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Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022)
- bitwize 2y agoKind of an alternate version of "fus ro data loss": https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4 https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=tDacjrSCeq4
- segasaturn 2y agoThis is a fun article but seriously lacking in details... musical frequencies crashing hard drives, including hard drives of laptops within earshot? That's a pretty extraordinary bug so I hoped there would be more elaboration. I also wonder if that patch to block those frequencies is still in effect.
- dvh 2y agoShouting in data center increases disk latency: https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4 https://youtu.be/tDacjrSCeq4
- anyfoo 2y agoI wouldn't call it a "bug", more "unfortunate physics". Still possible to guard against that, specifically. (There will always be more "unfortunate physics", for example I bet that the hard disk also fails if I smash it against a wall at 100mph, but nobody's going do care designing a consumer HD that stops exhibiting that specific behavior.)
- astrange 2y agoThere's more physics issues with the speakers themselves; especially for something like a laptop speaker in a small enclosed space, it's totally possible to blow it out by turning the volume up too high. There are various ways to protect against this, easiest being to just limit the top volume. If this is done in the official audio drivers then watch out if you decide to install Linux.
- hunter2_ 2y agoI'm not sure that the definition of "bug" is so narrow as to exclude unfortunate physics, given that it began as literal bugs before becoming metaphorical bugs. Erroneous human influences on software seems slightly farther from the original than peculiar physical influences on hardware!
- omoikane 2y agoThe follow up article has more details: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=107201 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...
- hyperhello 2y ago“ I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. Not an artistic judgement.” Then what is it?
- pclmulqdq 2y agoA desire to generally not listen to one song loudly over and over? I think after the 1000th time, anyone is going to fall out of love with any song.
- aidenn0 2y agoYeah, I had to listen to part of the All-4-One version of I Swear hundreds of times while reproducing a bug. It's not pleasant.
- astrange 2y agoMy car stereo likes to automatically play the first alphabetical song in my phone's music library when I start it. Kind of annoying, but not enough to replace it over.
- Jtsummers 2y agoIf you were setting this up in a lab to test you'd be playing the same song on repeat trying to recreate the circumstances and effect, possibly at different volumes and playback speeds and other things until you isolated a particular portion that caused the crash. Then you'd play back that portion. And all of this would be at a level people could hear. So you'd be hearing the same song over and over in an otherwise quiet lab. Even if you liked the song, you'd hate it by the end of the day (or spend the day wearing earplugs).
- bitwize 2y agoOne of the reasons why Cortana was deprecated was the reports of beleaguered IT professionals having to listen to dozens of chattering Cortanas as they set up a fleet of new corporate laptops.
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- pclmulqdq 2y agoAdam Neely has a good video on this effect, explaining why it is specifically the Janet Jackson song in question: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY
- wodenokoto 2y agoIt's linked to in the second half and worth the watch.
- deleted 2y ago[deleted]
- gpvos 2y agoDo read the follow-up, and maybe also the Adam Neely video about this, linked both there and in another comment here.
- jasoneckert 2y ago5400rpm laptop hard drives were notoriously sensitive to external force because of their thin metal construction and low power motor. I remember having a MacBook Pro with a Toshiba 5400rpm hard drive that failed shortly after I rested it on an HVAC unit in our server closet (the HVAC unit happened to be the perfect height off the floor for doing work while standing). Just to be sure that was the cause, I had the drive replaced under warranty, did the same thing again and it died again after only a short while of using it on that HVAC unit. After Apple replaced the drive a second time, I instead used a crash cart as a laptop desk and put a sign on the HVAC unit that read "Don't put laptops on here."
- netsharc 2y ago> "Don't put laptops on here." With an explanation why not? I feel like having that, instead of a "Here Be Dragons" note would be more helpful, so someone won't ignore the sign thinking "It'll be fine". Also it'd be funny if the sign is still there even though all* laptops have SSDs now...
- ruthmarx 2y ago> so someone won't ignore the sign thinking "It'll be fine". If they do whatever happens is on them for assuming that.
- Dylan16807 2y agoPresumably the goal is the avoid broken laptops, not to worry about who it's on.
- WilTimSon 2y agoI wonder if there is a name for the phenomenon where people do something that leads to negative consequences but they technically "did everything right". I have a friend who crosses the street without looking both ways and his argument is that if a car hits him "they're in the wrong", as if an accident doesn't occur that way.
- vlovich123 2y ago> And of course, no story about natural resonant frequencies can pass without a reference to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.¹ Yes it can because it turns out it wasn't an issue with resonant frequencies & it's just promulgating an incorrect (but catchy) story. > Just four months later, under the right wind conditions, the bridge was driven at its resonant frequency, causing it to oscillate and twist uncontrollably. After undulating for over an hour, the middle section collapsed, and the bridge was destroyed. It was a testimony to the power of resonance, and has been used as a classic example in physics and engineering classes across the country ever since. Unfortunately, the story is a complete myth. > You can calculate what the resonant frequency of the bridge would be, and there was nothing driving at that frequency. All you had was a sustained, strong wind. In fact, the bridge itself wasn't undulating at its resonant frequency at all! I recommend reading the article but the long & short is it's something called "flutter" and they even have a video of the problem. [1] https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/05/24/science-busts-the-biggest-myth-ever-about-why-bridges-collapse/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/startswithabang/2017/05/24/scie...
