Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?

    • @[email protected]
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      133 months ago

      And yet I still have electronics to this day that require me to pull the plug to get going again 😂

      • oleorun
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        133 months ago

        Our LG washing machine does this once every year and a half almost like clockwork. It will simply refuse to do anything until it is unplugged and then plugged back in.

        • dual_sport_dork 🐧🗡️
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          213 months ago

          It may be clockwork. If its power hasn’t been interrupted in the interim, i.e. you have very stable power at your house, that’s got to be some kind of overflow bug in its software. A timer somewhere is running out of room to count clock ticks and it barfs.

        • @[email protected]
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          3 months ago

          I’ve an oven which when turned off in hot state while in convection mode will turn on the fans for few minutes next time I turn it on, regardless of mode and temperature. To overcome this bug I need to put mains power off for couple of minutes and let the caps keeping the ram alive drain. Not only it has hot state reset bug but also a ram initialization issue as well it seems. Thankfully that state is not stored in nvram.

          The manufacturer was as expected: ‘we’re not software guy, we can send an ‘expert’ engineer (who knows only to replace parts, no debugging) and it’ll cost $$’. I thought I’ll reverse it and fixing someday, till then I’ll live with it.

            • @[email protected]
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              13 months ago

              good question :)

              I think it’s integrated ram inside the microcontroller. It stores states and programming (time, temperature etc) + the working memory for the program running on cpu. Surely some registers can do that but who cares.

              • Amon
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                13 months ago

                My meaning is why should an oven have any electronics?

                • @[email protected]
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                  13 months ago

                  No reason, few decades ago oven used to work just as well as they do today with knobs, thermostats and spring timers.

                  That’s why I said good question.

                  The oven I mentioned isn’t this smart but there exist ovens like

                  COOKING MADE SMARTER WITH WIFI POWERED BY SMART HQ: Voice-enabled cooking allows you to turn microwave on and off, add time or change power level via Alexa or Google Assistant; Scan-To-Cook Technology saves time and optimizes frozen food preparation

    • @[email protected]
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      53 months ago

      Maybe I’m misremembering (or it’s just old knowledge and new chips are more sophisticated) but despite it being low voltage vs high voltage the outcome is still on or off because there’s a resistor in the semiconductor that either allows current through or not. If it were a light switch it would be the equivalent of turning the light on or off.

      • @[email protected]
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        53 months ago

        Ya. It’s more like “current go this way or current go that way” than it is high/low voltages.

  • @[email protected]
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    153 months ago

    Tom Knight and the Lisp Machine

    A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

    Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

    Knight turned the machine off and on.

    The machine worked.

    Source: http://www.catb.org/jargon/html/index.html Section IIIA

  • @[email protected]
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    183 months ago

    A novice was trying to fix a broken Lisp machine by turning the power off and on.

    Knight, seeing what the student was doing, spoke sternly: “You cannot fix a machine by just power-cycling it with no understanding of what is going wrong.”

    Knight turned the machine off and on.

    The machine worked.

  • @[email protected]
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    3 months ago

    “Since words can be represented in binary, thus as a sequence of ones and zeroes, […], doesn’t that mean that all questions can be answered by saying no, then yes again at some level?”

    How has no one pointed out yet that this is conceptually wrong? Turning something off & on again is cycling the same switch. Solutions to IT problems are setting different bits, which is binary for “using different words”.

    • Get_Off_My_WLANOP
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      63 months ago

      How dare you use logic on my computer logic-related shower thought.

      But yeah, I get what you mean. I had that thought at some point after posting. This is why I should probably just keep it in this silly thread and not write any philosophy essays soon.

    • @[email protected]
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      23 months ago

      I mean, technically speaking, it’s cycling all the switches. You use one main switch to simplify the process, but it controls all the other switches as well.

      • @[email protected]
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        43 months ago

        No, that’s the whole misconception here. cycling a switch means returning to the previous state. Turning it off and on again means going from ON -> OFF -> ON. Software problems are solved by going from one state to a different state.

        • @[email protected]
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          43 months ago

          Software problems are solved by going from one state to a different state.

          Or by moving to Canada.

  • @[email protected]
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    183 months ago

    Go bigger than IT problems.

    Most desk jobs are simply finding information: a suitable combination of 1s and 0s until someone else agrees that the combination is correct.

    Then, as a reward, the business slightly changes the 1s and 0s of my bank account.

    It’s 1s and 0s all the way down.

    • @[email protected]
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      73 months ago

      Digital means that it’s discrete compared to analog which is continuous. Some of the first digital computers were decimal, but in general binary is simpler to use so that’s why it’s everywhere.

