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10 Computer Mishaps
Ant writes "ZDNet UK posted Ontrack Data Recovery's 2004 list of the 10 strangest and funniest computer mishaps... Some of them are funny!" My best mishap was installing the alpha video driver on an NT 3.51 box thinking that it was just an alpha driver. Of course since this Alpha meant DEC and this was an x86 box, the server barfed pretty hard. Also the time I spilled an 8oz glass of water on my laptop and lost all my email from 1994 to 1999 and my backup was corrupted. That I liked too.
Not to sound like a miserable bastard, but exactly which of these are supposed to be funny? This article is really lame, uninformative and about as funny as colon cancer.
/. going downhill>
The first item on the list takes the piss out of some guy for putting a HD in the freezer in an attempt to get it to work, when that is well known for sometimes working in temporarily resuscitating dead drives, if the death is due to a mechanical fault.
Also, the link for page two seems to keep taking me back to the first page in Firefox.
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Bah. Humbug.
Especially when UNIX shells provide paranoia flags for preventing exactly this kind of disaster:
Now any failing command in a script started like that will cause the script to bail. This should be your standard way of writing a shell script.
The only commands allowed to fail will be those that are the condition of an if or while statement, or are part of a command-chain using the short-circuit operators && or ||.
Further, any POSIX-compliant command has an "end of options" indicator, --. Sure, it's annoying to type on the command line, but when you're writing a script to run unattended, you need to protect it against anticipated situations.
It's not as if having the "remove" command be called "rm" was the cause of this problem.
Really, the use of wildcards in script that run unattended is just dangerous... if you're doing it, re-code.
Like this:
If you need to nuke subdirs too, that's easy--if you do it separately:
Anyone who doesn't get heart palpitations when writing rm commands to be run by a script as root is either inexperienced or unimaginative.
Ask the guys at Apple who had to pay for forensic recovery of customer's hard drives when a badly-written rm command in an early iTunes update clobbered hard drives because it didn't handle spaces-in-filenames.
. . .and because your friend was an unsecured creditor, he promptly got to write a check for $50,000.00 to the Bankrutpcy Trustee because that was a PREFERENTIAL TRANSFER and therefore not legal under bankruptcy law (in the US at least).
The unique spelling of "check" - i.e. "cheque" would suggest this took place outside of US Bankruptcy jursidiction.
These aren't my ones, but I once lost a day's productivity when I found the site.
Mixed bag, but don't read in any circumstances where you can't afford to laugh out loud and squirt coffee through your nostrils.
'No rational religion claims "supernatural" exists, that's an atheist slander.' - seen on slashdot.
Ofcause you have to remember to do everything in a single command otherwise if you delete the old version you cannot run anything else.
/bin and /sbin utilities (along with a few in
the similar /usr dirs (such as ldd, nm, and
a small editor like nano).
It amazes me that every single Linux distro doesn't just come with statically linked
Modern HDDs have oodles of space. Wasting a few extra megs in exchange for an almost-worst-case recoverable installation seems like a no-brainer to me.
Of course, I can (and do) install exactly such statically linked utils as my first task after a new install, but I shouldn't need to... Not to mention, many of the basic Linux programs take a whole lot more than just passing a "--enable-static" to the configure script or passing in an "LDFLAGS=-static".
Bah, agression against computers... I bet you also smash your windshield with a baseball bat when your car has a flat tier.
I'm trying to improve my English. Please correct me on any spelling/grammar errors in this post.