14 lines
746 B
Plaintext
14 lines
746 B
Plaintext
Don't do that then!
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imp. [from an old doctor's office joke about a patient with a trivial
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complaint] Stock response to a user complaint. When I type control-S, the
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whole system comes to a halt for thirty seconds. Don't do that, then! (or So
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don't do that! ). Compare RTFM. Here's a classic example of Don't do that
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then! from Neal Stephenson's In The Beginning Was The Command Line. A friend
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of his built a network with a load of Macs and a few high-powered database
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servers. He found that from time to time the whole network would lock up for
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no apparent reason. The problem was eventually tracked down to MacOS's
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cooperative multitasking: when a user held down the mouse button for too
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long, the network stack wouldn't get a chance to run...
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