  • @[email protected]
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    413 months ago

    Turning it off and on again is a universal truth. A defibrillator works by turning the heart off then on again.

    (You don’t defib a patient who is flat lining. You defib to fix an erratic heart beat.)

    • @[email protected]
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      103 months ago

      ECT basically does that too but for brains. Too sad and Prozac isn’t fixing it? We’re gonna put you under and slap the reset button every other day until you’re not. Shit works too its fucking wild.

      • @[email protected]
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        43 months ago

        I believe there is also a medical treatment that consists of wiping out your white blood cells entirely so your body has to make new ones.

        "Have you tried turning the immune system off then on again?’

    • @[email protected]
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      23 months ago

      Our University is a cosmic machine that has been running for billions of years, and as an IT guy reboots a computer when it’s been running for too long and has problems, will inevitably implode on itself and tear itself apart, which is the equivalent of God turning it off and on again.

  • Caveman
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    3 months ago

    Studied computer science. The answer is yes.

    A computer is a funky thingy that’s a jumbled city of stuff turning on and off with the one master on/off thingy which is the clock on the processor.

    When it switches from negative to positive a lot of small switches everywhere switch, some stay the same, some flip. It’s all just a bunch of rythm dancing of switches going off and on.

    • @[email protected]
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      43 months ago

      I come from the net. Through systems, peoples and cities to this place: Mainframe. My format: Guardian; to mend and defend. To defend my new-found friends, their hopes and dreams. To defend them from their enemies. They say the user lives outside the net and inputs games for pleasure. No one knows for sure, but I intend to find out.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      Until some stray gamma ray hits just the right spot, flips a bit and either nothing at all of everything all at once happens.

    • @[email protected]
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      53 months ago

      If you used mechanical switches, would it be possible to build a large version of some modern semiconductor chip? If so, I would expect that contraption to be slower and louder than the original.

      • Caveman
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        43 months ago

        If you’re willing to sacrifice the clock speed it’s possible. One of the issues will be that the insane amount of logic gates would have to propagate through every cycle which happens stupid fast on modern chips. Still possible to model it and do a timelapse.

        • @[email protected]
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          33 months ago

          This is pretty cool. I don’t care how slow it is. It just shows that that it can be done. If you want something useful, use silicon. If you want something awesome, use creative alternatives like pneumatic pipes and valves. :D

    • @[email protected]
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      33 months ago

      It’s all just a bunch of rythm dancing of switches going off and on.

      I want this rhythm game now.

    • @[email protected]
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      3 months ago

      We need a cells at work type of anime but about computers.

      It’s all just a bunch of rythm dancing

  • bluGill
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    33 months ago

    Turning the right thing off and on again is the key. When you only have one router and a handful of other things like most have at home this isn’t a big deal. When you have millions of things it can take weeks just to find the right thing in the mess.

    • Midnight Wolf
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      23 months ago

      the right thing

      Hospital IT: yes I hear you are having trouble with your TV not working, let me just grabs ventilator plug

      Patient: flailing

      IT: relax, I know what I’m doing

  • @[email protected]
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    23 months ago

    Until quantum comes around for everybody because then it can be zero or one at the same time. And you don’t know until you observe it.

    • @[email protected]
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      13 months ago

      Quantum computing will never come around for everyone. It’s entirely different technology, and what we have works quite well for what we need. A good analogy from this Cleo Abrams video is it would be like saying we no longer need cars because we invented boats

    • @[email protected]
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      23 months ago

      Not really.

      Quantum computing is about literally solving it exponentially faster.

      Think of it like brute forcing a password.

      Binary it can change one character and it has to go thru all of them.

      Actual quantum computing goes down multiple paths at once, so the bigger the password the more gain there is from quantum. It doesn’t have to actually try every single possible combination.

      It’s not just going from 2 to 3 states, because that third state is quantum superposition and by no means just a 50% increase. That superposition is how it goes down multiple “paths” at once.

      But the observer effect isn’t coming into play.

        • @[email protected]
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          13 months ago

          Computers are fine. It’s the internet that was a problem. Some will say social media, but newsgroups were the social media of the day. If the internet remained too difficult for stupid people to access, there’d only be a small number of people poisoned by bad information and they could be safely ignored, just like in the 90s.

          • @[email protected]
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            23 months ago

            Nah, man, based on the stories my parents told me from the 70s and 80s, computers were a mistake long before the Internet.

            It was as soon as the devices got in the hands of people who couldn’t program that things got bad

        • @[email protected]
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          3 months ago

          A million years ago some asshole fish decided to crawl on land and now I have to deal with IT problems.