My mother had a TV in the 90s that would spontaneously wake up at approximately midnight, at random. The family rumor was that it happened after being struck by lightning. Creepy.
Old tech is haunted
11–20 of 103 posts
Re: Old tech is haunted
#12Haunting is overfitting data to a pattern (ghost) that can explain everything. The benefit is less thought about things that don’t matter, but missing out on learning something useful is the disadvantage.
Re: Old tech is haunted
#13Old tech? My current tech is possessed by those doing Satan's bidding.
Constantly tempting me, always whispering in my ear to want more, making me covet what others have.
Re: Old tech is haunted
#14Many years ago, in my first tech job, we converted our typewriter-driven office to networked DOS PCs, running on Netware. One day, one of the legal secretaries, of self-described Roma ancestry, started complaining about her PC acting oddly...software not starting, spontaneous reboots ,etc. We replaced her machine to troubleshoot it, but the same thing happened with the replacement machine. We couldn't detect anything she was doing wrong.
Finally, she got tired of our fruitless technology-driven attempts to help her and strung a few cloves of garlic along the tops and sides of her cubicle. Her problems went away, immediately. My boss, the director of IT, and I looked at each other, shrugged, and called it good.
Re: Old tech is haunted
#15[deleted]
Re: Old tech is haunted
#16My brother worked in tech support at a Christian college. People would come in with a PC that wasn't working. He would look at it thoughfuly for a few moments, then, in a loud voice and great dramatic flair would say "Demon, Be Gone" and smash his hands into the keyboard (carefully, such that he was actually hitting control-alt-delete-- but you wouldn't notice this because of the acting).
the computer would shut down, reboot, and he would look at them and cheerfully and calmly say "All better now. You can go home."
Re: Old tech is haunted
#17Spectre-infested computer, you say? Yes, thanks to CPU manufacturers.
Why haven't Spectre et al been used as vectors to jailbreak old hardware yet? I get the impression they're not that practical of vectors and we freaked out and hobbled our cpu performance with patches for nothing.
Out of curiosity, what I would be jailbreaking? My x86-64 motherboard that I can boot any OS I want onto?
Re: Old tech is haunted
#18Spectre-infested computer, you say? Yes, thanks to CPU manufacturers.
Why haven't Spectre et al been used as vectors to jailbreak old hardware yet? I get the impression they're not that practical of vectors and we freaked out and hobbled our cpu performance with patches for nothing.
They're only useful for reading things out of memory, not writing. So it's not immediately obvious how you would use them to jailbreak a machine?
Re: Old tech is haunted
#19Old tech? My current tech is possessed by those doing Satan's bidding. Constantly tempting me, always whispering in my ear to want more, making me covet what others have.
and asking you to update it once per week so it can reorganize your files and workflow.
For your own good.
Re: Old tech is haunted
#20Old tech? My current tech is possessed by those doing Satan's bidding. Constantly tempting me, always whispering in my ear to want more, making me covet what others have.
and asking you to update it once per week so it can reorganize your files and workflow. For your own good.
Unless you use windows in which case "asking" is a bit of a euphemism.