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

    • @Godnroc
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      1112 months ago

      Ah, so the answer is just to get high!

    • @vinnymac
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      132 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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        132 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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          202 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.

          • Midnight Wolf
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            92 months ago

            washing machine

            overflow

            heh 🫧

        • @serenissi
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          2 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.

          • Amon
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            12 months ago

            Why should an oven have RAM?

            • @serenissi
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              12 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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                12 months ago

                My meaning is why should an oven have any electronics?

                • @serenissi
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                  12 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

    • @GoodEye8@lemm.ee
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      52 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.

  • Caveman
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    2 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.

    • @Senseless@feddit.org
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      2 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.

      • @Klear
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        92 months ago

        Advanced speedrun strats.

    • @UnderpantsWeevil
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      62 months ago

      Studied computer science. The answer is yes.

      NP = P, folks. Pack it up and go home.

    • @TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
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      52 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.

        • @TranquilTurbulence@lemmy.zip
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          32 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

      • Caveman
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        42 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.

    • @lordnikon
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      32 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.

  • @CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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    412 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.)

    • @Apytele@sh.itjust.works
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      102 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.

      • @CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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        42 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?’

    • @SolaceFiend
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      22 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.

  • OpenStars
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    342 months ago

    Mostly, though there’s also fire-fighting too.

    img

    • @Clanket
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      42 months ago

      Watching the IT crowd for the 1st time with the wife. So, so funny.

      • OpenStars
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        22 months ago

        It might be the best show in the universe. Or maybe not, but either way it’s funny as hell 🤣.

        • @CileTheSane@lemmy.ca
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          2 months ago

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

        • @some_guy@lemmy.sdf.org
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          12 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.

          • @peoplebeproblems@midwest.social
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            22 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

  • @rumba@lemmy.zip
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    212 months ago

    Under the same logic, All problems are also caused by turning it off and on again.

  • @nandeEbisu
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    192 months ago

    Sometimes the fix is to turn it off, take it out back and beat it with a stick.

  • @AllYourSmurf
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    182 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.

  • @qx128
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    182 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.

  • 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

  • @raspberriesareyummy
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    2 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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      62 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.

    • @Zorque
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      12 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.

      • @raspberriesareyummy
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        32 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.

        • @Klear
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          42 months ago

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

          Or by moving to Canada.

    • @zaphod@sopuli.xyz
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      72 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.