[HN Gopher] Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computer...
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Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)
Author : montalbano
Score : 299 points
Date : 2025-12-27 17:16 UTC (1 days ago)
(HTM) web link (devblogs.microsoft.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (devblogs.microsoft.com)
| etchalon wrote:
| Computers are so weird.
| 01HNNWZ0MV43FF wrote:
| Analog devices pretending to be digital
| nntwozz wrote:
| Another reason to step away from spinning rust.
|
| Thank dog for SSDs
| functionmouse wrote:
| Spinning rust may be defeated by Janet Jackson, but your chip
| storage is defeated by just sitting undisturbed in a drawer or
| a closet for too long...
| mc32 wrote:
| Platters are not made of iron (or even steel) and neither is
| the surface, so I'm not sure why rust comes into the picture.
| onraglanroad wrote:
| The platters used to be coated with iron oxide as the
| magnetic coating.
|
| Modern ones use more exotic materials.
| mc32 wrote:
| Yes but that was like 40 years ago. I think by now the
| phraseology should reflect reality after about forty years.
| jacquesm wrote:
| How many horsepower does your car have?
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| We still talk about "bugs" (99+% of computer defects in
| the past 70+ years have not been caused by insects) and
| "AJAX" (long after most of these requests use JSON
| instead of XML).
| seanhandley wrote:
| "Phraseology" is subtly different.
|
| You mean "vocabulary", "terminology", possibly
| "nomenclature".
| arcanemachiner wrote:
| Ironically, I only started hearing the term being used in
| the past decade, as a colloquial alternative to solid-
| state storage.
| vee-kay wrote:
| Technically, that magnetic spinning HDD can work even after
| decades if maintained safely (no dust, no extreme heat) and
| without stress, even if it is not switched on for years.
|
| In fact, if a magnetic HDD crashes, you may still recover some
| or all of the data by doing something hardcore, such as letting
| it sit for some hours in the freezer of your refrigerator, or
| immersing it in a bowl of rice overnight.
|
| However, SSDs (and other flash storage devices) need to be
| switched on once in few months, otherwise there's a chance that
| some data stored in them may be permanently lost, as some cells
| may loose their power.
|
| "As a reminder, an SSD's endurance rating is calculated based
| on how long it can store data if left unplugged after a certain
| amount of data has been written":
| https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/storage/unpowered...
| daymanstep wrote:
| HDDs also lose magnetic charge over time, about 1% per year.
| So you need to periodically spin up and rewrite the data
| every few years.
|
| CD drives however, can store data indefinitely without
| needing refreshing.
| aidenn0 wrote:
| CD-R media is of limited shelf life as well though
| binarymax wrote:
| But the materials on the CD eventually break down,
| sometimes as soon as within 5 years. So you can look into
| MDisc, which purports 100 years...but only in theory since
| the tests are just approximations of what would actually
| happen.
| iwontberude wrote:
| Totally could be a defect in the lamination we don't find
| out for years yet
| iwontberude wrote:
| Having had drives which sat for many years and spun right
| back up without corruption makes me think 1% is too
| generous maybe 0.05% per year at most
| wtallis wrote:
| The claim you're responding to is that hard drives lose
| "magnetic charge" at a rate of 1% per year, not that bits
| get corrupted at a rate of 1% per year. The error
| correction in hard drives is far simpler and weaker than
| what's used in SSDs, but it does exist. So we should
| expect that there's a significant margin for data
| degradation before any observable data corruption begins.
| (This is true for SSDs, too; the first symptom of data
| degradation is reduced read performance as slower, more
| complex error correction methods kick in, then much later
| the host starts to actually get read errors or bad data.)
| theandrewbailey wrote:
| The magnetic strength of particles on the disk can decay
| at 1% per year, but the drive won't have issues reading
| them until they fall below a threshold where they can no
| longer be read. It could take decades.
| vee-kay wrote:
| Magnetic HDDs also tend to have inbuilt SMART features to
| monitor disk performance and health, so they can inform
| when they are beginning to give problems. So the advanced
| user can recover the data before the HDD fully fails.
