Women.
Yeah, we play the WoW. Or we used to. With increasing levels, her desire to play the game with me has dropped off exponentially. We're a hair's breath from 60 now, and I haven't logged in to do more than check my mailbox in a month.
So last night she decides to go through with the 1.7.0 upgrade and get her talents (she's a hunter) sorted.
At this point I should tell you that for the last 8 months she has been having computer problems, and I have been telling her consistently that it's either a problem with her memory, memory controller, or CPU in that order of probability.
See, some of her games she plays on my computer because they don't crash that way. Some crash less often on hers, or just behave strangely when they do exhibit problems (weird textures, etc).
With WoW, she would get the dreaded white-screen errors (exceptions generated by WoW itself), whose numerals I can't remember now. "Fix it", she told me 8 months ago, stressing the importance that this is the role a man is supposed to play in such relationships...take care of the complicated technology for the poor defenseless woman (even though we know that's not the case, she built this machine).
So I determined after some experimentation that she was getting a single-bit error in cached memory of the datafiles WoW uses (by copying the files back and forth over samba and comparing their md5 hashes, then later hexdumping them and comparing diffs). But she wasn't going to replace any of those parts "just for one game". Meanwhile, she's playing Lord of the Rings on my machine because it crashes on hers, and even her Tivo To Go service (which encrypts the Tivo video files, and that decryption is sensitive to single-bit errors) has only been working in a way that could be best described as "spotty", resulting in losing some of our recorded programs no less.
8 months of this pass. Her machine is measurably broken, but she still blames Blizzard because "none of my other games do this". She excuses the games she plays on my own machine as "isolated incidents that probably have more to do with the video card."
And we're back to last night. I patched my own machine to 1.7.0, oblivious to the fact that there was a 1.7.1 already. I copied my 1.7.0 WoW directory to samba so she could fetch it and play.
Running 1.7.0, you get the 1.7.1 patch downloaded...and sure enough it corrupts her game, she can't play it without starting the 10-minute copy over again.
At this point she left the room without saying anything and when I went out to find her found that she was no longer speaking to me. When I finally succeed in getting words out of her, she says wasn't angry with me, she insists instead that she was moping over this problem with WoW.
So finally she says, again, "Fix it!" We're stuck in a loop at this point. I know it. I need to give her more than just "my opinion" even though that opinion is founded heavily in the empirical evidence I've already offered her.
So back to the computer room I go, and this time armed with a memtest86 bootable floppy, I get her machine happily chewing on its memory trying to decide how trustworthy it is. Hoping to offer proof that whatever comes out of this isn't "normal", I start my machine doing the same thing.
75% of the way through the first pass, it had already detected 12 bits that were stuck ON when the neighboring bits were in a paricular pattern. So 12 bits, 50% of the time (assuming half of the time the data written to these spaces actually wants those bits set), were failing. Out of a little over 8 billion bits in her machine. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why this is such a random problem, excercised by applications that need those 12 bits consistently. Why some patches fix it for her, and some patches don't.
What's more, it is visually impossible to misunderstand. My machine, on the right, a blue memtest86 screen still chewing on its bits (now on the second pass). It just exudes electronic happiness. Her screen, on the left, a blue memtest86 screen with 12 lines of red backgrounded white text indicating precisely where the bit errors were.
So at this point, I manage to get her to agree finally, there is either something wrong with her memory, controller, or cpu. Period. We're agreed on this. She admits it. Her machine is measurably broken. It is not Blizzard's fault. So, the logical conclusion is that we will need to replace one of these parts once we isolate the problem piece if she wants it to work properly, which is to say not randomly corrupt her memory.
Yet she still persists: "I'm not going to spend $100 to replace something just for one game!"
I'm just not getting through to her. $100 is definitely worth having a happy GF that talks to me.
Yeah, we play the WoW. Or we used to. With increasing levels, her desire to play the game with me has dropped off exponentially. We're a hair's breath from 60 now, and I haven't logged in to do more than check my mailbox in a month.
So last night she decides to go through with the 1.7.0 upgrade and get her talents (she's a hunter) sorted.
At this point I should tell you that for the last 8 months she has been having computer problems, and I have been telling her consistently that it's either a problem with her memory, memory controller, or CPU in that order of probability.
See, some of her games she plays on my computer because they don't crash that way. Some crash less often on hers, or just behave strangely when they do exhibit problems (weird textures, etc).
With WoW, she would get the dreaded white-screen errors (exceptions generated by WoW itself), whose numerals I can't remember now. "Fix it", she told me 8 months ago, stressing the importance that this is the role a man is supposed to play in such relationships...take care of the complicated technology for the poor defenseless woman (even though we know that's not the case, she built this machine).
So I determined after some experimentation that she was getting a single-bit error in cached memory of the datafiles WoW uses (by copying the files back and forth over samba and comparing their md5 hashes, then later hexdumping them and comparing diffs). But she wasn't going to replace any of those parts "just for one game". Meanwhile, she's playing Lord of the Rings on my machine because it crashes on hers, and even her Tivo To Go service (which encrypts the Tivo video files, and that decryption is sensitive to single-bit errors) has only been working in a way that could be best described as "spotty", resulting in losing some of our recorded programs no less.
8 months of this pass. Her machine is measurably broken, but she still blames Blizzard because "none of my other games do this". She excuses the games she plays on my own machine as "isolated incidents that probably have more to do with the video card."
And we're back to last night. I patched my own machine to 1.7.0, oblivious to the fact that there was a 1.7.1 already. I copied my 1.7.0 WoW directory to samba so she could fetch it and play.
Running 1.7.0, you get the 1.7.1 patch downloaded...and sure enough it corrupts her game, she can't play it without starting the 10-minute copy over again.
At this point she left the room without saying anything and when I went out to find her found that she was no longer speaking to me. When I finally succeed in getting words out of her, she says wasn't angry with me, she insists instead that she was moping over this problem with WoW.
So finally she says, again, "Fix it!" We're stuck in a loop at this point. I know it. I need to give her more than just "my opinion" even though that opinion is founded heavily in the empirical evidence I've already offered her.
So back to the computer room I go, and this time armed with a memtest86 bootable floppy, I get her machine happily chewing on its memory trying to decide how trustworthy it is. Hoping to offer proof that whatever comes out of this isn't "normal", I start my machine doing the same thing.
75% of the way through the first pass, it had already detected 12 bits that were stuck ON when the neighboring bits were in a paricular pattern. So 12 bits, 50% of the time (assuming half of the time the data written to these spaces actually wants those bits set), were failing. Out of a little over 8 billion bits in her machine. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand why this is such a random problem, excercised by applications that need those 12 bits consistently. Why some patches fix it for her, and some patches don't.
What's more, it is visually impossible to misunderstand. My machine, on the right, a blue memtest86 screen still chewing on its bits (now on the second pass). It just exudes electronic happiness. Her screen, on the left, a blue memtest86 screen with 12 lines of red backgrounded white text indicating precisely where the bit errors were.
So at this point, I manage to get her to agree finally, there is either something wrong with her memory, controller, or cpu. Period. We're agreed on this. She admits it. Her machine is measurably broken. It is not Blizzard's fault. So, the logical conclusion is that we will need to replace one of these parts once we isolate the problem piece if she wants it to work properly, which is to say not randomly corrupt her memory.
Yet she still persists: "I'm not going to spend $100 to replace something just for one game!"
I'm just not getting through to her. $100 is definitely worth having a happy GF that talks to me.
sharon:
even though I am Half Chinese, I don't speak it 