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Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)
- ww520 9mo agoThat’s a heck of debugging.
- etchalon 9mo agoComputers are so weird.
- 01HNNWZ0MV43FF 9mo agoAnalog devices pretending to be digital
- nntwozz 9mo agoAnother reason to step away from spinning rust. Thank dog for SSDs
- functionmouse 9mo agoSpinning rust may be defeated by Janet Jackson, but your chip storage is defeated by just sitting undisturbed in a drawer or a closet for too long...
- mc32 9mo agoPlatters are not made of iron (or even steel) and neither is the surface, so I’m not sure why rust comes into the picture.
- onraglanroad 9mo agoThe platters used to be coated with iron oxide as the magnetic coating. Modern ones use more exotic materials.
- mc32 9mo agoYes but that was like 40 years ago. I think by now the phraseology should reflect reality after about forty years.
- jacquesm 9mo agoHow many horsepower does your car have?
- theandrewbailey 9mo agoWe still talk about "bugs" (99+% of computer defects in the past 70+ years have not been caused by insects) and "AJAX" (long after most of these requests use JSON instead of XML).
- seanhandley 9mo ago“Phraseology” is subtly different. You mean “vocabulary”, “terminology”, possibly “nomenclature”.
- arcanemachiner 9mo agoIronically, I only started hearing the term being used in the past decade, as a colloquial alternative to solid-state storage.
- vee-kay 9mo agoTechnically, that magnetic spinning HDD can work even after decades if maintained safely (no dust, no extreme heat) and without stress, even if it is not switched on for years. In fact, if a magnetic HDD crashes, you may still recover some or all of the data by doing something hardcore, such as letting it sit for some hours in the freezer of your refrigerator, or immersing it in a bowl of rice overnight. However, SSDs (and other flash storage devices) need to be switched on once in few months, otherwise there's a chance that some data stored in them may be permanently lost, as some cells may loose their power. "As a reminder, an SSD's endurance rating is calculated based on how long it can store data if left unplugged after a certain amount of data has been written": https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered-ssd-endurance-investigation-finds-severe-data-loss-and-performance-issues-reminds-us-of-the-importance-of-refreshing-backups https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered...
- daymanstep 9mo agoHDDs also lose magnetic charge over time, about 1% per year. So you need to periodically spin up and rewrite the data every few years. CD drives however, can store data indefinitely without needing refreshing.
- aidenn0 9mo agoCD-R media is of limited shelf life as well though
- binarymax 9mo agoBut the materials on the CD eventually break down, sometimes as soon as within 5 years. So you can look into MDisc, which purports 100 years…but only in theory since the tests are just approximations of what would actually happen.
- iwontberude 9mo agoTotally could be a defect in the lamination we don’t find out for years yet
- Dylan16807 9mo agoIt's a reason not to use a hard drive from over 20 years ago. But if you're stuck with hardware that old, an SSD isn't an option.
- wtallis 9mo agoIDE SSDs have been a niche but readily-available product for as long as consumer SSDs have been mainstream. CompactFlash cards ensured that the necessary controller chips were available.
- Dylan16807 9mo agoOkay I guess you can use a 4GB CompactFlash card that cost a thousand dollars at the time. (While a laptop hard drive could reach 100GB.)
- joeel84 9mo agoI love this story! Ha
- ninalanyon 9mo ago> certain models Why the weasel words? Does Raymond Chen not know which models? Or is it actually apocryphal.
- CamouflagedKiwi 9mo agoHe might not since it comes via a friend. Or he's forgotten since. Also seems not unreasonable for an employee like him not to specifically name and shame hardware partners. Maybe it'd all be fine, but I wouldn't blame him at all for not wanting to risk it.
- adzm 9mo agoIn general, he never names companies in his posts if there is anything potentially negative in there.
- Ysx 9mo ago> Yes, I know which “major computer manufacturer” it is, and no, I’m not telling. This is consistent with longstanding blog policy that companies are not identified in stories, because the point of the story to teach something, not to call out companies for derision. From the follow-up post: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=107201 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...
- wtallis 9mo agoThat's kind of a pathetic excuse, because it means that the "something" the story teaches is highly limited and there's nothing concrete for the reader to use as the basis for a deeper investigation.
- Mindwipe 9mo agoHe genuinely might not know. I worked on a similar incident when our video encoder caused about 30% of a pretty mainstream mobile handset to hard lock when recieving a stream, requiring the battery to be removed to reboot the device. Neither us nor the OEM ever figured out why. They suspected that it was a weird combination of different bin combinations from different parts, but ultimately we had to change the method of delivering video to stop it happening.
