As a tech, I HATED how often this worked. I want to know what actually went wrong. I usually have some idea … but no, finding that out is rarely the job.
So what happens is you have drivers loaded into your kernel, that know how to ‘talk’ to everything your PC interacts with.
Now, on startup, they can fail to load, for whatever reason. Or if they are already loaded in memory, it can get corrupted, again, for whatever reason.
So unless the disk is fried and that driver is permanently lost, a reboot will resolve it by loading it again from the drive.
Back in the 1960s there was a kind of car called a Bubble Car. They had a front-opening door, that is, the door and windscreen were one, and it opened up, out and to the left. The cars also had no reverse gear.
It was thus possible to get into a state where you’d driven right up to the back wall of a garage and were then completely unable to get out.
The car wasn’t broken and otherwise worked normally. If there’d been a radio in there, that would have still worked. The seat didn’t suddenly become uncomfortable, etc. Nonetheless, the user was stuck.
What’s the point of this anecdote? Well, a computer that can be fixed by rebooting was in a state like that bubble car stuck against the back wall of the garage.
Unfortunately, with the car, there was no equivalent reset to get back outside the garage again, and usually resulted in the user screaming for help.
If it’s what you’re thinking of and it probably is, the OG “bubble car” was the BMW Isetta and I’m afraid the scenario outlined above is a myth that was promulgated by Top Gear. The Isetta does indeed have a reverse gear, because even ze Bavarians were smart enough to think of that. Yes, this is also the car that Steve Urkel drove.
What’s true is that in the immediate postwar years, quite a lot of other lesser European microcars hit the streets which were built around largely as-is motorbike drivetrains which didn’t have reverse. Vanishingly few of these did not have side opening doors, though, with some strange exceptions.
You could also just open the door into the obstacle and push if you were really hard up, with the understanding that you may mar the paint on the door edge.
One thing I think about is that we make servers with ECC RAM because normal RAM has cosmic rays cause random corruption IIRC once every 100 days on average.
It’s overkill for desktops because you don’t care about 3 bit flips every year if you only have 1 machine as opposed to managing thousands in a datacenter, and you regularly restart your stuff anyway.
And then you have people who have to deal with hundreds of people who never restart their stuff.
And companies ship stuff with memory leaks all the time on top of this. US nuclear guidance systems have them, but they are not expected to have to be on constantly for weeks on end like the laptop of Joan from Marketing.
As a tech, I HATED how often this worked. I want to know what actually went wrong. I usually have some idea … but no, finding that out is rarely the job.
So what happens is you have drivers loaded into your kernel, that know how to ‘talk’ to everything your PC interacts with.
Now, on startup, they can fail to load, for whatever reason. Or if they are already loaded in memory, it can get corrupted, again, for whatever reason.
So unless the disk is fried and that driver is permanently lost, a reboot will resolve it by loading it again from the drive.
I’m the guy on the right in the OOP, plus about 25 years of experience and learning. I’m not short on ideas, and didn’t say I was.
Back in the 1960s there was a kind of car called a Bubble Car. They had a front-opening door, that is, the door and windscreen were one, and it opened up, out and to the left. The cars also had no reverse gear.
It was thus possible to get into a state where you’d driven right up to the back wall of a garage and were then completely unable to get out.
The car wasn’t broken and otherwise worked normally. If there’d been a radio in there, that would have still worked. The seat didn’t suddenly become uncomfortable, etc. Nonetheless, the user was stuck.
What’s the point of this anecdote? Well, a computer that can be fixed by rebooting was in a state like that bubble car stuck against the back wall of the garage.
Unfortunately, with the car, there was no equivalent reset to get back outside the garage again, and usually resulted in the user screaming for help.
Internet Pedantry Alert!
If it’s what you’re thinking of and it probably is, the OG “bubble car” was the BMW Isetta and I’m afraid the scenario outlined above is a myth that was promulgated by Top Gear. The Isetta does indeed have a reverse gear, because even ze Bavarians were smart enough to think of that. Yes, this is also the car that Steve Urkel drove.
What’s true is that in the immediate postwar years, quite a lot of other lesser European microcars hit the streets which were built around largely as-is motorbike drivetrains which didn’t have reverse. Vanishingly few of these did not have side opening doors, though, with some strange exceptions.
Got me wondering: did they not even have Neutral?
They do. They also have a manual clutch.
“Help, I’m stuck because I’m too weak to push a vehicle that weights nothing away from the wall!!”
You could also just open the door into the obstacle and push if you were really hard up, with the understanding that you may mar the paint on the door edge.
That’s actuall what I was getting at.
Ah. I was thinking one hand out the window, like James was trying to accomplish. Either/or.
One thing I think about is that we make servers with ECC RAM because normal RAM has cosmic rays cause random corruption IIRC once every 100 days on average.
It’s overkill for desktops because you don’t care about 3 bit flips every year if you only have 1 machine as opposed to managing thousands in a datacenter, and you regularly restart your stuff anyway.
And then you have people who have to deal with hundreds of people who never restart their stuff.
And companies ship stuff with memory leaks all the time on top of this. US nuclear guidance systems have them, but they are not expected to have to be on constantly for weeks on end like the laptop of Joan from Marketing.
I’d love if you had a source for this, that’s hilarious
Its incredibly hard to search on the web nowadays, so this is the best I could find. If I try searching for anything military, it’s propaganda slop.
It’s not specifically about nukes, and it might have been the origin point of an urban legend that reached my circles mutated.
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20180228-00/?p=98125
Also it’s technically a storage leak not a memory leak.