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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.""
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.
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.
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...