- knuckleheads 9mo agoVery funny, reminds me of how Jennifer Lopez created Google Image Search when she wore a very deep cut green dress in 2000. So many people searched for "Jennifer Lopez Green Dress" that the search team realized they needed to include images in the search results. https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/google-european-commission-and-disruptive-technological-change-by-eric-schmidt-2015-01#yMSC5IlY7sHATDCO.99 https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/google-european-c... https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/jennifer-lopez-walks-in-versace-show-in-jungle-dress.html https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/jennifer-lopez-walks-in-versa...
- leobg 9mo agoIf this hadn’t been published in 2015, you’d all call it AI slop: > When the German engineer Karl Benz invented the first petroleum-powered automobile, he did not just create an engine with wheels; he set in motion an industry that revolutionized the way society was structured.
- cjs_ac 9mo agoLLMs write like a high-schooler padding out an essay about something they only pretend to care about with vacuous adjectives and adverbs because that’s how most commercial writing reads.
- nkrisc 9mo agoWell sure, no one thinks LLMs invented bad writing, but they do copy the style.
- deIeted 9mo agoWell, that's human slop, and it's actually more insidious than AI slop. You know what's weird? We've had this for almost twenty years. This human slop in writing this is the first time ever that this painful writing has been addressed by someone else on a comment on the internet. I've raised it so many times, but it's the first time I've ever seen one other person acknowledge it. Like, how crazy is that? Is the last twenty years been a fever dream?
- GaryBluto 9mo agoWhy didn't they mute the volume to see if it was the video or audio stream causing problems?
- wanderingstan 9mo agoThis is someone retelling a story they were told by a co-worker of an event over 20 years prior. It’s not surprising that he doesn’t go into the details of exactly what was tried, beyond the key parts of the story.
- theologic 9mo agoI won't repeat it here, but I posted What I saw as an insider. I think that not all of the facts were quite right. However, some of the overtones definitely are.
- k3vinw 9mo agoNot an expert here, so I’m genuinely curious how could a video stream (edit: with muted audio stream) possibly cause another laptop in close proximity to crash?
- firesteelrain 9mo agoWhat is claimed in TFA is that the hard drive resonate frequency reacts to the Janet Jackson video in bad ways because that music video puts out music that interferes with what the hard drive expects. TFA was lacking details so this is merely a retelling.
- vlovich123 9mo agoObviously not the video but the accompanying audio track. Could also just be a made up apocryphal engineering story that never actually happened exactly as described. Engineering as a profession is chock full of them but they do tend to be memorable parables of things to keep in mind when working on a relevant piece of tech. What is definitely well documented is Brendan Gregg’s related discovery of performance degradation in servers from vibration of sibling servers / clapping nearby that caused spinning disks to pause their heads.
- cm2187 9mo agoSimilary story from Apple: https://youtu.be/C5d151lqJsA?t=108 https://youtu.be/C5d151lqJsA?t=108
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- yegle 9mo agohttps://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 reminds me of this gem.
- efortis 9mo agoI was reminded of this MythBusters episode: Tesla's Earthquake Machine https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHsHiKtjoag https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHsHiKtjoag
- neomantra 9mo agoSo classic. For those weary of random links, it’s Cantrill and Gregg screaming at Thumpers and affecting IOPS. That was such a great machine. We rearchitected our systems around it.
- Natfan 9mo agorandom links to a youtu.be video? pray tell, what malware would be transmitted from youtube.com, owned by Alphabet?
- neomantra 9mo agoIt's not about privacy or malware, although those are important in life. Maybe I'm on Reddit too much, but I like knowing what will appear on the other end of a link. I originally posted my own comment with link and prose, but then saw GP's comment which preceded mine by an hour, so I deleted mine. I didn't originally realize it was that same video because it didn't say so, but then I recognized the link hash. I want people to see that video, because it's so great, so I added context as a reply.
- shmeeed 9mo agoYou could catch a bad case of algorithm poisoning if you're not careful
- corobo 9mo agoThe malware of "up next" that eats billions of hours a year lol
- teiferer 9mo agoI'd love to know whether that story is actually true. Some dude hears somebody tell a story about sth 20 years ago, puts it in a blog, and here we are on HN, nobody questioning whether it's actually accurate. Of course Raymond Chen isn't just any random person, but the more important it would be to actually check? I mean, who hasn't heard people tell stories from decades ago, including colleagues reminiscing about the good old times "before y'all were born" only to realize later that it was vastly exaggerated or even outright made up. Anybody around here with some actual first-hand info or at least another source besides this blog entry? I'd love to hear!
- bitwize 9mo agoI believe it because it's a plausible variant of what I call the "Fus Ro Data Loss" vulnerability: shouting at hard drives causes them to resonate in a way that affects their ability to access data. https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
- jacquesm 9mo agoNever let the truth get in the way of a good story. That's my motto. Now let me tell you about the time that we dug up this dinosaur egg and hatched it.
