21–30 of 88 posts
Similar story: http://patrickthomson.tumblr.com/post/2499755681/the-best-de... Oh, and back when Sun Microsystems said random server crashes were due to alpha particles. http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...
Someone recently posted a list of these. http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/
Similar story: http://patrickthomson.tumblr.com/post/2499755681/the-best-de... Oh, and back when Sun Microsystems said random server crashes were due to alpha particles. http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...
Speaking of Sun alumni, there's also Brendan Gregg's one weird trick for inducing disk latency (spinning disks hate him!): https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 Side note: that scream makes a superb notification tone for people you don't like, or PagerDuty. I also heard a good yarn once where a customer's DSL service inexplicably stopped working at exactly the same time every day, and after weeks of troubleshooting and changi…
Turned out that the contractor who replaced the coax on our block didn't use the right grade of cable... the weight of the water plus wind would stretch the cable and open a crack in the housing.
I had a user of an audio streaming product who suffered from random disconnects. He could only stream for about five minutes before it quit. But, and this was the crazy part, the problem only happened when streaming rock and roll. Classical music worked fine.
After many weeks going back and forth, I tracked it down to a misconfiguration on his network interface. The MTU was set lower than the IPv6 spec allowed (or so, forgive me if I get this detail wrong) and the OS wouldn't fragment our UDP packets with this setting.
Our packets usually were under the limit, but occasionally went over and triggered an error. Why was classical music immune? The lossless codec we were using did a better job on classical than rock, so classical (or at least this guy's classical) never went over the size limit.
Similar story: http://patrickthomson.tumblr.com/post/2499755681/the-best-de... Oh, and back when Sun Microsystems said random server crashes were due to alpha particles. http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...
Someone recently posted a list of these. http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/
Similar story: http://patrickthomson.tumblr.com/post/2499755681/the-best-de... Oh, and back when Sun Microsystems said random server crashes were due to alpha particles. http://web.archive.org/web/20020202013942/http://www.compute...
from the second link: > Q: Do you ever think about retiring? > A: Every day. No, not really. I can't leave my kids to Microsoft. The government won't fight the battle. The government won't enforce the laws. i'm not old enough to know the context, and out of context this is pretty funny.
"People say, 'Why haven't you retired?' I said, 'I can't leave my kids to a world of Control, Alt, Delete,' " he said, referring to the function in Microsoft Windows for rebooting after a system crash. "I can't leave my kids to MSN. I think you [developers should be out there helping your families [by spreading Java use.]"
http://www.crn.com/news/channel-programs/18818889/mcnealy-ev...
Stories like this always remind me of the car allergic to vanilla ice cream. http://www.cgl.uwaterloo.ca/smann/IceCream/humor.html
Not forgetting the classic "magic / more magic" switch: http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Not forgetting the classic "magic / more magic" switch: http://catb.org/esr/jargon/html/magic-story.html
Or the email server that couldn't send emails more than 500 miles: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/vunp/the_case_o...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Or the email server that couldn't send emails more than 500 miles: https://www.ibiblio.org/harris/500milemail.html
Or the server that timed out when pallets in the shipping room were lifted: https://www.reddit.com/r/reddit.com/comments/vunp/the_case_o...
(As per https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html I've been allowed to say that for some time)