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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.""
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.
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?
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make install -not war
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.
It was never violent for me. I lost the hard drive in my webserver when it was mysteriously dropped while I was on christmas vacation.
4 years of email archives, website work, pictures, etc. All of my CVS archives (though fortunately, enough people had copies of my code and were nice enough to email them back to me... linus torvalds was right about backups!). Not to mention the fact that I lost the same amount of data for about a dozen friends which I was hosting. Damn.
My first reaction wasn't anger or grief (those both came later). It was fervor... the inspiration of trying to stay up all night and do anything possible to recover the data. No dice. Then the truth started to sink in...
The sad part is that I wasn't able to back up this machine, so I kind of saw this coming... I knew that it would be screwed if something happened to that drive, but I had no way to reliably back up 40Gb of data. The internet connection it was on was too slow to do a network backup, not to mention that my workplace would probably kill me for doing that on a regular basis. The server itself was a cobalt raq2, which means it had only a power plug, serial port, and ethernet cable on the back. So, no usb, firewire, or cdr backups were possible here, and backing data up to the drive itself obviously wouldn't have helped.
I guess the inevitable finally happened, but at least I learned from my lessons. I scrapped the cobalt and converted an old machine into my new server, with a mirrored raid-1 2x80Gb array. I rebuilt my home server, too, with a raid-5 4x80Gb array, and now I use a laptop and rsync to keep religious backups.
I don't really see it as "backing up", though... for instance, the music I write is on my laptop, because that's where I write it. When I finish writing a track, I'll master it on my desktop, and make a copy of it there. And every so often, I'll rsync the two servers just to make sure everything's current. I found it way too hard to discipline myself to make consistent backups, but it's easy to just copy data around. Once you get into the habit, it's far more foolproof than a tar+cron backup or trying to remember it by hand.
"Quoting famous computer scientists out of context is the root of all evil (or at least most of it) in programming." - K
Obviously you never worked in a hands-on tech support field.
:)
I can't even begin to tell you how many powersupply fans, monitors, mice, cd drives, just to name a few, I have fixed by hitting them, or "properly re-aligning their hardware". Of course it is usually a temporary fix, but a fix all the same.
How many other people had the NES and used to blow really hard into the cartridges/slot to get their copy of Metroid or Zelda to boot up one last time?
That was my first foray into physically fixing hardware cheaply and quickly.
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But 7 percent said their first reaction is the hit the computer, Johnson said, a step that's rarely productive.
That implies that sometimes it *is* productive?
It actually can be, though more often it isn't.
Once, I had a problem with a computer that wouldn't boot. I took out all of the major components (PSU, hard drive, etc.) and tried them in other PC's, where they worked fine. I put everything back, computer still wouldn't boot. Turned it back off, and in a fit of inspiration I kicked it. Turned it back on, and it booted.
The problem was my graphics card was not seated properly. Kicking it seated it just enough for it to boot, and in turn it was pretty obvious to me that it had been a loose connection somewhere. (btw, no, I didn't test either the graphics card or the mobo in another PC, as I didn't think of the graphics card as a possible culprit and the mobo I figured could be eliminated or confirmed as the cause without removing it). When I then went back through the PC and just tightened everything, I felt the card sitting about halfway out of its slot.
It was one of those "d'oh!" moments, and also one of those rare cases where physical violence against a wayward PC actually gained a positive result.
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.
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I think that people would be surprised by the number of crashes they blame on software that are actually caused by hardware. A few year back I had great luck fixing random software crashes by replacing the NIC. Never understood HOW it was affecting things, but the evidence was pretty clear. Remember the Mac has the benefit of a consistent hardware underpinning and generally high quality components, vs the Wintel world of cheapest component available.
You are in a maze of twisted little posts, all alike.