#5
by Jill
[quote][/quote]
Not mine, but funny,
"In school, I was one of four people allowed by our teacher to help other students fix problems with their computers. Sometimes other students would figure that they were perfectly capable of messing around with the systems. One of my favourite examples was this guy who fancied himself a hacker -- he believed he was doing something malicious to the computer when he would open up MS-DOS and make the computer run 'bad' and 'invalid' programs.
Because of this habit of students messing around where they shouldn't, crashes were all too common. Once I saw a computer report an error and the message "dumping physical memory," meaning of course that Windows was saving the contents of the memory so that an administrator could figure the problem out later. I'd never encountered this error before, so I called one of the other guys over to ask him about it. His reaction was one of instant panic.
Him: "Oh my gosh! Plug it out!"
Me: "What?"
He reached behind the machine and unplugged it.
Me: "What? What was it?"
Him: "It said, 'Dumping physical memory.'"
Me: "Yes...."
Him: "That means it was physically kicking the RAM chip and hard drive out of the computer!"
I have no idea how he thought any error in any program could result in a computer disassembling itself.
The worst part was, because the computer never finished doing the memory dump, the administrator never managed to figure out what caused the error. The computer never functioned properly from then on, and the school ended up having to buy a new PC."
"now that the victim is in place, the killing bite will be administered in 10 seconds." --Valve.
Beware the man that speaks in hands.
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