3 ms·

Really? No one's broken hardware with bad software? Kids these days. Back in the early 80s there was a series of POKEs that would fry the old PETs. If I rem

by sanj 17y ago

Really? No one's broken hardware with bad software? Kids these days. Back in the early 80s there was a series of POKEs that would fry the old PETs. If I remember, it'd blow out the CRT flyback transformer.

meunierc 17y ago
THANK YOU. I think this feeling of invincibility the kids have these days is a by-product of the cocoon we are now bringing up children in. I bet none of the youngguns reading this have lost a grade school friend and a cousin under the wheels of a school bus. They'd know that sometimes, when one takes risks, there are consequences. Sometimes I prefer taking care of somebody's computer, precisely because they might break something. Nowadays you can still burn an LCD if you neglect the screensaver and powersave (10'000 hours backlighting MTBF can really fly), or burn a nice annoying image in your display. You can mess up your Windows installation pretty bad if you play in the wrong places. And don't get me started on giving root access to grandpa. I don't see much value for some people in learning to rebuild an OS installation from scratch. Like with kids there are times to encourage experimentation, and there are times to be cautious. There's a whole school of thinking that value safety first. About 15 years ago there was a bold data entry clerk that wasn't afraid of fixing problems by himself. Faced with 2 waypoints called "R", he decided to encode one point as "ROZO" and the other as "R". As a consequence an aircraft turned into a mountain en route to Cali, Colombia. Toyota, presumably because of sloppy programming in a cheap microcontroller, is learning that when you take somebody's code without looking, you get all his problems too. It's fun to take risks sometimes, go into uncharted territory, put yourself in a situation to be exposed to new unfamiliar things. But please, don't make it a point of being careless.
- kilian 17y ago
  I don't know why you are downvoted, but this is from experience: people who don't know what they're doing can do pretty much anything they don't want with a pc without realising it. Case in point: My grandma vs. Windows. Windows is a sore, sore loser. And try as I might, all I can do to really fix it is install it again (temporary) or install linux (not going there yet)
- bemmu 17y ago
  More info for the curious about that flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_965 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_965
thwarted 17y ago
More recently than that, there was a time -- pre LCDs, DDC and monitors that would shut themselves down when driven at the wrong frequency -- when rolling your own XF86Config file could fry your monitor if you got the timings wrong.

by sanj 17y ago

meunierc 17y ago

THANK YOU. I think this feeling of invincibility the kids have these days is a by-product of the cocoon we are now bringing up children in. I bet none of the youngguns reading this have lost a grade school friend and a cousin under the wheels of a school bus. They'd know that sometimes, when one takes risks, there are consequences. Sometimes I prefer taking care of somebody's computer, precisely because they might break something. Nowadays you can still burn an LCD if you neglect the screensaver and powersave (10'000 hours backlighting MTBF can really fly), or burn a nice annoying image in your display. You can mess up your Windows installation pretty bad if you play in the wrong places. And don't get me started on giving root access to grandpa. I don't see much value for some people in learning to rebuild an OS installation from scratch. Like with kids there are times to encourage experimentation, and there are times to be cautious. There's a whole school of thinking that value safety first. About 15 years ago there was a bold data entry clerk that wasn't afraid of fixing problems by himself. Faced with 2 waypoints called "R", he decided to encode one point as "ROZO" and the other as "R". As a consequence an aircraft turned into a mountain en route to Cali, Colombia. Toyota, presumably because of sloppy programming in a cheap microcontroller, is learning that when you take somebody's code without looking, you get all his problems too. It's fun to take risks sometimes, go into uncharted territory, put yourself in a situation to be exposed to new unfamiliar things. But please, don't make it a point of being careless.

kilian 17y ago
I don't know why you are downvoted, but this is from experience: people who don't know what they're doing can do pretty much anything they don't want with a pc without realising it. Case in point: My grandma vs. Windows. Windows is a sore, sore loser. And try as I might, all I can do to really fix it is install it again (temporary) or install linux (not going there yet)
bemmu 17y ago
More info for the curious about that flight http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_965 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Airlines_Flight_965

thwarted 17y ago

More recently than that, there was a time -- pre LCDs, DDC and monitors that would shut themselves down when driven at the wrong frequency -- when rolling your own XF86Config file could fry your monitor if you got the timings wrong.