5400rpm 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."
Not hard drive related AFAIK, but I used to work in a media lab with about 30 mac desktops of around the powermac g4 vintage.
We noticed that the macs were rebooting unexpectedly when certain people were in the room. After a bit of observation we worked out that the call button on our walkie talkies could trigger a reboot from a couple of feet away, which turned out to be an awesome superpower if you'd had a gobful from an especially obnoxious student.
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...
This 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.
I 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.)
You 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."
I 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.
If 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 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.
> 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.
There'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.
The wind excited a vibrational mode of the bridge which caused it to kind of fail and when parts started breaking more modes were activated and it fell apart.
It's being sold as this gotcha! it's a myth! it wasn't _really_ resonant frequency!
And like... I studied aerospace structures... sure "flutter" is a bit of a better explanation, but saying "resonance" is a myth is a bit silly. Complex structures have lots of vibration modes. The first fundamental frequency can be picked usually and called _THE Resonance Frequency_ or whatever, but it's not like something anybody really places that much emphasis on being the boss in charge of all the vibration.
Myth != terminology nitpick in a layman's explanation
But you get a lot of layman going around correcting people and calling things myths.
It's like Internet people arguing about "just a theory", nobody who actually does science really cares at all about the precise meaning of the word "theory".
At Boeing, I worked on proving the elevators would not flutter. It wasn't about a driving force being at the resonant frequency. It was about the interaction of spring rate of the system and the force pushing on it.
The same thing happens if you stretch a rubber band in front of your lips and blow on it. Increasing the stretch will increase the frequency.
Musical wind instruments work the same way.
P.S. the elevators did not flutter in flight test or in service. Phew!
My 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?
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. :(
You’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.
"For years, scientists have wondered: 'Can you make grown men and women weep tears of joy by playing Tom Jones' It's Not Unusual?' And the answer is yes, you can, as long as it's preceded by 7 What's New Pussycats."
If 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).
jasoneckert|1 year ago
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."
sahmeepee|1 year ago
We noticed that the macs were rebooting unexpectedly when certain people were in the room. After a bit of observation we worked out that the call button on our walkie talkies could trigger a reboot from a couple of feet away, which turned out to be an awesome superpower if you'd had a gobful from an especially obnoxious student.
netsharc|1 year ago
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...
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
pclmulqdq|1 year ago
wodenokoto|1 year ago
BiteCode_dev|1 year ago
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|1 year ago
recycledmatt|1 year ago
segasaturn|1 year ago
dvh|1 year ago
anyfoo|1 year ago
omoikane|1 year ago
https://devblogs.microsoft.com/oldnewthing/20220920-00/?p=10...
narrator|1 year ago
arittr|1 year ago
kugelblitz|1 year ago
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.
alargemoose|1 year ago
> “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/73861...
gphilip|1 year ago
You get shocked easily when you use the escalator.You wouldn't be electrocuted more than once.
hamasho|1 year ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY
userbinator|1 year ago
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.
pjc50|1 year ago
vlovich123|1 year ago
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/scie...
jdiff|1 year ago
> 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.
colechristensen|1 year ago
The wind excited a vibrational mode of the bridge which caused it to kind of fail and when parts started breaking more modes were activated and it fell apart.
It's being sold as this gotcha! it's a myth! it wasn't _really_ resonant frequency!
And like... I studied aerospace structures... sure "flutter" is a bit of a better explanation, but saying "resonance" is a myth is a bit silly. Complex structures have lots of vibration modes. The first fundamental frequency can be picked usually and called _THE Resonance Frequency_ or whatever, but it's not like something anybody really places that much emphasis on being the boss in charge of all the vibration.
Myth != terminology nitpick in a layman's explanation
But you get a lot of layman going around correcting people and calling things myths.
It's like Internet people arguing about "just a theory", nobody who actually does science really cares at all about the precise meaning of the word "theory".
WalterBright|1 year ago
The same thing happens if you stretch a rubber band in front of your lips and blow on it. Increasing the stretch will increase the frequency.
Musical wind instruments work the same way.
P.S. the elevators did not flutter in flight test or in service. Phew!
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
nick3443|1 year ago
keybored|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
bitwize|1 year ago
ryandrake|1 year ago
But there's a follow-up article that addresses all of that: 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|1 year ago
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...
gpvos|1 year ago
unknown|1 year ago
[deleted]
hyperhello|1 year ago
Then what is it?
lcnPylGDnU4H9OF|1 year ago
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aYIwPu50Fic
"For years, scientists have wondered: 'Can you make grown men and women weep tears of joy by playing Tom Jones' It's Not Unusual?' And the answer is yes, you can, as long as it's preceded by 7 What's New Pussycats."
pclmulqdq|1 year ago
anyfoo|1 year ago
I don't think it's an artistic judgement.
Jtsummers|1 year ago
klyrs|1 year ago
throwawayQQOWJF|1 year ago