Bastards the lot of them!!! Especially the God of Hard Drives!!! :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad: :mad:
Sing it, brother! I had a run-in last week in Dante’s third rung of printer/fax/copier hell, then on this weekend with Satan’s Fourth Imp of Wireless Routers. A pox upon them all, purveyors of sleek plastic humming boxes of electronic mayhem! Get thee behind me, HP!
Er, no, not you, Mr. Lovecraft.
I say kill the computers!!! For too long have their dark Gods reaked havoc on us(just when we nee to get an important piece of work done too)!!!
Destroy the evil mind-controllers, they start fires and cause explosions and steal peoples jobs anyway!!!
YES ! … I remember back when a man had to carry messages across this fine and glorious land using only his strong back, his muscled legs and his love of months long journing into the wilds.
Oh wait … no … sorry … I don’t remember that.
Carry on. Nothing to see here.
The Gods of Computer Hardware love me, for I do not bespoil my temple with inferior software. 
I had the Thundering God of Exploding Power Supplies drop by some time ago. Plus I had to fight against General Failure (God of Hard Drives first cousin) for a friend of mine 2 weeks ago. Sadly he could only be defeated with the dreaded Format C: maneuver.
Linksys, link this! ::grabs mouse and rubs it on crotch::
Now it’s a LapLink.
Don’t listen to him god!! He does not know what he speaks! Please do not smite my imminent hardware upgrade!
Hey, that’s pretty good! I wonder what the other eight levels of computer-related hell are …
It’s good to know that my malevolent work has been appreciated.
-catsix,
computer engineer,
digital logic designer,
evil bitch of hardware.
Seriously though, it’s not typically a deliberate effort to annoy, frustrate, or mess with the minds of the users. Although sometimes it is, because we know that some day the people who make our lives miserable with deadlines and impossible requests will have to use that hardware.
Most of the time though, it’s because many thousands (or millions, in the case of processors) have to be properly aligned and set, and how many logic gates must fall perfectly into place to make something work, and even with really great simulation-testing and synthesis-testing, there are bugs.
<slight sidetrack into processors> Those bugs are often so preplexing because the average person sees a .25"x.25" square as the processor, and has no idea that inside there are literally millions of parts and pathways. What looks like one part is actually a whole shitload of parts.</sidetrack>
The more ‘smart’ a device is supposed to be, the more it will rely on having a fairly complex processor, system board, and firmware (the software that makes it work) in order to do its job. The more easy it is for the user to use (or the easier it’s supposed to be to use), the more stuff it’s got to do itself, thus the device is more complex on the inside than the user sees. The more complex it is, the harder it is to make it bug free, because it’s got to think more, interpret more, and in general do more, which means increasing the complexity of the design, which means that testing it becomes more difficult.
Unfortunately the best and most accurate way to determine how a piece of hardware is going to work under normal use conditions is to put it under normal use conditions where users will do things to it that the design engineers never thought the users would try to do.
As for the hard drives, those are also extremely complicated little devices that rely not only on the actual mechanics of the drive (which can fail because they’re mechanical), they rely on a controller card containing chips and buses and firmware all their own as well. Most often, drive failures are mechanical, which is why drives are tested extensively to determine an MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures). That MTBF is no guarantee of how long the drive will work, it’s just an average number of hours it took for the test drives to fail. All in all, for what goes into designing computer hardware and the software or firmware that runs it, they work amazingly well for their complexity.
But it still makes even me want to kill someone when one of those things doesn’t work right.
Here’s my experience with computer hardware. Well, no. Here’s my dad’s experience with power tools. Just hang on a minute.
When my dad was a kid, his father was planing some boards. A planer is a rotating drum set into a smooth metal table; the drum has two or three blades on it which slowly shave the board smooth. The thing about a planer is that the blades spin really really fast. When a planer is stopped, sometimes the gap between two blades will be exposed, and it appears as though there is no drum, and that a square hole in the table has been “sucking” all the wood away. The other time a planer looks like this is right after it’s been shut down and the drum is spinning down. The circumstances were stupid, but what happened was, my dad stuck his finger in the still-moving planer like he’d done hundreds of times before with the non-moving planer, and only then did he learn that the two are easily mistaken. He has nine-and-a-half fingers now, and he always told me to treat power tools as though they were always on, because they just might be. Or they might get that way while you’re not looking.
Now, I told you that story to tell you this one.
Every time I have a hardware failure, my first instinct is to force it back into compliance. When that doesn’t work, I try to force it back into the original, only-partially-broken state. If you’ve read Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance then you know where this is headed. The more frustrated you get with the hardware, the more likely it is to compound your mistake, and to “bite you back.” The moment you catch yourself getting impatient with hardware, or failing to respect it, or taking any shortcut whatsoever, walk away.
Wash your hands in cool water, splash some on your face, and go for a walk outside, or go see a movie, or go out for a drink. Don’t come back to fix it for 24 hours. If you are a technician for a living, you probably have a better solution, but for us PC owners at home, let me say it again: walk away, man.
As a professional PC nerd, I worship the Computer Hardware Gods. In return they smite the unknowing, who then rent my services for mucho denaro.
I then take said moola and purchase a geeky toy like an ATI 9800 XT video card, which pleases the Computer Hardware Gods and makes them smile. The cycle begins anew, and another user screams in the night.