|
| In my experience, flash drives tend to get problems
| suddenly leading to data corruption, and it may not be
| immediately apparent to the user till it is too late. I
| haven't such problems in recent years though, so maybe
| flash drives have become smarter too.
| jwitthuhn wrote:
| The important distinction here is that CD-ROMs can store
| data indefinitely, but CD-Rs and CD-RWs can not.
| kevin_thibedeau wrote:
| BD-R and M-Disc CD and DVDs have archival storage life.
| theologic wrote:
| As an industry insider, I have never heard the one percent.
| I'm not saying that it's not possible, but I don't recall
| ever hearing of us testing for it. So what is the source of
| the 1%?
| wtallis wrote:
| I feel like maybe you didn't understand the meaning of that
| last bit you quoted from Tom's Hardware. To be clear: the
| standard for consumer SSDs is 1 year of unpowered data
| retention after the drive's full write endurance rating has
| been exhausted.
|
| The experiment Tom's is reporting on found _twelve_ instances
| of data corruption on a low-end drive that had been subjected
| to over two thousand full drive writes, _four times_ its
| rated write endurance, then left on a shelf for _two_ years.
| This is a demonstration of a bottom of the barrel SSD _wildly
| exceeding expectations_.
|
| It's really important in conversations like this to
| accurately convey not just the existence of the failure mode,
| but also the realistic chances of running into this problem,
| and the extent of the problem when it does manifest. If a
| deliberate torture test can only produce a few _kilobytes_ of
| data corruption after twice the duration and four times the
| abuse the drive is supposed to be able to handle, this
| problem should be described as _extremely minor_.
| vee-kay wrote:
| Bottom of the barrel flash drives..
|
| Many of us have old cheap flash drives, which may have some
| backups (family photos, videos, career files, etc.) we may
| not want to lose - so they may qualify for such periodic
| basic maintenance (just plugging them into the PC once in 6
| months or so).
|
| I think most home users don't know this can be a potential
| problem for flash drive storage.
| justsomehnguy wrote:
| > of a bottom of the barrel SSD wildly exceeding
| expectations.
|
| I heard enough of stories of a bottom of the barrel SSDs
| wildly exceeding expectations by actually crashing with a
| partial or a full data loss waaay below their expected
| write endurance and while still powered on. Sure, these are
| the real bottom of the barrel, like Netac or King _Spec_ -
| but I won 't expect any non-server grade SSD to retain data
| at all for any meaningful time.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| It's a reason not to use a hard drive from over 20 years ago.
|
| But if you're stuck with hardware that old, an SSD isn't an
| option.
| wtallis wrote:
| IDE SSDs have been a niche but readily-available product for
| as long as consumer SSDs have been mainstream. CompactFlash
| cards ensured that the necessary controller chips were
| available.
| Dylan16807 wrote:
| Okay I guess you can use a 4GB CompactFlash card that cost
| a thousand dollars at the time. (While a laptop hard drive
| could reach 100GB.)
| joeel84 wrote:
| I love this story! Ha
| ninalanyon wrote:
| > certain models
|
| Why the weasel words? Does Raymond Chen not know which models? Or
| is it actually apocryphal.
| CamouflagedKiwi wrote:
| He might not since it comes via a friend. Or he's forgotten
| since.
|
| Also seems not unreasonable for an employee like him not to
| specifically name and shame hardware partners. Maybe it'd all
| be fine, but I wouldn't blame him at all for not wanting to
| risk it.
| adzm wrote:
| In general, he never names companies in his posts if there is
| anything potentially negative in there.
| Ysx wrote:
| > Yes, I know which "major computer manufacturer" it is, and
| no, I'm not telling. This is consistent with longstanding blog
| policy that companies are not identified in stories, because
| the point of the story to teach something, not to call out
| companies for derision.
|
| From the follow-up post:
| https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...
| wtallis wrote:
| That's kind of a pathetic excuse, because it means that the
| "something" the story teaches is highly limited and there's
| nothing concrete for the reader to use as the basis for a
| deeper investigation.
| Mindwipe wrote:
| He genuinely might not know. I worked on a similar incident
| when our video encoder caused about 30% of a pretty mainstream
| mobile handset to hard lock when recieving a stream, requiring
| the battery to be removed to reboot the device.
