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Computer Crash Reactions Examined
Posted by
timothy
on Wed Mar 30, 2005 03:01 PM
from the tim-just-swears-a-lot-and-shoots-things dept.
from the tim-just-swears-a-lot-and-shoots-things dept.
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.""
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Computer Crash Reactions Examined
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Hit F5 (Score:4, Funny)
Whenever this one happens, I just hit F5 a few times.
Re:Statistically Windows is a health Hazard... (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.nodomain.org/)
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...
Re:Hit F5 (Score:5, Funny)
(http://joe-baldwin.net/ | Last Journal: Saturday September 02 2006, @11:58AM)
And when I challenged her on this her response was "No, I know more about computers than you do, F5 is the key to refresh the page and I know it is and it always works for me."
Can you guess why she's an ex?
Re:Hit F5 (Score:5, Funny)
Depends (Score:5, Funny)
(http://nizo.deviantart.com/gallery/ | Last Journal: Friday November 16, @08:17PM)
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.....
Re:Depends (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Depends (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Depends (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Depends (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.example.com/ | Last Journal: Tuesday October 15 2002, @12:42PM)
4 years of email archives, website work, pictures, etc. All of my CVS archives (though fortunately, enough people had copies of my code and were nice enough to email them back to me... linus torvalds was right about backups!). Not to mention the fact that I lost the same amount of data for about a dozen friends which I was hosting. Damn.
My first reaction wasn't anger or grief (those both came later). It was fervor... the inspiration of trying to stay up all night and do anything possible to recover the data. No dice. Then the truth started to sink in...
The sad part is that I wasn't able to back up this machine, so I kind of saw this coming... I knew that it would be screwed if something happened to that drive, but I had no way to reliably back up 40Gb of data. The internet connection it was on was too slow to do a network backup, not to mention that my workplace would probably kill me for doing that on a regular basis. The server itself was a cobalt raq2, which means it had only a power plug, serial port, and ethernet cable on the back. So, no usb, firewire, or cdr backups were possible here, and backing data up to the drive itself obviously wouldn't have helped.
I guess the inevitable finally happened, but at least I learned from my lessons. I scrapped the cobalt and converted an old machine into my new server, with a mirrored raid-1 2x80Gb array. I rebuilt my home server, too, with a raid-5 4x80Gb array, and now I use a laptop and rsync to keep religious backups.
I don't really see it as "backing up", though... for instance, the music I write is on my laptop, because that's where I write it. When I finish writing a track, I'll master it on my desktop, and make a copy of it there. And every so often, I'll rsync the two servers just to make sure everything's current. I found it way too hard to discipline myself to make consistent backups, but it's easy to just copy data around. Once you get into the habit, it's far more foolproof than a tar+cron backup or trying to remember it by hand.
Re:Depends (Score:4, Informative)
(http://nizo.deviantart.com/gallery/ | Last Journal: Friday November 16, @08:17PM)
Re:Depends (Score:4, Informative)
(http://rikkus.info/)
Yes, it's called Bookmarks Synchronizer [mozdev.org] and is a Firefox extension
Rik
Re:Depends (Score:5, Informative)
However, do not use this sort of thing for backups!!
If files get deleted by accident and you don't notice until after the backup, BOTH copies of the data will be bad. This is just replication, which itself is very good for somethings. Not backups though.
I use a tool called RIBS [rustyparts.com]. It uses rsync to create incremental backups across the network. You get hourly.0, hourly.1 etc directories, each with a hard-linked snapshot of the backup as it was at that time. These pan off into weekly, then monthly. Personally I dropped the hourly entirely, I just do daily. I do this off an IDE disk onto an IDE disk, no RAID or anything fancy required. Sure, it's a little extra work should one of the drives pack in (no RAID redundancy, maybe one day perhaps), but it's worth it for the cronological snapshots. I even backup files like MS Outlook *.pst on my Windows box, so should it get corrupted, I don't care.
Oh, did I say I'm backing up 120GB of data onto a P90 with 16meg of ram? Not bad for old junk!
