Since bits are ones and zeroes, and also mean true/false and on/off by extension, doesn't that mean all solutions to IT problems are just turning something off and on again at some level?
Hello, IT. Have you tried turning it off and on again?
547
Comments89
In theory. In reality it's not on or off it's always on and it's high vs low voltage.
Ah, so the answer is just to get high!
Orrrr get low
To the windowwwwwww...
I'm old
To the wall
Till the sweat drip down my balls
All these bitches crawl.
My Neck
My back
Thx now I have Need for Speed Underground in my mind
Man I loved that game. I didn't even play the story much. It's was just a fun drive around game
It had a story?
I... Thought it did....
Just checked, you're right.
And yet I still have electronics to this day that require me to pull the plug to get going again 😂
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.
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.
heh 🫧
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.
Why should an oven have RAM?
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.
My meaning is why should an oven have any electronics?
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
That's actually why. You have to drain the power from the circuits.
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.
Ya. It's more like "current go this way or current go that way" than it is high/low voltages.
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.
Until some stray gamma ray hits just the right spot, flips a bit and either nothing at all of everything all at once happens.
Advanced speedrun strats.
NP = P, folks. Pack it up and go home.
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.
It would be considerably slower, it's also possible to make pneumatic logic gates
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
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.
We need a cells at work type of anime but about computers.
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.
I want this rhythm game now.
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.)
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?'
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.
Mostly, though there's also fire-fighting too.
At a Sea Parks‽
I don’t want to talk about it.
Watching the IT crowd for the 1st time with the wife. So, so funny.
It might be the best show in the universe. Or maybe not, but either way it's funny as hell 🤣.
That would also mean that all IT problems are caused by turning something off and on again at some level.
If you just stopped using your computer it wouldn’t crash.
[ticket closed]
It's why I say as a software engineer: computers were a mistake.
A million years ago some asshole fish decided to crawl on land and now I have to deal with IT problems.
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.
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
But computer solve problems you wouldn't have without them.
You're... you're right.
It's like, all part of some yin-yang thing.
Under the same logic, All problems are also caused by turning it off and on again.
Sometimes the fix is to turn it off, take it out back and beat it with a stick.
Damn it feels good to be a gangsta
I got a killa up inside of me
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.
yes, and no.
This is only true for quantum computers.
😂
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.
One token ring to crash them all!
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
"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".
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.
:P :)
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.
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.
Or by moving to Canada.
I thought it was always DNS? 🫣
Turn the DNS off and on again, too
Ooof. That's deep.
Upvote for username :)
That's in short what digital means.
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.
Indeed, I got corrected.
Tachikoma - in analog that's God, digital that's Zero
I wasn't expecting to see a reference to one of my favorite anime of all time. Thank you for reminding me why it's peak.
Turning the right thing off and on again is the key. When you only have one router and a handful of other things like most have at home this isn't a big deal. When you have millions of things it can take weeks just to find the right thing in the mess.
Hospital IT: yes I hear you are having trouble with your TV not working, let me just grabs ventilator plug
Patient: flailing
IT: relax, I know what I'm doing
Until quantum comes around for everybody because then it can be zero or one at the same time. And you don't know until you observe it.
Not really.
Quantum computing is about literally solving it exponentially faster.
Think of it like brute forcing a password.
Binary it can change one character and it has to go thru all of them.
Actual quantum computing goes down multiple paths at once, so the bigger the password the more gain there is from quantum. It doesn't have to actually try every single possible combination.
It's not just going from 2 to 3 states, because that third state is quantum superposition and by no means just a 50% increase. That superposition is how it goes down multiple "paths" at once.
But the observer effect isn't coming into play.
Quantum computing will never come around for everyone. It's entirely different technology, and what we have works quite well for what we need. A good analogy from this Cleo Abrams video is it would be like saying we no longer need cars because we invented boats
And nobody will ever need more than 128 kilobytes of RAM.
Yea, that's pretty much why turning it a machine off and on again works.