|
| Neither us nor the OEM ever figured out why. They suspected
| that it was a weird combination of different bin combinations
| from different parts, but ultimately we had to change the
| method of delivering video to stop it happening.
| jacquesm wrote:
| The Dutch broadcasting service hired me to figure out why
| their homepage was crashing browsers. I turned out to be an
| animated GIF of two speakers that had an extra 0 interval
| frame in it which caused IE to crash... it doesn't take much.
| knuckleheads wrote:
| Very funny, reminds me of how Jennifer Lopez created Google Image
| Search when she wore a very deep cut green dress in 2000. So many
| people searched for "Jennifer Lopez Green Dress" that the search
| team realized they needed to include images in the search
| results. https://www.project-syndicate.org/magazine/google-
| european-c... https://www.thecut.com/2019/09/jennifer-lopez-
| walks-in-versa...
| leobg wrote:
| If this hadn't been published in 2015, you'd all call it AI
| slop:
|
| > When the German engineer Karl Benz invented the first
| petroleum-powered automobile, he did not just create an engine
| with wheels; he set in motion an industry that revolutionized
| the way society was structured.
| cjs_ac wrote:
| LLMs write like a high-schooler padding out an essay about
| something they only pretend to care about with vacuous
| adjectives and adverbs because that's how most commercial
| writing reads.
| nkrisc wrote:
| Well sure, no one thinks LLMs invented bad writing, but they
| do copy the style.
| deIeted wrote:
| Well, that's human slop, and it's actually more insidious
| than AI slop. You know what's weird? We've had this for
| almost twenty years. This human slop in writing this is the
| first time ever that this painful writing has been addressed
| by someone else on a comment on the internet. I've raised it
| so many times, but it's the first time I've ever seen one
| other person acknowledge it. Like, how crazy is that? Is the
| last twenty years been a fever dream?
| bananaflag wrote:
| I've seen a lot of comments discussing how recipe pages are
| filled with this sort of human slop. But not blog posts in
| general.
| tomcam wrote:
| Not sure I agree. It's a fact.
| behringer wrote:
| All he had to do to fix this was say "he drove forward"
| instead of set in motion. So close to a great simile.
| GaryBluto wrote:
| Why didn't they mute the volume to see if it was the video or
| audio stream causing problems?
| wanderingstan wrote:
| This is someone retelling a story they were told by a co-worker
| of an event over 20 years prior. It's not surprising that he
| doesn't go into the details of exactly what was tried, beyond
| the key parts of the story.
| theologic wrote:
| I won't repeat it here, but I posted What I saw as an
| insider. I think that not all of the facts were quite right.
| However, some of the overtones definitely are.
| k3vinw wrote:
| Not an expert here, so I'm genuinely curious how could a video
| stream (edit: with muted audio stream) possibly cause another
| laptop in close proximity to crash?
| firesteelrain wrote:
| What is claimed in TFA is that the hard drive resonate
| frequency reacts to the Janet Jackson video in bad ways
| because that music video puts out music that interferes with
| what the hard drive expects.
|
| TFA was lacking details so this is merely a retelling.
| vlovich123 wrote:
| Obviously not the video but the accompanying audio track.
| Could also just be a made up apocryphal engineering story
| that never actually happened exactly as described.
| Engineering as a profession is chock full of them but they
| do tend to be memorable parables of things to keep in mind
| when working on a relevant piece of tech.
|
| What is definitely well documented is Brendan Gregg's
| related discovery of performance degradation in servers
| from vibration of sibling servers / clapping nearby that
| caused spinning disks to pause their heads.
| trehalose wrote:
| I doubt it could, but when you run into a problem that defies
| your understanding of reality, you might try out responses
| that also defy your understanding of reality, in the hopes
| you might gain the missing insight somewhere along the way,
| yeah?
| raisedbyninjas wrote:
| Also not an expert, it would have to be EMI or maybe the
| bright light was causing LEDs on the nearby laptop to
| generate voltage. LEDs can poorly work in reverse.
| geor9e wrote:
| If this is just a fiction novel world-building question: The
| video pixels create a bitstream to bitbang the gpu bus into
| emitting a 2.4-gigahertz EMF signal to exploit a flaw in the
| Wi-Fi driver.
