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.

Comments

Dull dull dull

[MullerMn]

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.

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.

<insert misc comment about /. going downhill>

Bah. Humbug.

Re:Dull dull dull

[Pig Hogger]

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.

That's not the idea. The idea is to have slashdotter contribute their own stories which are bound to be orders of magnitude better than the lame stuff in the original article...

Re:Arguments becoming options

[greed]

How is "programmer failing to check error status" or "protect arguments" a sign of bad platform design?

Especially when UNIX shells provide paranoia flags for preventing exactly this kind of disaster:

#!/bin/sh -e

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:

find "${DATADIR}" -type f -exec rm {} \;

If you need to nuke subdirs too, that's easy--if you do it separately:

find "${DATADIR}" -type d -mindepth 1 -depth -exec rmdir {} \;

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.

Re:My ones

[IngramJames]

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.