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leam1983 · 7 months ago

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Tech - FAQ

Why do magnets still fuck up computers? Aren't plate drives archaic?

Plate drives might be going the way of the dodo as active storage, but magnetism isn't going anywhere. NAND cells use magnetic polarity to shift bits as needed. A control gate handles the programming and the chip's interfacing with the rest of your drive or your system altogether, and a floating gate stores a charge, so that you can theoretically unplug an SSD, leave it lying around for ages, then plug it back in on a whim to find that all your stuff's still there. It's essentially the same tech that's been used since the first few plate drives - and even in things like your old SNES carts. It's why you still have that Megaman X save on your thirty-odd year-old cart - assuming of course that you don't go about sticking a big enough magnet on it.

Fucking magnets - how do they work? I mean, in relation to data?

Alright. Imagine that you're both Jackson Pollock and Magnetism personified. You start out with a row of paint cans and a blank stretch of canvas - a nice, clean and orderly hard drive, more or less. There's magnetic force involved even in the system's proper state - after all, you've got paint in cans. It's just not splashed everywhere, right now.

The thing is, systems want to create neat and orderly drive systems. This is why you'd defragment your drives back when plate drives were super common. The thing is, that pesky user keeps pulling files and shifting them to RAM, which fucks up your neat and orderly arrangement! Unlike raw magnetism, however, a computer fetching files and moving bits around is working as intended. Put a magnet on that drive and, well, you're Pollock splashing paint everywhere, creating beautiful chaos - and an irrecoverable drive.

But if drives are magnetic, then what's the issue?

When an SSD calls up a file, it's doing so in a controlled and expected manner. Magnetism is involved, the NAND chip's configuration changes to match the new state - but nothing's going haywire. Add a magnet to this and you're adding too much of a good thing.

Does any magnet work?

No, thankfully. One of my older PCs ended up with Buckyballs stuck somewhere in the drive cage - I was a dumb teen with way too many desk toys for my own good - and nothing's ever happened. Sticking a fridge magnet or a credit card's strip against a drive won't do much; most PC parts are actually built to tolerate some exposure to open magnetic fields - but leaving that magnet there or going for something bigger might cause issues.

Aren't LCD screens magnetic?

Technically, yes! However, the screen is running off of a controlled and isolated field, and nobody's sticking a computer monitor right next to a running power supply, anyway. You'll need a fairly targeted application of a bigger field to really fuck up your little crystals' polarity - thereby creating the dreaded "dead pixels" video enthusiasts loathe so much.

Let's talk OSes - specifically, dumb shit I'm too scared to try but always wanted to do. What happens if I delete System32 in Windows?

Most modern versions of Windows - we're talking 7 and above - won't let you touch that folder, even with normal elevated system privileges, as a computer's Admin. You can mash Delete for days, the OS just won't let you nuke it. However, a little Terminal wizardry can succeed in telling Windows "shut up, I own you, let me delete the equivalent to your cerebellum, I have Reasons that have nothing to do with wanting to test an insult or run with a shitpost".

The system will ask you a few more times, as you really shouldn't be doing this - and will then let you proceed ahead. In short order, you'll realize that your current rig is, for all intents and purposes, fucked severe. Even rebooting won't let you fix it, even if you're trying to backtrack to a previous Restore Point. Your only option, at this point, is a complete reformat and reinstall.

Is this why the FORMAT.C command always brings up a warning?

That is exactly why. FORMAT.C, in Terminal or PowerShell, is effectively computer-speak for "I want you to start over, in the most abrupt and uncalled-for way possible. Wipe yourself."

And if what you want is to wipe away a system's very existence, there's more effective, physical and gratifying ways of doing that, anyway. Most of them involve an already-scrapped microwave and a power drill! Awesome!

What is the black magic I need to delete System32? I swear I want to do this to a virtual machine, and not to perpetrate an act of technological malfeasance on someone I happen to loathe.

If you need to ask about the black magic, you're not ready for the black magic. Google is your friend, and I'm not responsible for what you do on your own time.

Linux is so much better, the system trusts me! But, just for funzies, how can I fuck up a distro running off of Ubuntu?

It's the object of the same memes as "delete System32". If the darkness calls to you, thou shall find thine answers upon the myriad pages of Google.

Water's a poor conductor; I remember this from Physics class! Why my PC go broky if I spray it with a garden hose, then?

Because it's not the water that's making the magic smoke happen, believe it or not. If you were a baller and could spray your PC with a tank's worth of pure, ozonized water with absolutely zero particulates in it and no minerals whatsoever, it would probably be totally fine. Hell, there's even entire PC build projects that involve immersing components in purified water. The problem is, tap water isn't exactly pure. There's trace minerals in it, we typically add fluoride as well, and most water tables fall somewhere on the pH and alkalinity scales, and not often in the "objectively pure" margins of them. And even if you could guarantee a basin of 100% pure H2O, then you'd just condemn your PC to suffocation by way of its own building and festering thermal mass. You'd need systems to agitate the water or to re-absorb its heat before diffusing it elsewhere.