| cm2187 wrote:
| Similary story from Apple: https://youtu.be/C5d151lqJsA?t=108
| yegle wrote:
| https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 reminds me of this gem.
| efortis wrote:
| I was reminded of this MythBusters episode: Tesla's Earthquake
| Machine
|
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LHsHiKtjoag
| neomantra wrote:
| So classic. For those weary of random links, it's Cantrill and
| Gregg screaming at Thumpers and affecting IOPS.
|
| That was such a great machine. We rearchitected our systems
| around it.
| Natfan wrote:
| random links to a youtu.be video? pray tell, what malware
| would be transmitted from youtube.com, owned by Alphabet?
| neomantra wrote:
| It's not about privacy or malware, although those are
| important in life. Maybe I'm on Reddit too much, but I like
| knowing what will appear on the other end of a link.
|
| I originally posted my own comment with link and prose, but
| then saw GP's comment which preceded mine by an hour, so I
| deleted mine. I didn't originally realize it was that same
| video because it didn't say so, but then I recognized the
| link hash. I want people to see that video, because it's so
| great, so I added context as a reply.
| shmeeed wrote:
| You could catch a bad case of algorithm poisoning if you're
| not careful
| corobo wrote:
| The malware of "up next" that eats billions of hours a year
| lol
| yaur wrote:
| Someone linked flesh simulator the other day and now my you
| tube is filled with some seriously weird stuff.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| >it's Cantrill and Gregg screaming at Thumpers and affecting
| IOPS.
|
| For me, that is less meaningful and more random than a
| youtube link. I have absolutely no clue what you are talking
| about.
| neomantra wrote:
| That is fair, particularly compared to Janet Jackson! I
| will add detail.
|
| In their younger days, two distinguished engineers, Bryan
| Cantrill and Brendan Gregg, made this video where they
| scream at a data storage server nicknamed Thumper.
| Screaming at it has surprising results, which are observed
| with a novel software technology called dtrace.
|
| The Sun Fire X4500 was a dense storage sever, 4U with 48
| disks and insane IO performance and a newish filesystem
| called ZFS. The video is not only funny in content, it
| features technology and technologists that became very
| impactful, hence the classic tag.
|
| ---
|
| I love the lore, so I'll drop more.
|
| While our team previously used AFS (mainly for its great
| caching) and many storage servers, this hardware combined
| with its software allowed us to consolidate and manage and
| access data in new ways, alleviating many of our market
| data analysis problems.
|
| We switched to NFS, which previously was not performant
| enough for us on other hw/sw architectures. While using NFS
| with the Thumpers and then Thors (X4540) was fantastic,
| eventually the data scales became hard again and we made a
| distributed immutable filesystem that looked like the
| Hadoop HDFS and Cassandra file systems, named after our
| favorite Klingon Worf (Write-Once Read-Frequently).
|
| Interestingly, in 2025 both XTX [1] and HRT [2] open-
| sourced their distributed file systems which are pretty
| similar to it, using 2020's tech rather than 2000's. HRT's
| is based on Meta's Tectonic which is a spiritual successor
| to Cassandra.
|
| I wrote about our parallel HFT networking journey once upon
| a time on HN. [3]
|
| [1] https://www.xtxmarkets.com/tech/2025-ternfs/
|
| [2] https://www.hudsonrivertrading.com/hrtbeat/distributed-
| files...
|
| [3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31924784
| ofalkaed wrote:
| It was your rather odd usage of "affecting" that caused
| my confusion, made me think IOPS was some new internet
| acronym and something which could be affected as one
| would affect continental to sound cultured. I would have
| gotten the general gist had you said "causing IOPS" or if
| I knew Thumpers or maybe if you had used the full names
| of Cantrill and Gregg but I am not sure if I would have
| made that connection. Thanks for the clarification and
| the absolutely bizarre and quite interesting
| construction, I enjoyed this a great deal.
|
| Edit: I clearly just got derailed by my initial
| confusion, there was nothing weird about your usage.
| rkomorn wrote:
| I don't understand what you find odd about "affecting
| IOPS."
