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Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

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Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#81

Post by mikeash »

nerflad wrote: post #76
mikeash wrote: post #24

Since we're all sharing wacky debugging stories.... 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…

I'm assuming this is due to the lower average signal level of symphonic recordings? Rock music is mastered closer to 0db due to the well-publicized loudness war. Obviously, this doesn't affect bandwidth in uncompressed audio, where every sample contains every bit, so filesize = bit-depth * sample-rate(hz) * T(seconds). But in compressed audio, average signal level can make a significant difference in filesize/bandwid…

I think rock is just less regular at a small scale. Consider a flute versus an electric guitar. The flute is at least somewhat like a pure tone which would be easy to compress, while an electric guitar is a mishmash of stuff that will look much more random on a sample by sample basis.

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#82

Post by jabl »

tyingq wrote: post #4

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...

Doesn't sound that far-fetched. Here's a slightly newer story where cosmic rays caused address lines to generate spurious signals, and radioactive lead solder caused L1 cache corruption on a bg/l machine: http://spectrum.ieee.org/computing/hardware/how-to-kill-a-su...

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#83

Post by dTal »

bobbles wrote: post #72
franze wrote: post #65

Around 2000: a colleague told me about his slow PC, rattling noises, random crashes. i did what any responsible workmate would do: told him to call IT support, I'm a web-designer (well actually I was a frontend, backend developer, database guy and project manager but devision of labor in webdevelopment didn't happen yet so my job title was webdesigner, anyway...)! 5 weeks of various visits by the IT support later, in…

I doubt fridge magnets would have anything to do with problems in a PC, they would need to be about 100x stronger than that to have any sort of impact

Sounds like it was somehow causing a fan to stick, hence the rattling and subsequent instability.

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#84

Post by nerflad »

mikeash wrote: post #81
nerflad wrote: post #76

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm assuming this is due to the lower average signal level of symphonic recordings? Rock music is mastered closer to 0db due to the well-publicized loudness war. Obviously, this doesn't affect bandwidth in uncompressed audio, where every sample contains every bit, so filesize = bit-depth * sample-rate(hz) * T(seconds). But in compressed audio, average signal level can make a significant difference in filesize/bandwid…

I think rock is just less regular at a small scale. Consider a flute versus an electric guitar. The flute is at least somewhat like a pure tone which would be easy to compress, while an electric guitar is a mishmash of stuff that will look much more random on a sample by sample basis.

Cool -- I didn't even consider the shape of the waveforms (sine-like for flute, saw/square-like for anything distorted) having an effect on the data, but now that you tell me... duh!

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#86

Post by otuutti »

noxin wrote: post #78
mishac wrote: post #54

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you have a link for the one with the general visiting? Sadly a google search just gave stories of military officers in plan crashes.

Unfortunately I can't seem to find it anymore. It was in a military facility in the seventies, and always when the general visited the computers crashed. This happened too often to be a demonstration effect, it turned out to be the metal in the generals shoes interfering with the electronics.

Can it be found in this list? http://beza1e1.tuxen.de/lore/

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#87

Post by mikeash »

nerflad wrote: post #84
mikeash wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think rock is just less regular at a small scale. Consider a flute versus an electric guitar. The flute is at least somewhat like a pure tone which would be easy to compress, while an electric guitar is a mishmash of stuff that will look much more random on a sample by sample basis.

Cool -- I didn't even consider the shape of the waveforms (sine-like for flute, saw/square-like for anything distorted) having an effect on the data, but now that you tell me... duh!

To be clear, I surmised this from what I described, I didn't actually get down and poke at how the codec works on these different types of music. But I'm pretty sure that's what's going on.

These lossless codecs work by attempting to predict the next sample from all the previous ones, and then encoding the difference between the prediction and reality. So a more regular waveform will compress better than a crazy-looking one. It's somewhat counterintuitive since rock music tends to be less complicated from a high-level human perspective.

Re: Every time we lift a pallet from the shipping room, the server times out (2006)

#88

Post by chime »

raldi wrote: post #50
chime wrote: post #44

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Original commenter here. Talk about a blast from the past! It was indeed surprising and scary for me too. Hard to recall precise details from a decade ago but I think that both the devices connected because I used the same password on them and while the reset caused the test WAP to become a repeater, it still had the credentials necessary to connect to the production WAP. I did not have enough time or resources to fi…

Hey, a reunion! In case you were wondering, the reason I submitted this was that it recently came up in /r/TenYearsAgoOnReddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/TenYearsAgoOnReddit/comments/5jo2dk... (then ctrl-f "original post")

That's awesome. Thanks for bringing back the nostalgia :)
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