This is also why distilled water isn't often used in full-immersion builds, seeing as distilled water is hard to keep in its pure state. You need air to leech off some of its absorbed heat, and exposure to the outside world means a potential exposure to trace minerals, dead skin flakes or other bits of stuff that aren't chemically related to water and that happen to conduct a charge a little bit better, so...

Is this why this never really took off, compared to the liquid-cooling rigs we know of?

Yes. A well-assembled water-cooling loop has water come in contact with a cooling plate, which itself touches the CPU, or occasionally the GPU as well. As it's a closed loop, any traces of organic components - like fungi - could be dangerous over time. It's why most dye kits for water-cooling loops typically generously include a little bottle of sterilizer. The one issue is that with copper being one of the most thermally-effective metals and also fairly rust-prone, a lot of care has to be involved. A lot of cautious water-cooling enthusiasts tend to advise users in that space to drain out and dry out their loop every few years, to check for signs of corrosion.

But fans are so noisy!

I know, but if you're a budget, an air-cooled build is going to be the most effective approach you could take.

What about AIOs?

All-in-One systems are convenient, but you can't typically access the coolant that's circulating in the loop. On the one hand, an airtight system means no buildup of anything. On the other? No maintenance is possible. If it breaks, it breaks. The average AIO has a life expectancy of about five years - about the same lifespan as your typical rig.

Why is everyone bad-mouthing Windows? I'm just an end-user, I don't give a shit about what I put on my computron!

In a few words, Microsoft's pivoted from its former business model, which involved selling legitimate copies of their OS at high prices, to selling their users' data to the highest bidder. It generates far more profits, it's dystopian as shit, and it's a frightfully smart business decision. I don't approve of it one bit - but it's still smart. In the "I don't give a shit about you, now give your browser history, I'm Patrick Bateman with a fancy ISO to give to you" sense of it being smart.

You and I are the product, now. This is why people are moving to Linux - even if I think this is a flawed solution to a problem that has objectively very few serious consequences for the average end-user.

What do you mean? This is terrible!

Yes, it is! However, your collection of cat pics or your snapping stills with a phone because DRM doesn't let you capture frames for a gifset is of zero worth whatsoever to both Microsoft and the advertisers your data is sold to. The more private aspects of your life are safe, for the most part - what they're focused on is what they could sell to you. So - that involves most of your browsing history and potentially your emails, too. Windows Recall, however, could up the ante by giving MS access to those less-marketable aspects of who you are. That's the onus, here.

What's that?

A user-accessible long-term memory of sorts, used to help the user remember previous tasks or recall where certain elements are stored. It seems neat, until you realize this means Microsoft wants to record everything you do at your computer.

And Linux is better?

It doesn't overtly spy on you - at least, not if you stick to most trustworthy distributions, or OS installs. You're paying for an uptick in privacy with a loss in convenience, however. The more tech-savvy you are, the easier you'll get used to Linux. This isn't to say there aren't noob-friendly distros, there's actually several - but if something goes wonky, chances are you could find yourself stuck on your distro's Community forums, trying to divine what this rando means when he's asking you to list what the lspci command returns. Most enthusiasts in the sphere are nice, but several tend to forget that for a lot of end-users, there's no thrill in spending a few days hunting-and-pecking for a fix. Grandma won't grep shit, she just wants her Bluetooth manager to work!

What's grep?

It's Orc-speak for "find shit now." Jokes aside, it means Global Regular Expression Print. It's a command you can input in a Terminal while accessing a file, to have it search for what's inside. So if I open up a folder called "chocolate chip cookie recipe" in Linux and want to check how much flour I need while being too lazy to open the file on my own, I can just head to the terminal and type grep flour chocolatechipcookies.doc Grep tells the computer it'll need to look for something, flour is what it needs to look for in the file, and chocolatechipcookies.doc is what I'm pointing it to. I'm basically saying "Look in the chocolatechipcookies.doc file and find me all instances of the word flour being used."

If your head feels about to burst, I get it. It's a lot, and it's non-obvious - much like Windows' own Terminal or PowerShell languages.

Ah. So some Linux peeps think people are just going to troubleshoot everything themselves?

I know, right? It's almost as if some of these people forgot that for a lot of folks, a PC is just a convenient portal for emails, social networks and the occasional YouTube binge-watch.

So you don't believe we'll ever get the Year of the Linux Desktop?

Nope. Linux is too atomized, too fiddly, too focused on doing things honestly, as opposed to practically. Windows and MacOS aren't in any real danger of losing their market shares, even if the number of Linux users is slowly and steadily increasing. Unless Linux Mint or something close to it becomes so foulproof that your grandma can flat-out not know of the Terminal's existence without it impacting the computer's usage even in the advent of software failure, then we won't get a fully reliable third option.

I don't know what you're talking about, I've changed permissions on my Plex server and I passed my GPU through a VM for containerized Windows gaming on Linux; it's stupid as shi-

You're not the average use-case scenario, Steven. Sit back down. Raise your hand again once you're eighty-six and barely know how to access your NeuraMail or connect with the Galactic Sodality while your hypothetical grandchildren drone on about leaving the prison of the flesh for the purity of silicon wafers and you feel an encroaching sense of Sartrian Contingency rise up in the pit of your stomach upon realizing how incomprehensible this cold and barren new world is for you.

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