- bryanrasmussen 9mo agoIt's like Mark Twain and the rules for reselling a slave in Missouri https://medium.com/p/fe48ea07ad20 https://medium.com/p/fe48ea07ad20 "the free black man in Missouri could only remain in the state for 6 months before being taken and put on auction as a slave." only it turned out to be false, and evidently made up by Twain for reasons of fiction.
- ndiddy 9mo agoThere's a really good video here that shows that it likely happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY Rhythm Nation is unique because it uses a nonstandard tuning that shifts the notes to less-used frequencies. The video creator found a paper that studied the resonant frequency of various 2.5 inch laptop hard drives, and found that it matched up with the frequency of the low E note used in Rhythm Nation.
- tzury 9mo agohttps://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequency+of+a+chicken%2527s+skull https://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequen... Example (for both functions): /* Emits a 7-Hz tone for 10 seconds. True story: 7 Hz is the resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity. This was determined empirically in Australia, where a new factory generating 7-Hz tones was located too close to a chicken ranch: When the factory started up, all the chickens died. Your PC may not be able to emit a 7-Hz tone. */ #include int main(void) { sound(7); delay(10000); nosound(); return 0; } from the comments over there (2002)
- sandermvanvliet 9mo agoNot very likely https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/54400 https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/54400
- maxbond 9mo agoI don't see how even an entire chicken is going to meaningfully respond to a wavelength of almost 50 meters. Their coop could though.
- thaumasiotes 9mo ago> I don't see how even an entire chicken is going to meaningfully respond to a wavelength of almost 50 meters. Without disputing the conclusion, is the wavelength the right measurement, or should that be half the wavelength?
- maxbond 9mo agoThat's a more natural way to consider the resonance, certainly. What I was getting at is that if we were using a 7hz tone to explore a big room, we couldn't tell if there was a chicken in there or not. We'd have a hard time sensing an elephant. Let alone exert enough of a force to harm. Because the wave is so much larger that they barely interact.
- elteto 9mo agoJust a small nitpick: the Tacoma Narrows bridge didn’t collapse because of resonance but because of flutter. It’s a common misconception. For resonance the external driving force must match the resonance frequency of the system, but wind is rarely/never purely sinusoidal.
- echelon 9mo agoIs flutter a derivative like jerk?
- shkkmo 9mo agohttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroelasticity#Flutter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroelasticity#Flutter
- MarkSweep 9mo agoThe derivatives following jerk are snap, crackle, and pop: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_derivatives_of_position https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv...
- lisper 9mo agohttps://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-03-differential-equations-spring-2010/63b26053bec64e7c32b93900b15d7fad_MIT18_03S10_Appendix_B.pdf https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-03-differential-equations-spr...
- kelnos 9mo agoThe article covers this: > Follow-up 2: Yes, I know that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge collapse was not the result of resonance, but I felt I had to drop the reference to forestall the “You forgot to mention the Tacoma Narrows Bridge!” comments.
- forrestthewoods 9mo agoAsk me how I know you didn’t read the whole article!
- YouAreWRONGtoo 9mo ago[dead]
- jamesgill 9mo agoThat's Miss Jackson if you're Windows.
- monocularvision 9mo agoI am not a huge fan of joke-y replies like this, but bravo. Perfect.
- dang 9mo agoRelated. Others? Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534483 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534483 - Sept 2024 (79 comments) Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32483211 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32483211 - Aug 2022 (12 comments)
- thimkerbell 9mo agoExtra points for people who avoid gratuitous clickbait
- Kuraj 9mo agoIt wasn't exactly disappointing. I loved to read The Old New Thing back in the day, Raymond's blog was full of stuff like this.
- brk 9mo agoWeird. Digital recording and mastering was definitely a thing at that time. You’d think they would have been crashing the HDDs of PCs in the recording studios.
- wtallis 9mo agoNot weird at all. This problem manifested only with some model of 5400RPM laptop hard drive (2.5"), but a recording studio would likely have been using 7200RPM 3.5" desktop drives. Different resonant frequencies, more sturdy mounting, more distance between the speakers and the hard drives.
- n8m8 9mo agoApparently pro tools came out in 1989, makes me think this may or may not be true. This article has some info about the mixture of analog and digital tools use to record: > The main event was a brand-new mixing console called the Harrison Series 10, which was the first analog console to feature a digital control surface, with full automation of all parameters. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were the first studio to have it, according to Jam. This meant that they could cut down the time it took to switch songs to about 10 minutes because complex mixes now required little-to-no cross-patching. https://reverb.com/news/the-making-of-janet-jacksons-rhythm-nation https://reverb.com/news/the-making-of-janet-jacksons-rhythm-...
- sedatk 9mo agoThey probably didn't use laptops in which the disk and the speaker are next to each other.
