Slashdot Mirror
Computer Voodoo?
jbeaupre asks: "A corollary to 'Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic' is that sometimes users have to resort to what I call 'computer voodoo.' You don't know why it works, you barely care how it works, but you find yourself doing the strangest things because it just seems to work. I'm talking about things like: smacking a PC every 5 seconds for an hour to keep it from stalling on a hard drive reformat (with nary a problem after the reformat); or figuring out the only way to get a PC partially fried by lightning to recognize an ethernet card, after booting into Windows, is to start the computer by yanking the card out and shoving it back in (thereby starting the boot processes). What wacky stuff have you done that makes no obvious sense, but just works?"
No offense is meant to the poster but you do realize this is slashdot, right?
:(
/.ers would be interested in reading, even if they already know about it.
For some reason that question just seems like something a bunch of "normal" people would talk about during a break at work. I've never met a geek stupid enough to smack their spinning hard drive to keep it from fucking up, as an example. Hot swapping PCI cards sounds like something I would do shortly after rebuilding my first OEM computer in the 90s while I still didnt know shit and was sub double digits in age. (guess it woulda been an ISA card then actually)
Does anyone here actually do crap like that?
When I first started reading the article / summary I thought he was talking about the "voodoo" that makes stuff work and there would be loads of insightful comments about the underlying technology behind computers
PS. That seems like something