|
| If someone does something that has an impact on IOPS,
| then it's sensible to say they (or what they're doing)
| are "affecting IOPS."
|
| Screaming at the JBOD wasn't "causing" IOPS, so using
| that phrase would've been more confusing.
| ofalkaed wrote:
| Right, I covered that in my edit which I probably made as
| you were writing your post. It was just one of those
| situations where a small amount of confusion compounds
| until you have lost sight of reality.
| rkomorn wrote:
| Ah yep, definitely hadn't seen your edit. :) Sorry for
| the churn.
| neomantra wrote:
| All good, I thought your point was fair either way,
| considering my original point of being clear about a
| link. Plus a chance for storytelling. =)
| beAbU wrote:
| Old man yells at the cloud.
| teiferer wrote:
| I'd love to know whether that story is actually true.
|
| Some dude hears somebody tell a story about sth 20 years ago,
| puts it in a blog, and here we are on HN, nobody questioning
| whether it's actually accurate. Of course Raymond Chen isn't just
| any random person, but the more important it would be to actually
| check? I mean, who hasn't heard people tell stories from decades
| ago, including colleagues reminiscing about the good old times
| "before y'all were born" only to realize later that it was vastly
| exaggerated or even outright made up.
|
| Anybody around here with some actual first-hand info or at least
| another source besides this blog entry? I'd love to hear!
| bitwize wrote:
| I believe it because it's a plausible variant of what I call
| the "Fus Ro Data Loss" vulnerability: shouting at hard drives
| causes them to resonate in a way that affects their ability to
| access data.
|
| https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
| jacquesm wrote:
| Never let the truth get in the way of a good story. That's my
| motto. Now let me tell you about the time that we dug up this
| dinosaur egg and hatched it.
| bryanrasmussen wrote:
| It's like Mark Twain and the rules for reselling a slave in
| Missouri https://medium.com/p/fe48ea07ad20 "the free black man
| in Missouri could only remain in the state for 6 months before
| being taken and put on auction as a slave." only it turned out
| to be false, and evidently made up by Twain for reasons of
| fiction.
| ndiddy wrote:
| There's a really good video here that shows that it likely
| happened. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY Rhythm
| Nation is unique because it uses a nonstandard tuning that
| shifts the notes to less-used frequencies. The video creator
| found a paper that studied the resonant frequency of various
| 2.5 inch laptop hard drives, and found that it matched up with
| the frequency of the low E note used in Rhythm Nation.
| theologic wrote:
| As somebody that actually had development experiences, both PC
| companies and in the hard drive industry, I posted an upper
| level post on this. I won't repeat it here, but an awful lot of
| this sounds apocryphal but some truth behind it.
| ww520 wrote:
| That's a heck of debugging.
| tzury wrote:
| https://everything2.com/title/7+hertz+-+the+resonant+frequen...
|
| Example (for both functions): /* Emits a 7-Hz
| tone for 10 seconds. True story: 7 Hz is the
| resonant frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
| This was determined empirically in Australia, where a
| new factory generating 7-Hz tones was located too
| close to a chicken ranch: When the factory started up,
| all the chickens died. Your PC may not
| be able to emit a 7-Hz tone. */ #include
| int main(void) { sound(7); delay(10000);
| nosound(); return 0; }
|
| from the comments over there (2002)
| sandermvanvliet wrote:
| Not very likely
|
| https://skeptics.stackexchange.com/a/54400
| maxbond wrote:
| I don't see how even an entire chicken is going to
| meaningfully respond to a wavelength of almost 50 meters.
| Their coop could though.
| thaumasiotes wrote:
| > I don't see how even an entire chicken is going to
| meaningfully respond to a wavelength of almost 50 meters.
|
| Without disputing the conclusion, is the wavelength the
| right measurement, or should that be half the wavelength?
| maxbond wrote:
| That's a more natural way to consider the resonance,
| certainly. What I was getting at is that if we were using
| a 7hz tone to explore a big room, we couldn't tell if
| there was a chicken in there or not. We'd have a hard
| time sensing an elephant. Let alone exert enough of a
| force to harm. Because the wave is so much larger that
| they barely interact.