- jdiff 2y agoThere's a footnote indicated by the superscript 1 in your quote: > ¹ 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. Damned if you do, damned if you don't, and damned if you do both, even.
- ptero 2y agoIt's closer to "damned if you knowingly make grossly incorrect statements even if you put a small footnote saying OK, I know it is not correct". And damned right that you are damned in this case :) I would much prefer a reference to the event with the clarification, in the same paragraph, that it is due to a different phenomenon. My 2c.
- lelandfe 2y agoThink I missed the grossly incorrect part
- ryandrake 2y agoMy first thought was that filtering a set of frequencies out from the laptop's sound output doesn't seem to be a good solution that addresses the root cause. This only corrects it for those laptops running that OS software, and does it at the cost of reducing the quality of the device's audio for all applications. What about other laptops playing the song, or just living room speakers playing it? What if I, as a user of the laptop, was doing audio processing and needed the sound card to faithfully output frequencies that I commanded it to play? But there's a follow-up article that addresses all of that: https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=107201 https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10... TLDR is it's cheaper to throw your audio quality under the bus than to recall the defective laptops/drives and replace them with a design that works. :(
- avianlyric 2y agoYou’re making the assumption the tweaks to the audio subsystem made a material change to the quality of the audio output. It’s not like laptop speakers are very good to start with, or like laptop sound cards ever faithfully reproduce the sound they’re asked too. Getting good audio out of a laptops speaker in 20% hardware and 80% audio filtering anyway. No laptop speaker (even Macs[1]) sounds good without significant processing to workaround the physical limitations of tiny speakers mounted in a non-ideal chassis. As for other speakers, sound pressure drops off following the cube law. So a speaker millimetres away from the hard drives which have substantially greater impact than speakers outside of the laptop. Of course if you crank the volume enough it’ll eventually cause an issue, but given there doesn’t seem to be widespread reporting of this issue, it looks like that wasn’t too much of an issue. [1] https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio?tab=readme-ov-file#why-this-is-necessary https://github.com/AsahiLinux/asahi-audio?tab=readme-ov-file...
- narrator 2y agoYou know the cheesy ending in a dumb TV show where they play a song and the plot gets resolved? They should have had one where the evil guy is going to use his laptop to do something sinister and then they play "Rhythm Nation."
- hamasho 2y agoAdam Neely created a 15-minute video about this issue. It's redundant but a fun watch. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY
- arittr 2y agoShoutout to Raymond Chen, all of these posts are HN gold
- userbinator 2y agoThe manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback. Too bad the manufacturer wasn't named; I quckly looked through a few laptop schematics from that era and didn't find anything that stood out as being a notch filter.
- BiteCode_dev 2y agoI know it's unrelated because this has an actual explanation, but I had an ex that stopped watches simply by wearing them for a while. The model didn't matter, give them a few weeks, and they would stop. Put them aside for a while, they started back. Never could figure out why, no particular behavior emerged, she changed jobs and houses and I couldn't see a pattern. Fun that life is still full of weird stuff like this.
- RobotToaster 2y agoReminds me of the Pauli effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pauli_effect
- codetrotter 2y ago> the supposed tendency of technical equipment to encounter critical failure in the presence of certain people Is there an inverse of this? Often times, people ask me to help them do something on the computer or with other computer related or electronic things. I walk over, touch the equipment without actually doing anything and their problem is instantly solved. Could be a printer that won’t print, even! I don’t see any links in the See Also section about any “effect” like this.
- Moru 2y agoThat would be "Demonstration Effect" or "IT Support Effect". Happens every other support call. I bet this is why half the older companies still have a tech person on staff. :-)
- recycledmatt 2y agoFascinating. Did she work in medical / hard science? I could imagine some exposure to radiation / magnetization could do this.
- BiteCode_dev 2y agoNope. Hotel, then airplanes.
- kugelblitz 2y agoI have another, different oddity. Whenever my colleague and I stand up (or also sit down?) on the desk, his Dell monitor would turn black for a few seconds. I don't remember the specifics, but I think it was mostly just the two of us, when other people say down if was fine. Even if he's sitting on a different table, the moment I sit down his screen would blank for a few seconds then continue to work normally. I also get electrocuted easily when I use the escalator. It almost doesn't matter what I wear, so it might have to do with my skin or it's conductivity? But that's just a wild theory that would need to be checked. Edit: Some research seems to point to the static electricity from the chairs.
- gphilip 2y ago> I also get electrocuted easily when I use the escalator. You get shocked easily when you use the escalator.You wouldn't be electrocuted more than once.
- kugelblitz 2y agoThat's true :D, thanks for the correction! I think I was still in German mode, it's called "electric punch" (Stromschlag) if translated literally, my brain went the easy route and tried to find the closest match.
- alargemoose 2y agoIf they use a docking station, there’s a known issue with DisplayLink video output from gas spring chairs causing EMI spikes that disrupt the video signal momentarily when you sit down or stand up. > “Surprisingly, we have also seen this issue connected to gas lift office chairs. When people stand or sit on gas lift chairs, they can generate an EMI spike which is picked up on the video cables, causing a loss of sync” The linked support doc also links to a white paper analyzing the issue. https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/738618-display-intermittently-blanking-flickering-or-los https://support.displaylink.com/knowledgebase/articles/73861...