- bjackman 9mo agoI've had a similar case before but for a much more boring reason: a certain YouTube video somehow triggered a spike in power draw and caused my Google Pixel to reset. Google's response after looking at the crash dumps: "WAI, your battery is degraded" (IIRC my phone was less than 3 years old).
- TeMPOraL 9mo agoCould be; after ~3 years, my Samsung Galaxy S7 would reset if I tried to make a call with battery below ~20%. I immediately knew it was the battery, because I still remember noticing it as a kid on Nokia 3410 - calling would sometimes drop the battery indicator by one bar, which would come back moments after call ended. That's how I learned about internal resistance and how battery capacity is measured :). As for fixes in software, it's either treating it as WAI, or secretly throttling down the phone, like Apple did, for which they got accused of planned obsolescence. Neither choice is good (though actually informing the users would go a long way).
- deleted 9mo ago[deleted]
- mstep 9mo agoaccording to this video [0] the frequency was 84.2. that-s not unplausible. a known problem in cutting vinyl records are sudden bursts of high volume frequencies around 100 hz, that have the potential to make the needle skip with a normal amount of weight on the tone-arm. ------- [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY
- lelandfe 9mo agoI remember reading that the bassline in LFO’s self titled broke the cutting needle when they were pressing it. Wonder if that had a similar explanation.
- rurban 9mo agoFor a F1 drive axle the critical resonance frequency is around 2400 rpm. That's why you need to turn it up fast at start over the safe 4000 rpm, and never go down. Without the ECU you can easily break it by starting too slow
- OisinMoran 9mo agoReminds me of Gödel, Escher, Bach in which there is a phonograph dubbed "Record Player X", which destroys itself by playing a record titled I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X.
- CharlesW 9mo agohttps://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
- j45 9mo agoThis gives new meaning to Rhythm Nation.
- btilly 9mo agohttps://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html https://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html is a similar story from IBM in the 1960s. Except that there was nothing accidental about the problem.
- modzu 9mo agoreminds me of the captain crunch whistle and 2600
- baobun 9mo ago> And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video! Reality must have been falling apart for someone for a brief moment there.
- Gazoche 9mo ago> And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to crash, even though that other laptop wasn’t playing the video! That’s about the time I would have given up on the investigation and called in an exorcist.
- WYSIMOLWYG 9mo agoReminds me (tangentially) of the story of the Raspberry Pi 2 and Xenon flash. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/xenon-death-flash-a-free-physics-lesson/ https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/xenon-death-flash-a-free-ph...
- theologic 9mo agoThe story is slightly unusual because I was actually managing a part of the engineering group at IBM that was integrating hard disk drives into ThinkPads during that era. I am not suggesting that it could not have happened or that it might have occurred at another major laptop manufacturer, but many details regarding the exact source and nature do not feel quite right. Music was a massive issue. It's just that it became an industry issue a little later as production moved to Taiwan and we were increasing our AD curve. The issue of music crashing a hard disk drive was a genuine problem. Since I later specialized in hard drives, I can confirm that every manufacturer faced this issue as multimedia laptops became more common and we transitioned to higher areal densities. To state the obvious, we shrank the tracks every time to achieve larger capacities. We were doubling capacities every nine to twelve months when we first introduced MR, GMR, and PMR heads. The hard drive industry employs incredible control theory experts due to the requirement of keeping a head on track. Personal opinion, which I probably should research, but I believe that one of the densest concentrations of Ph.D.s in leading edge control theory could be found within the hard disk drive industry. Amazing things happen when you're trying to fly nanometers off the disc in a track that is maybe 100 nanometers wide at the time. By 2010ish, as part of our development suite, we actually played music through the speakers to identify these types of issues. The origin of this practice actually came from the ODMs in Taiwan. Therefore, Janet Jackson was not the standard qualification song we used. Instead, it was popular hits from the Chinese pop market. There were also Western songs within the suite, but I remember our team blasting Chinese pop songs at full volume on multimedia laptops. Laptop development began moving heavily to Taiwan in the mid nineties. By the time the early two thousands arrived, there was a massive amount of competence in Taiwan regarding chassis design engineering. As time progressed, every American PC company continued to outsource development to Taiwan and eventually to China. As development was outsourced, the ODMs would work with suppliers because we wanted to present solutions to the OEMs that were free of issues. EDIT: By the way, it wasn't necessarily a blue-screen crash. I'm not saying that that couldn't happen, but generally what we did is we had the throughput test that we were run on the hard drives. Then we would go blast the music full bore and there were certain bandwidth requirements that we needed to get out of the hard disk drive. So to add some more details behind this, I would describe it as a performance issue and the blue screen issue was relatively minor. However, this was a number of years ago and I don't remember the exact percentages.