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| You're not generating a 7 hz tone on any sort of conventional
| audio gear, and definitely not a pc speaker.
| clolege wrote:
| The SVS PB-17 Ultra advertises a range of 12-220Hz at -3dB. I
| imagine it could play a pure 7Hz tone if you turn it up.
|
| And most speakers can play infrasound for many non-sinusoidal
| waveforms [0]. They'll drop the fundamental and some lower-
| end harmonics but can still give a sense of what it sounds
| like
|
| [0] https://szynalski.com/tone#7,saw,v0.5
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| > I imagine it could play a pure 7Hz tone if you turn it
| up.
|
| You're misunderstanding the numbers here. Going from 12 to
| 7 Hz is most of an octave, nearly doubling wavelengths.
|
| Also SVS's numbers are gonna be the usual marketing stuff,
| so they're assuming a fat room gain curve, and just looking
| at their website they have a disclaimer on their graphs
| that it doesn't represent actual total output capability.
| Which is a way of hiding that if you actually try to drive
| it that hard that low with ~3kw electrical in those voice
| coils are going to torch.
|
| The non lying way to prove that claim is to show large
| signal Kipple results including the heat soak. They ain't
| doin' that here.
|
| Basically stuff going this low is really exotic and more in
| the realm of servos that simulate earthquakes than
| traditional transducers.
|
| Tom Danley is the world expert on this sort of thing. He
| used to build stuff like ultrasonic levitation ovens and
| full scale sonic boom simulators for JPL/NASA.
|
| In the audio world he was first famous as the tech lead
| behind ServoDrive. This now defunct company made special
| effects subwoofers using DC rotary servo motors to drive
| the diaphragm. They were used as special effects subs in
| that era by big acts like Garth Brooks. But they didn't
| catch on outside that niche because very little music has
| significant content below 40 hz as it just turns into a
| muddy rumble that harms sound quality as a whole. So to use
| these sorts of things you have to mix for it specifically.
| Cinema goes lower with the rumbles down to 15hz, but that's
| basically it.
|
| Getting anything that's like a clean tone at 7hz is not
| gonna happen without a purpose built device.
|
| FWIW Tom Danley started his own company[1] after Servo
| Drive failed on the business side, where he focuses on
| large scale horn speakers using novel topologies. They're
| among the best in the business at what they. Again, they
| don't have anything that even remotely tries to go down to
| 7hz.
|
| [1]: https://www.danleysoundlabs.com/
|
| Tom's a nice guy, I've traded emails with him a few times
| over the years. He used to be pretty active on the DIY
| speaker building mailing lists sharing his very in depth
| knowledge freely.
| Jap2-0 wrote:
| For context, the lowest notes on most pipe organs are
| typically about 33 or 16 Hz (from a pipe that is 8', 16',
| or 32' long).
| zahlman wrote:
| If I feed a 7hz input to some cheap hand-made thing like
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=liSEwqdq7aA , will it not
| vibrate at 7hz and thus produce a 7hz "tone" (disregarding
| that humans won't perceive that as sound, at least not the
| fundamental)?
| jasonwatkinspdx wrote:
| No, because reproducing the fundamental is the thing.
| Saying otherwise is kinda like me saying I'm gonna take a
| voice call, run it through a filter that generates a ton of
| distortion harmonics, then seperate out those distortion
| harmonics, and then call it a "tone" of your voice.
|
| But also the original post was about a 7hz tone somehow
| resonating with a chicken's skull cavity, which if you know
| the basic wave equation relating wavelength with frequency
| is an absurdity. The waves involved are multiple orders of
| magnitude too big to couple to a volume that small. They'll
| just diffract around like nothing.
| conradojordan wrote:
| You can with your hands, just shake them
| tzs wrote:
| Who said the source has to stationary? Doppler shift for the
| win.
| conradojordan wrote:
| An easier way to generate a 7 Hz tone is to just move your
| hands back and forth 7 times a second. Either way you won't be
| able to hear because we can't hear 7 Hz anyway
| jamesgill wrote:
| That's Miss Jackson if you're Windows.
| monocularvision wrote:
| I am not a huge fan of joke-y replies like this, but bravo.
