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Plugtest

37 points by dhorthy

by JohnLocke4

2 subcomments

This reminds me of a story I read once about how Bell Labs engineers wanted to find the ideal length of a landline telephone chord. They did this by secretly shortening the chord over time on test users' telephones and waited to see how short they could make the chord before they noticed. If the plugtest is hardware-hardware testing Bell Labs engineers were doing human-hardware testing.
I tried to find a source for the story but I couldn't find one. I think I read it in The Innovators by Walter Isaacson, but I can't remember it exactly - maybe I'm misremembering it.

by mauvehaus

1 subcomments

Microsoft did (does?) Installable File System plugfests. The anti-virus vendors always had a pretty full dance card because they go to great lengths to scan files, which is sometimes at odds with other drivers.
We had a hierarchical storage management driver, and getting files released to remote storage and keeping them released until the users actually wanted them back was helped greatly by actually being able to talk to the AV vendors and understand their criteria for when to scan.
At the time, a lot of AV filter drivers were legacy model drivers, which led to some serious shenanigans getting a second minifilter installed above the AV layer in the stack to distinguish between user and AV generated reads.

by rkangel

0 subcomment

Similarly the Bluetooth SIG organises "Unplugfests" which are the same, but for a wireless protocol. I attended several back when I was doing Bluetooth stuff full time. You learn a lot about how a very clearly written spec can be interpreted in 5 different ways!

by afandian

0 subcomment

Reminds me of the "USB Cart of Death"
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6_hm3NzLeO8

by kotaKat

0 subcomment

Also in the similarly camp: NFL "RF War Games". Everyone running radio gear at the Superbowl all fires up their radios at once to determine who's interfering with who to resolve interference issues before the show.
https://operations.nfl.com/gameday/behind-the-scenes/nfl-eve...
https://www.mixonline.com/live-sound/tackling-rf-for-the-sup...