On Sat, 16 Jun 2018 14:25:52 -0400, William Ray Wing wrote: >> On Jun 16, 2018, at 9:10 AM, Steven D'Aprano >> <steve+comp.lang.pyt...@pearwood.info> wrote: >> >> On Sat, 16 Jun 2018 11:54:15 +1000, Chris Angelico wrote: >> >>> On Sat, Jun 16, 2018 at 11:00 AM, Jim Lee <jle...@gmail.com> wrote: >> >>>> I once had a Mustek color scanner that came with a TWAIN driver. If >>>> the room temperature was above 80 degrees F, it would scan in color - >>>> otherwise, only black & white. I was *sure* it was a hardware >>>> problem, >>>> but then someone released a native Linux driver for the scanner. >>>> When I moved the scanner to my Linux box, it worked fine regardless >>>> of temperature. >>>> >>>> >>> I would be mind-blown if I did not have the aforementioned too many >>> hours. Sadly, I am merely facepalming. Wow. >> >> >> > Let me add one more story (true) to the list. Concerns an old IBM > mainframe installed in a bank in New York City, that crashed rarely, and > only night, never during the day. They called IBM; repair man spent the > night with it - no crash; same story the next night and the next. > Finally on the forth night he left around 10:00 PM to get something to > eat and some coffee. Came back to find the computer had crashed. Spent > the next night - no crash. Left the next again for coffee, came back to > find the computer down. Obviously it was only crashing when he wasn't > watching. Next night he left, but only took the elevator down to the > ground floor, didn’t go outside. Computer crashed. He rebooted, > restarted the job stream, left the computer room for the same length of > time, but didn’t leave the floor. No crash. > > To make a long story short, it was the motor-generator set that ran the > elevators. During the day, there was enough constant elevator traffic > so that the MG set never shut down and even it it did, there was enough > load elsewhere in the building to make the start-up transient a > relatively small perturbation. At night it would time out, shut down, > and when he called for the elevator late at night, the start-up > transient was too much for the computer’s power regulators. > > Earlier crashes turned out to be coincident with janitorial staff > working extra late after special events. > > Bill > My supervisor had a similar issue with a PBX (Telephone system) that would cut of callers when the lift was used.
I personally one attended a site to try to identify why an ISDN circuit kept randomly resetting. I had been on the phone with the BT engineer for about 1/2 hr monitoring the circuit when it suddenly cut off. "Was it anything I did" asked the person using the photo copier A few quick tests later confirmed that whenever the photocopier made multiple copies (approx 10+) the circuit would reset Cust advised to relocate photocopier, case closed :-) or if you want a really strange one we used to maintain PBX's for a particular Bank. A common fault report was the earpiece buzzing. This turned out to be caused by blown halogen light bulbs in a nearby display board (i don't know who originally identified that one). working on the help desk it was always "fun" trying to convince the user that this was the problem, understandably they though we were pulling their leg" > > >> -- >> Steven D'Aprano "Ever since I learned about confirmation bias, I've >> been seeing it everywhere." -- Jon Ronson >> >> -- >> https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list -- It's later than you think. -- https://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list