| Perfect.
| dang wrote:
| Related. Others?
|
| _Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534483 - Sept 2024 (79
| comments)
|
| _Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers_ -
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32483211 - Aug 2022 (12
| comments)
| elteto wrote:
| Just a small nitpick: the Tacoma Narrows bridge didn't collapse
| because of resonance but because of flutter. It's a common
| misconception.
|
| For resonance the external driving force must match the resonance
| frequency of the system, but wind is rarely/never purely
| sinusoidal.
| echelon wrote:
| Is flutter a derivative like jerk?
| shkkmo wrote:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aeroelasticity#Flutter
| MarkSweep wrote:
| The derivatives following jerk are snap, crackle, and pop:
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fourth,_fifth,_and_sixth_deriv.
| ..
| lisper wrote:
| https://ocw.mit.edu/courses/18-03-differential-equations-spr...
| kelnos wrote:
| The article covers this:
|
| > _Follow-up 2: Yes, I know that the Tacoma Narrows Bridge
| collapse was not the result of resonance, but I felt I had to
| drop the reference to forestall the "You forgot to mention the
| Tacoma Narrows Bridge!" comments._
| forrestthewoods wrote:
| Ask me how I know you didn't read the whole article!
| thimkerbell wrote:
| Extra points for people who avoid gratuitous clickbait
| Kuraj wrote:
| It wasn't exactly disappointing. I loved to read The Old New
| Thing back in the day, Raymond's blog was full of stuff like
| this.
| brk wrote:
| Weird. Digital recording and mastering was definitely a thing at
| that time. You'd think they would have been crashing the HDDs of
| PCs in the recording studios.
| wtallis wrote:
| Not weird at all. This problem manifested only with some model
| of 5400RPM laptop hard drive (2.5"), but a recording studio
| would likely have been using 7200RPM 3.5" desktop drives.
| Different resonant frequencies, more sturdy mounting, more
| distance between the speakers and the hard drives.
| n8m8 wrote:
| Apparently pro tools came out in 1989, makes me think this may
| or may not be true. This article has some info about the
| mixture of analog and digital tools use to record:
|
| > The main event was a brand-new mixing console called the
| Harrison Series 10, which was the first analog console to
| feature a digital control surface, with full automation of all
| parameters. Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis were the first studio to
| have it, according to Jam. This meant that they could cut down
| the time it took to switch songs to about 10 minutes because
| complex mixes now required little-to-no cross-patching.
|
| https://reverb.com/news/the-making-of-janet-jacksons-rhythm-...
| sedatk wrote:
| They probably didn't use laptops in which the disk and the
| speaker are next to each other.
| bjackman wrote:
| I've had a similar case before but for a much more boring reason:
| a certain YouTube video somehow triggered a spike in power draw
| and caused my Google Pixel to reset.
|
| Google's response after looking at the crash dumps: "WAI, your
| battery is degraded" (IIRC my phone was less than 3 years old).
| TeMPOraL wrote:
| Could be; after ~3 years, my Samsung Galaxy S7 would reset if I
| tried to make a call with battery below ~20%. I immediately
| knew it was the battery, because I still remember noticing it
| as a kid on Nokia 3410 - calling would sometimes drop the
| battery indicator by one bar, which would come back moments
| after call ended. That's how I learned about internal
| resistance and how battery capacity is measured :).
|
| As for fixes in software, it's either treating it as WAI, or
| secretly throttling down the phone, like Apple did, for which
| they got accused of planned obsolescence. Neither choice is
| good (though actually informing the users would go a long way).
| mstep wrote:
| according to this video [0] the frequency was 84.2. that-s not
| unplausible.
|
| a known problem in cutting vinyl records are sudden bursts of
| high volume frequencies around 100 hz, that have the potential to
| make the needle skip with a normal amount of weight on the tone-
| arm.
|
| -------
|
| [0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY
| lelandfe wrote:
| I remember reading that the bassline in LFO's self titled broke
| the cutting needle when they were pressing it. Wonder if that
| had a similar explanation.
| rurban wrote:
| For a F1 drive axle the critical resonance frequency is around
| 2400 rpm. That's why you need to turn it up fast at start over
| the safe 4000 rpm, and never go down.
