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    Dangerous Laptop

    During a press meeting in Japan this laptop suddenly exploded and started burning.

    It was probably the battery the cause of this incident.

    The pictures are pretty impressive.
    Imagine that happens while you have the computer on your lap, maybe in a plane.

    Lxm
    Attached Files

    #2
    Some people will do almost anything to get attention.

    Comment


      #3
      Originally posted by BigSpud
      Some people will do almost anything to get attention.
      Maybe someone had just been surreptitiously posting a really hot AW message...

      takochan

      Comment


        #4
        Oh that's nothing. In know of one story involving a laptop being killed by a kitten(!)

        I'll leave 'how' it up to your imagination. Yes, there is photographic evidence, but I can't remember where I saw it.

        Kind of makes you wonder what the point of a portable device is that can be annihilated by a month-old cat.

        Comment


          #5
          What I like is the guy in the corner of the second photo. Is he turning his off just in case? Or filing a news bulletin?

          Comment


            #6
            That will teach him for looking at the HOT girls of AW when hes surposed to be working

            Comment


              #7
              The Motorola MC6800 and MC68000 microprocessors actually had an undocumented machine-code instruction called HCF (can't remember what the mnemonic stood for), but what it did was stop the program execution completely, and put the CPU into a factory self-test mode, where it would rapidly toggle the bus lines as fast as possible.

              The problem with this, was that some motherboard chipsets that these CPUs were used with, weren't designed to tolerate those kinds of signals; executing the HCF instruction on such systems would cause the I/O chips to overheat and fry themselves. Consequently, the instruction became whimsically known as Halt and Catch Fire.

              Long-time Linux users should also know of a similar-minded easter egg in the Linux kernel; if a printer paper jam occurs, you'll see a message like lp0: printer on fire in the kernel logs. This was a throwback reference to the older, large high-speed dot-matrix printers of the 1970's and early 1980's, where paper jams could actually cause the drum roller to overheat from friction build-up, and create a fire hazard, since these printers usually didn't have reliable in-built sensors that could detect such faults.

              Comment


                #8
                Originally posted by Diablo
                ...Halt and Catch Fire.....
                That reminds me ....

                Years ago, someone had come up with a whole new set of mnemonic expansions for 370 assembler. They were a riot for an assembler programmer to read and just about meaningless for the rest of the world.

                Comment


                  #9
                  Ah, here we go: Secret Assembler Mnemonics (warning: very obscure humour, you will only find it funny if you've programmed in assembler before!)

                  I've programmed in assembler on both Intel 80x86 and MC68HC11; there's a few mildy amusing ones in those, like the 8086's LAHF (load AH register with flags), and the HC11's BRA (branch unconditionally). The original MC6800 also had a SEX (sign extend) instruction, which provided much giggles to computer engineering folk of the time.

                  Comment


                    #10
                    Originally posted by Diablo
                    Ah, here we go: Secret Assembler Mnemonics (warning: very obscure humour, you will only find it funny if you've programmed in assembler before!)
                    Diablo,

                    I know the devil made you do it. Thanks. That was a great chuckle.

                    Spud

                    Comment


                      #11
                      Diablo, those were funny! I sent them to my college computer science prof! thanks

                      Comment

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