Only the deltas are transmitted with it being rsync. Highly recommended, knowing you can restore ANY file means I haven't renamed to *.bak in a very long time!
Re:Depends (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.krgallagher.com/)
Q: What is the first thing you do when your computer crashes?
A: Swear from now on you will make regular backups.
Q: What is the last thing you actually do when your computer crashes?
A: Begin making regular backups.
Re:heh... (Score:4, Funny)
1/2 did, the other 1/2 bought new computers.
Re:heh... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
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!
Re:heh... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/~Shadow%20Wrought/journal | Last Journal: Saturday November 17, @12:05PM)
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;-)
Re:Whack It! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/~Shadow%20Wrought/journal | Last Journal: Saturday November 17, @12:05PM)
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;-)
Re:heh... (Score:5, Interesting)
(http://www.jwnyc.com/)
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.
Re:heh... (Score:4, Funny)
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.
Worst reaction (Score:5, Funny)
Personal experience (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://vinc.iclod.com/)
I wonder if different OS crashes induce different responses?
Re:Personal experience (Score:5, Funny)
Yes:
Deep fryer? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Deep fryer? (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Wednesday January 15 2003, @02:17AM)
Re:Deep fryer? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Deep fryer? (Score:5, Funny)
Just call them Freedom Fries. The complaints will go away.
Re:Deep fryer? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.wilcoxon.org/~sewilco | Last Journal: Friday October 19, @12:46AM)
After carefully examining all of the possible... (Score:5, Funny)
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)
Re:After carefully examining all of the possible.. (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Deep fryer? (Score:5, Funny)
I once worked at an unnamed fast food place, and spent a stint manning the fryers. One nightly task was to drain the oil through the external vacuum/filter.
Well, guess what happens if you forget to turn off the fryer, and still drain the oil out???
I'll *always* remember the cute little counter girl looking over my shoulder, and saying (just as calmly as can be) "is that vat supposed to be on fire?".
No, it wasn't -- and the resultant mess _almost_ resulted in the need for a new one. So yes, it's possible.....
Re:Deep fryer? (Score:5, Funny)
only when it crashes? (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.iamelliott.com/ | Last Journal: Thursday March 17 2005, @10:32PM)
I hit my monitor (Score:3, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday March 21 2005, @02:39PM)
Laptop destruction - true story... (Score:5, Funny)
(http://mute-net.sf.net/ | Last Journal: Thursday April 28 2005, @03:50AM)
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)!
Crash Landing (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://slashdot.org/~Doc%20Ruby/journal | Last Journal: Thursday March 31 2005, @01:48PM)
Re:Crash Landing (Score:5, Funny)
It uses it's last remaining CPU cycles to sing a song.
"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..
"I'm half-crazy, all for the love of you,
"It won't be a stylish marriage,
"I can't afford a carriage,
"But you'll look sweet, upon the seat
"Of a bicycle built for two."
Either that, or display the BSOD on Windows.
Re:Crash Landing (Score:5, Informative)
(http://www.seizurerobots.com/)
Peripherals that use hardware passthroughs can have amusing responses to a system crash... When an old machine that had a TV card froze up, the video and audio would continue playing (the video was put onscreen as a hardware overlay on a key color, and the audio was handled by the PCI card). The audio would continue to play as the system rebooted, only stopping when the computer got around to loading the TV card's driver which reinitialized the hardware.
Re:Crash Landing (Score:5, Informative)
It depends on a lot of things. If the crash is due to a hardware failure, the machine might hang inside a device driver, waiting for an IO acknowledgement that will never come. Sometimes the OS deliberately halts the machine, such as when it receives a double-fault inside kernel space. Back in the DOS days, a bad address (usually a result of a buffer overflow) would shoot the machine into la-la land, executing random garbage until it either reached a HLT instruction or got stuck in a loop.
Again, in the days of DOS, it was tons of fun when you accidentally used a far NULL pointer, since that meant overwriting the interrupt vector table -- the next time a timer interrupt came in (18.2 times a second, to be precise) the CPU would happily fly off into dreamworld.
