#DECEMBER 2014 GOES FULL DISK ARCHIVE PLUS#
#DECEMBER 2014 GOES FULL DISK ARCHIVE WINDOWS#

Our unix admins were thinking they had an equivalent to those frameworks (which I can’t remember the name now, maybe Chilisoft?). I remember Janet Jackson’s website would start playing her music when you went to it, and then there was a mixer that you could mix in or out the vocals, drums, and other instruments. The devs were doing amazing things for the time and dependent on dynamic frameworks like ASP and Cold Fusion. That was more about compatibility with the cutting edge development than it was about traffic though. The unix admins thought they had a better solution on Linux (Redhat 6.9 IIRC), and it wasn’t 48 hours later before their devs were begging to switch back. As more people came into the cable modem and DSL realm, the issue became more apparent. Even still, their devs were always in our face about it constantly. We had people dedicated to watching their uptime. The scripts were getting more “smart” to deal with all these inadequacies, yet still just a terrible solution. Even if it wasn’t crashing, it would slow to a crawl frequently.

We wrote numerous scripts to keep restarting IIS as it was so unreliable. We started on four load balanced NT4 IIS servers and that was a constant nightmare that seemed to never end. Each artist on a busy day could generate GBs of IIS logs, per server. Between her, Eminem and maybe a couple others under the Interscope label, the amount of traffic they generated was mind blowing. Around the turn of the century, I was part of the team that managed her website. Janet Jackson had the power to crash web servers too. After upgrading the BIOS and installing an SSD (or deactivating the right speaker) those machines were rock solid (I know because I have a couple of them still working).

#DECEMBER 2014 GOES FULL DISK ARCHIVE PLUS#

That problem, plus the unreliability of sleep/wake with early BIOS versions, gave those models a bad reputation. A better and more permanent solution was to replace the hard drive with a SATA SSD, which had the added benefits of reduced power consumption and hit resistance. The manufacturer never acknowledged the problem, but, fortunately, if you knew it, solution was simple: just setting the balance all the way to the left, deactivating the offending speaker. That meant the right speaker ended just next to the hard drive, which was affected by all kinds of vibrations when playing loud sounds. The problem was that the computer was initially designed around an SSD and then adapted for a hard drive (they even had to add a “hump” to the underside so they could fit a standard 2.5″ drive). The SSD-based model 110 had no trouble at all, but the hard drive-based 150 crashed or even silently corrupted drive data if you played music (almost any music) at high volume. Years later, in 2008-09, the very first 9″ netbooks from a well known brand suffered the same problem. Hopefully, their laptops are not still carrying this audio filter to protect against damage to a model of hard drive they are no longer using.)Īnd of course, no story about natural resonant frequencies can pass without a reference to the collapse of the Tacoma Narrows Bridge in 1940.īonus chatter: Video version of this story and a Twitter poll.Īlso, Larry Osterman had a similar experience with a specific game that crashed a prototype PC.

(Though I’m worried that in the many years since the workaround was added, nobody remembers why it’s there. The manufacturer worked around the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline that detected and removed the offending frequencies during audio playback.Īnd I’m sure they put a digital version of a “Do not remove” sticker on that audio filter. It turns out that the song contained one of the natural resonant frequencies for the model of 5400 rpm laptop hard drives that they and other manufacturers used. One discovery during the investigation is that playing the music video also crashed some of their competitors’ laptops.Īnd 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!

I would not have wanted to be in the laboratory that they must have set up to investigate this problem. A major computer manufacturer discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “ Rhythm Nation” would crash certain models of laptops.

#DECEMBER 2014 GOES FULL DISK ARCHIVE WINDOWS#

A colleague of mine shared a story from Windows XP product support.

December 2014 goes full disk archive