechanical issues, MAY receive a possible benefit. LCDs, optical drives, and software faults are highly unlikely to benefit from percussive maintenance.
Sara
Designer, Gamer, Macgrrl in an XP World