On most MODERN operating systems, however, the system deliberately halts itself as soon as it realizes that something is terribly wrong. The risks of executing random code are simply too great.
Hulk SMASH Dead compy! (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/ | Last Journal: Sunday September 09, @10:43PM)
It's like beating a dead horse, but without the smell.
Me? I go all cold, and start to panic (Score:4, Insightful)
(http://nutsncents.blogspot.com/ | Last Journal: Friday August 08 2003, @07:47PM)
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.
Hitting the Motherboard (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Hitting the Motherboard (Score:5, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
Once was when my girlfriend's mother caught us having sex in high school. The phone call that initiated the phone-bashing incident was about 2 hours after that when I got to hear her mother telling her what to say:
Mom: You can never see him again....
Ex-Girl: I can never see you again...
It was like a soap opera with the Jedi mind trick worked into it. Funny and distressing at the same time. The phone met with an unfortunate rapid deceleration incident after contacting a brick wall at a high rate of relative velocity.
The second phone attack was much more fun. I was sleeping in a twin bed, next to the wall, with my girlfriend on the outside of the bed next to me.
In the pitch black of night there is a terrible shriek. My mind is clouded, dim, and limbic from sleep; enraged and disoriented by this hideous sound that keeps repeating itself. It screams once, twice, then on the third keening screech I launch myself over my sleeping girlfriend and land on top of the offending THING. I have absolutely no idea what it is that is making the noise, but I am driven insane with anger that it won't stop. The room is pitch black so I have to feel the screaming thing to find a way to make it stop. I grab it wholly in my hands and start to roughly search for a weak point, squeezing it hard all the while in vain hopes that it will choke and stop. Suddenly I feel a small tail-like thing in my hands and realize with grim and ecstatic joy that I have discovered its weak spot. I grab it, and as it yells again I begin to yank furiously on the tail, over and over.
Unfortunately I have begun to wake up now and by the time I realize just exactly what is going on I am sitting there in the dark, naked, with a phone in one hand and a frayed phone cord in the other, grinning like a madman but with the dawning realization that I have just killed with primal rage...my telephone. My girlfrind turns on the light about this time and looks at me, starteled. Then she fixes me with that LOOK. You might know the one. It is like she is never, ever gonna consider me fully human again, but dosen't want to let me know that she is thinking this in, just in case I decide to fulfil her basest opinions of me.
It still cracks me up to think of how I slaughtered a telephone in my sleep.
Dr. Cave Man (Score:5, Funny)
(http://www.ti-news.com/)
Cave man throw laptop into deep fryer. No need use the.
Yet most people think crashes are normal (Score:5, Insightful)
(http://www.ime.usp.br/~fr/)
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.
A huge omission, but consider the source (Score:4, Insightful)
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?
Out the Window (Score:3, Funny)
"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...)
Re:Truth and Consequences (Score:5, Funny)
(http://nizo.deviantart.com/gallery/ | Last Journal: Friday November 16, @08:17PM)
Did he get the death penalty or just life in prison?
This should be a poll (Score:5, Funny)
Computers shouldn't lose data (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
causes, causes (Score:3, Insightful)
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've never seen (Score:3, Interesting)
(Last Journal: Friday May 06 2005, @07:02PM)
...well don't just leave us hanging! (Score:5, Funny)
(http://allstarpowerup.com/)
Yes, but how did it taste???
Blame someone else (Score:4, Interesting)
(http://www.mandible-games.com/)
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.
Enlightenment (Score:4, Funny)
(http://slashdot.org/)
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
Stages of coping... (Score:3, Insightful)
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
Obligitory Computer Stupidities link (Score:5, Funny)
(Last Journal: Monday January 23 2006, @12:19PM)
Found a Girlfriend (Score:3, Funny)
Now I run Linux on my PC... I guess this means I'll never have another girlfriend.
Re:Crash? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes, keep telling yourself your choice of OS can magically prevent hardware failures.
Re:Crash? (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Poetry (Score:5, Informative)
Or pr0n.