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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
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
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
"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.
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.
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.
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
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.
Did he get the death penalty or just life in prison?
I Am My Own Worst Enemy
What about us members of /. who are sick of stupid LoTR jokes? Where's our apology? :)
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!?
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
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.
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
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!
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?
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...
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