7mo ago

The Server Fell Over

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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.
- I use fell over to mean crashed all the time
  
  Same, I thought it was used commonly too.
  
  "Fell over", to me, implies server load balancing.
  
  “Failed over” does, I’ve never heard fell over mean anything but what’s described in the picture.
  
  I have heard it before, albeit tongue-in-cheek. So, like the server can be "running", it can also trip and fall over.
  
  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.
  
  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
  
  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
  
  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!)
- yeah i was thinking "down".
- Or a different language. To me, they're the same word, so this pun would actually work properly.

21 comments