|
| Without the ECU you can easily break it by starting too slow
| w-m wrote:
| Wouldn't a multiple of the resonance frequency also be
| problematic then? Why doesn't the axle disintegrate at 4800
| rpm?
| rurban wrote:
| Because that's way above the critical resonance frequency.
| 4000 - 25000 is safe
| OisinMoran wrote:
| Reminds me of _Godel, Escher, Bach_ in which there is a
| phonograph dubbed "Record Player X", which destroys itself by
| playing a record titled _I Cannot Be Played on Record Player X_.
| CharlesW wrote:
| https://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/antimemetics-division-hub
| j45 wrote:
| This gives new meaning to Rhythm Nation.
| btilly wrote:
| https://www.penzba.co.uk/GreybeardStories/TheBlackTeam.html is a
| similar story from IBM in the 1960s. Except that there was
| nothing accidental about the problem.
| modzu wrote:
| reminds me of the captain crunch whistle and 2600
| baobun wrote:
| > And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the
| music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to
| crash, even though that other laptop wasn't playing the video!
|
| Reality must have been falling apart for someone for a brief
| moment there.
| Gazoche wrote:
| > And then they discovered something extremely weird: Playing the
| music video on one laptop caused a laptop sitting nearby to
| crash, even though that other laptop wasn't playing the video!
|
| That's about the time I would have given up on the investigation
| and called in an exorcist.
| WYSIMOLWYG wrote:
| Reminds me (tangentially) of the story of the Raspberry Pi 2 and
| Xenon flash. https://www.raspberrypi.com/news/xenon-death-flash-
| a-free-ph...
| theologic wrote:
| The story is slightly unusual because I was actually managing a
| part of the engineering group at IBM that was integrating hard
| disk drives into ThinkPads during that era. I am not suggesting
| that it could not have happened or that it might have occurred at
| another major laptop manufacturer, but many details regarding the
| exact source and nature do not feel quite right. Music was a
| massive issue. It's just that it became an industry issue a
| little later as production moved to Taiwan and we were increasing
| our AD curve.
|
| The issue of music crashing a hard disk drive was a genuine
| problem. Since I later specialized in hard drives, I can confirm
| that every manufacturer faced this issue as multimedia laptops
| became more common and we transitioned to higher areal densities.
| To state the obvious, we shrank the tracks every time to achieve
| larger capacities. We were doubling capacities every nine to
| twelve months when we first introduced MR, GMR, and PMR heads.
| The hard drive industry employs incredible control theory experts
| due to the requirement of keeping a head on track. Personal
| opinion, which I probably should research, but I believe that one
| of the densest concentrations of Ph.D.s in leading edge control
| theory could be found within the hard disk drive industry.
| Amazing things happen when you're trying to fly nanometers off
| the disc in a track that is maybe 100 nanometers wide at the
| time.
|
| By 2010ish, as part of our development suite, we actually played
| music through the speakers to identify these types of issues. The
| origin of this practice actually came from the ODMs in Taiwan.
| Therefore, Janet Jackson was not the standard qualification song
| we used. Instead, it was popular hits from the Chinese pop
| market. There were also Western songs within the suite, but I
| remember our team blasting Chinese pop songs at full volume on
| multimedia laptops.
|
| Laptop development began moving heavily to Taiwan in the mid
| nineties. By the time the early two thousands arrived, there was
| a massive amount of competence in Taiwan regarding chassis design
| engineering. As time progressed, every American PC company
| continued to outsource development to Taiwan and eventually to
| China. As development was outsourced, the ODMs would work with
| suppliers because we wanted to present solutions to the OEMs that
| were free of issues.
|
| EDIT: By the way, it wasn't necessarily a blue-screen crash. I'm
| not saying that that couldn't happen, but generally what we did
| is we had the throughput test that we were run on the hard
| drives. Then we would go blast the music full bore and there were
| certain bandwidth requirements that we needed to get out of the
| hard disk drive. So to add some more details behind this, I would
| describe it as a performance issue and the blue screen issue was
| relatively minor. However, this was a number of years ago and I
| don't remember the exact percentages.
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