Example (for both functions):

    /* Emits a 7-Hz tone for 10 seconds.

      True story: 7 Hz is the resonant
      frequency of a chicken's skull cavity.
      This was determined empirically in
      Australia, where a new factory
      generating 7-Hz tones was located too
      close to a chicken ranch: When the
      factory started up, all the chickens
      died.

      Your PC may not be able to emit a 7-Hz tone. */

 #include 

   int main(void)
   {
     sound(7);
     delay(10000);
     nosound();
     return 0;
   }

For resonance the external driving force must match the resonance frequency of the system, but wind is rarely/never purely sinusoidal.

a known problem in cutting vinyl records are sudden bursts of high volume frequencies around 100 hz, that have the potential to make the needle skip with a normal amount of weight on the tone-arm.

-------

[0] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-y3RGeaxksY

Without the ECU you can easily break it by starting too slow

That’s about the time I would have given up on the investigation and called in an exorcist.

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers (2022) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41534483 - Sept 2024 (79 comments)

Janet Jackson had the power to crash laptop computers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32483211 - Aug 2022 (12 comments)

Google's response after looking at the crash dumps: "WAI, your battery is degraded" (IIRC my phone was less than 3 years old).

Reality must have been falling apart for someone for a brief moment there.

The issue of music crashing a hard disk drive was a genuine problem. Since I later specialized in hard drives, I can confirm that every manufacturer faced this issue as multimedia laptops became more common and we transitioned to higher areal densities. To state the obvious, we shrank the tracks every time to achieve larger capacities. We were doubling capacities every nine to twelve months when we first introduced MR, GMR, and PMR heads. The hard drive industry employs incredible control theory experts due to the requirement of keeping a head on track. Personal opinion, which I probably should research, but I believe that one of the densest concentrations of Ph.D.s in leading edge control theory could be found within the hard disk drive industry. Amazing things happen when you're trying to fly nanometers off the disc in a track that is maybe 100 nanometers wide at the time.

By 2010ish, as part of our development suite, we actually played music through the speakers to identify these types of issues. The origin of this practice actually came from the ODMs in Taiwan. Therefore, Janet Jackson was not the standard qualification song we used. Instead, it was popular hits from the Chinese pop market. There were also Western songs within the suite, but I remember our team blasting Chinese pop songs at full volume on multimedia laptops.

Laptop development began moving heavily to Taiwan in the mid nineties. By the time the early two thousands arrived, there was a massive amount of competence in Taiwan regarding chassis design engineering. As time progressed, every American PC company continued to outsource development to Taiwan and eventually to China. As development was outsourced, the ODMs would work with suppliers because we wanted to present solutions to the OEMs that were free of issues.

EDIT: By the way, it wasn't necessarily a blue-screen crash. I'm not saying that that couldn't happen, but generally what we did is we had the throughput test that we were run on the hard drives. Then we would go blast the music full bore and there were certain bandwidth requirements that we needed to get out of the hard disk drive. So to add some more details behind this, I would describe it as a performance issue and the blue screen issue was relatively minor. However, this was a number of years ago and I don't remember the exact percentages.

Some dude hears somebody tell a story about sth 20 years ago, puts it in a blog, and here we are on HN, nobody questioning whether it's actually accurate. Of course Raymond Chen isn't just any random person, but the more important it would be to actually check? I mean, who hasn't heard people tell stories from decades ago, including colleagues reminiscing about the good old times "before y'all were born" only to realize later that it was vastly exaggerated or even outright made up.

Anybody around here with some actual first-hand info or at least another source besides this blog entry? I'd love to hear!

Thank dog for SSDs

Why the weasel words? Does Raymond Chen not know which models? Or is it actually apocryphal.