Programmer Humor

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The Server Fell Over (lemmy.ml)

submitted 5 months ago by yogthos@lemmy.ml to c/programmerhumor@lemmy.ml

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[–] calabast@lemm.ee 85 points 5 months ago (3 children)

I'm gonna guess the original version of this joke said "crashed" instead of "fell over", cause then it would actually be ambiguous enough for the premise to work.

[–] yogthos@lemmy.ml 25 points 5 months ago (2 children)

I use fell over to mean crashed all the time

[–] TechieDamien@lemmy.ml 11 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Same, I thought it was used commonly too.

[–] Zorsith@lemmy.blahaj.zone 8 points 5 months ago (2 children)

"Fell over", to me, implies server load balancing.

[–] Chronographs@lemmy.zip 5 points 5 months ago (1 children)

“Failed over” does, I’ve never heard fell over mean anything but what’s described in the picture.

[–] Ephera@lemmy.ml 2 points 5 months ago

I have heard it before, albeit tongue-in-cheek. So, like the server can be "running", it can also trip and fall over.

[–] bamboo@lemm.ee 2 points 5 months ago

I use it to describe a variety of things, but usually it’s related to servers not being able to handle load rather than an outright crash, but I’m not strict about it. Laos balancer failures could be it, could also just be that something was really I efficient but wasn’t noticed until it went into production.

[–] litchralee@sh.itjust.works 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

I vaguely recall a (probably apocryphal) story of an early washing machine-sized hard drive that lurched its way across the floor during a customer demo, eventually falling over once the connecting cables pulled taught.

That said, those hard drives did indeed move themselves: http://catb.org/jargon/html/W/walking-drives.html

[–] Revan343@lemmy.ca 2 points 5 months ago

Some bands of old-time hackers figured out how to induce disk-accessing patterns that would do this to particular drive models and held disk-drive races.

I love the Jargon File

[–] Mouselemming@sh.itjust.works 1 points 5 months ago

That's probably fallout from the early days of this joke. After seeing this image with 'the server crashed', funny programmers would start saying their server "fell over" to reference that memory. Now it's come full circle. Meanwhile those of us who are "grandma peering at the computer screen" would only say a computer has "crashed." And wouldn't know how to fix it beyond a couple of tries at turning it off and back on again. (Which usually does work, though!)

[–] Mac@mander.xyz 15 points 5 months ago

yeah i was thinking "down".

[–] Bezier@suppo.fi 4 points 5 months ago

Or a different language. To me, they're the same word, so this pun would actually work properly.