Windows: “I’m trying really hard to be your friend, please love me”
Linux: “Lol you wanna fuck around and find out? Go ahead dude IDGAF”
And in the process, I learned something about computers :D
Weird how that works.
FYI, Windows 3.11 let one fuck around in this way.
The fun part is that I’ve actually done the “delete the bootloader” on purpose. We did it for operating systems class and then manually did the disk partition calculations to directly write a new bootloader into place. Once you’ve done that a few times you start to really really understand how the superblock, bootloader, and partitions work.
Bad time for a typo. Can’t*
Thank you corrected it
One thing I miss from Reddit is that all this software/hardware supremacy bullshit died out years ago.
I’m so fucking sick of these memes
As GNU/Linux user, I don’t like this meme too. I’ve seen this so many times that it’s not funny anymore. And if it was, it should be posted to c/linuxmemes, not here.
I don’t know why, but there’s a LOT of Linux users on here. Feels like it’s half tech nerds/programmer types.
Never visited r/linuxmemes?
I have no beef with folks circle jerking in their own space, go for it. But having it constantly hammered in my feed is just annoying and toxic. May as well get in arguments about whose dad could beat up whose.
I was on LinuxMasterRace, i’m not done yet.
look at mr “I never deleted the bootloader” here
This joke is explained with a story by Neal Stephenson in his “The Hole Hawg of Operating systems”. It’s a short, but great read: http://www.team.net/mjb/hawg.html
To quote:
“But I never blamed the Hole Hawg; I blamed myself. The Hole Hawg is dangerous because it does exactly what you tell it to. It is not bound by the physical limitations that are inherent in a cheap drill, and neither is it limited by safety interlocks that might be built into a homeowner’s product by a liability-conscious manufacturer. The danger lies not in the machine itself but in the user’s failure to envision the full consequences of the instructions he gives to it.”
Like a review of the OG Dodge Viper:
“Traction control? Air bags? Nope. You get ten cylinders, four wheels, and a steering wheel. Whatever happens next, it’s on you.”
Edit: Here it is
“this car accelerates like it hates the past” is maybe one of my favorite quotes of all time now. Thanks for sharing this gem
His Demon review is even better:
“This car doesn’t accelerate, it escalates. Like a conversation born from the phrase ‘what’s wrong?’”
Poetry
Story time: In 1994 my friends dad still had a PC running DOS/Windows 3.1
My friend and I had been downloading pron clips from a local BBS that were all in a *.dl file format.
My friend got anxious his father would find the porn and he would get in trouble, so in a command line for DOS, he typed:
C:\> del *.dlWhich the computer read as
del *.dl*which meant within seconds it was deleting every Dynamic Link Library on the PC, and in short order it crashed and then would not boot.So yes, especially in older Windows systems, you could delete all kinds of shit to bork it.
I just tried this in an MS-DOS + Windows 3.1 virtual machine that I have, and no, that doesn’t happen.
del *.dldoes exactly what you’d expect.del *.dldoes not delete DLL files. Your friend probably accidentally pressed the L key twice.del *.dldoes not delete anything in any folder other than the current one. Your friend probably stored his porn in theC:\WINDOWS\SYSTEMfolder or something.- I don’t think there even is a built-in way in MS-DOS to delete files matching a pattern across multiple folders. You can delete files in a single folder matching a pattern (
del), or you can delete a folder and all of its contents (deltree), but neither of those does what you’re talking about. - Deleting DLLs stops Windows from starting, but doesn’t stop MS-DOS from booting. MS-DOS doesn’t have any DLLs to delete.
- MS-DOS isn’t even capable of loading DLLs at all. If you were writing an MS-DOS program and you wanted to link code dynamically, you had to bring your own dynamic linker to do it with. Fun times.
You’re right that it doesn’t stop you from deleting system files, though, which is kind of odd as MS-DOS does have a mechanism for stopping you from doing that: the “system” attribute. This is used to protect the MS-DOS kernel files,
IO.SYSandMSDOS.SYS. For whatever reason, though, the Windows installer doesn’t give the Windows system files this attribute, so you can still see them and delete them at will.Your friend probably accidentally pressed the L key twice
That’s probably what he did and I don’t know why he would store his porn in the system folder, but it did genuinely bork the computer and his dad was pretty pissed, because his dad was a banker and all his work was on it.
I never tested it myself partially because I didn’t want to kill my system and well, my parents had a Mac.
Well, that’s the nice thing about virtual machines! 😁 You can copy them and bork them freely.
In case you feel like experimenting, WinWorld has installation disk images for most of Apple’s and Microsoft’s vintage operating systems.
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I mean, there’s a reason they don’t let you delete system32 anymore
It’s like one of the earliest troubleshooting joke memes. It just so happens people actually did that, and not because they wanted to do that.
But like on earlier versions of Windows you could absolutely delete any folder on the drive. I think there’s even a story about an uninstaller that accidentally deleted the entire root of the drive because it wasn’t written correctly.
“Deltree C:\ . /Y” I think it was.
The solution should be restricting such actions to root/admin, not preventing them entirely though.
Yep, this was me a few weeks ago. I was running widows and linux dualboot on separate hard drives. I decided to reformat the windows drive since I was never using it. Apparently I had installed the bootloader to the drive which windows was on…
Yes. Also happened to me. Linux distros also do this (if you didn’t specify a separate boot partition), so next time you need to erase an OS, go into that partition, and remove the folder corresponding to the OS like “Windows” or “Ubuntu”.
If you’re running Linux with the French language add-on installed, you can delete it:
rm -fr /
I have done this a few days ago and im still struggling to set it back up but I like the freedom
Nothing like disabling the screen in the BIOS/UEFI. Guaranteed adrenaline
When I first started using Arch Linux I swear I deleted my bootloader on accident like 4 times lol.
I had a dream the other night that I accidentally deleted the ls command and it broke a bunch of shit on my linux server.
Yet it still booted, and my mdadm raid array was still intact. I had to boot from a live CD to copy the command over.
As someone who knows enough about linux to run a ubuntu file server, but has never contributed to a meaningful open source project in his life, is this something that can actually happen?
Sure. There’s a story around somewhere of someone deleting basically all of /bin and was able to recover the live system
All fun and games until immutable systems are the future of Linux
Just wondering, but is there anything regarding packages or flatpaks (and variants of them) that would make immutable systems a requirement in order to use your applications, or would it still be possible to use a regular distro?
I’m sure there wouldn’t really be any complaints regarding 90% of linux users using immutable systems, as long as applications weren’t “locked in” to using those exclusively.
Microsoft and Android have entered the chat
did you say immutable fun and games? We’re in!
System32 is not the bootloader. You can delete it all day long once you change permissions and unhide it.
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