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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.""
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.
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
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.
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!!
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
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.
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
In case of a crash, I still have a stash of old dead-tree pr0n.
"Guess the rest reinstalled the OS and called it a day..."
1/2 did, the other 1/2 bought new computers.
Beauty is in the eye of the beerholder.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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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
He is talking about disk packs that used to be used on mini and mainframe computers in the 70's and 80's. These were fairly large (14"?) magnetic platters (much bigger versions of modern HD "platters"), were "stacked" on a spindle (very much like modern HDs), but were typically removable, and were placed in a washing machine sized device.
You work for Microsoft don't you?
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
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.
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
What about us members of /. who are sick of stupid LoTR jokes? Where's our apology? :)
well, for me it's usually Apples that do the crashing. Don't ask me why, but Apples and me just don't agree with each other... Duh!
DocTim
Wow what kind of drives do you use? I burn out at least a drive a year. Now I have a RAID array which I use rather than actually buying a tape drive or burning to CD. If there are better drives out there, I'd love to get some. IIRC, I'm just using run of the mill 10k seagates.
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? If there is any chance whatsoever of me getting my deleted files back (1 in a billion?) I'll hit the computer everytime!
Do you Gentoo!?
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.
The PC God cannot be appeased by poetry. He requires human sacrifices.
Or pr0n.
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..."
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
Never underestimate the power of percussive maintenance. Eons ago, back when the C64 was bleeding edge tech, I was in a school computer class. Our C64 locked up, taking with it everything we had done in the preceeding period. I head-butted the keyboard. It unfroze and worked fine for the rest of the period. True story. Used my head to solve the problem;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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.
Check out the best P2P sharing website: MEDIACHEST.COM
you can have that now.
BTW, those solid state hard drives you wax poetically about being so reliable....
oops, they suddenly have dead storage locations. or the battery backed ram versions have their Li-ion battery die losing everything.
I've used solid state hard drives in embedded systems for a decade now and they are not what you want.
BTW, a 10 gig SS drive costs more than the fastest wintel computer you can even dream of costs.
Solid State drives.... Expensive, and not as reliable as you think.
they make them for high vibration or extreme use.. not for unlimited life storage.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
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 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.
"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
Really? Thats why EMC data storage has a tech come out every month to exchange a bad drive. Or thats why after 6 months of use, emc came out to replace a bad stick of ram. Luckily the EMC makes quality products that report errors before they cause data loss or failure but the consumer market can't afford these luxories. Ask yourself this, why do servers use ECC ram? Ram flipping a bit can easily take down a box and its going to happen.
Have you ever been to a turkish prison?
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!
I had a NetWare 4.0 server where the hard drive heads would stick to the platter when you shut it off (this was in the days of RLL drives). A swift kick would unstick them, and afterwards the machine would boot just fine.
Chip H.
Here's the hardware abuse link, I don't think it's shown up here yet.
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.
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.
I worked at a law firm once where one of the partners put his fist through the CRT after the computer ate his 150+ page brief;-) The best part of the story (which he tells with a ragamuffin gleam in his eye) is that it also happened to be the the first day in the office for a new legal secretary. She had just walked into his office to be introduced when he sucker punched the monitor. It was months, apparantly, before she would walk past his office again;-)
If brevity is the soul of wit, then how does one explain Twitter?
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).
It also helps if you give the computer the "just in case I need it" look.
Look at computer, look at hammer, look back at computer, give it the look. Maybe give a little nod. My old Pentium 66 always got the hint.
[javac] 100 errors
crash different.
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!
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
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.