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Comment by carrja99 | Hacker News Reader

Brings back good memories... I used to go directly to the electronics section at Walmart while my parents shopped, start defrag on all the computers and then watch from the CD aisle with a smirk as an associate would come across them, exclaim "my god!" and restart the computers with a power off and on.

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The modern version is to pair with bluetooth speakers on display. Then ambush play weird shit from the next alley for reactions.

Same with their demo tvs that have chrome cast. Found that a lot end up connected to the public wifi.

Potential consequences are what?

If the tv is vulnerable you can install your payload. Once somebody buys it and brings it home you are in their network.

You can cast videos from the weird part of YouTube to the TVs.

Is there a non-weird part?

The boring one

WiFi printers are also fun

Reminds me of that time when I went into the Apple Store and came up to a Mac, opened a window (idk I think it was something harmless like Finder), took a screenshot and then set that screenshot as the wallpaper. I'm sure there were many people that day who tried to close the 'uncloseable' window that was purely part of the background...

I did that on a high school Windows lab PC, put the task bar on top of the screen, set it to auto-hide, and killed explorer.exe so the Desktop icons were only part of the background.

A prof had to ask me to set it back because they couldn’t figure it out.

I imagined this entire sequence as a scene from The Simpsons, sound effect and all - thank you.

Oh, you made me laugh out loud, that is brilliant!

Power cycling during a defrag seems like a good way to lose data.

That's the joke.

Friggin weird how this sort of thing just goes over some people's heads.

But not an effective one. Generally defrag routines copy data and then update the file system. Power loss would have to occur during the file system write in order for it to be destructive. (And in the case of journaling file systems, likely still recoverable.)

Yes, but the system is writing roughly half the time, and defragging was mostly a thing before the advent of journalling file systems.

Power loss while a defragmenter is writing file data will not cause data loss, even on the most basic of file systems like FAT or HFS. Duplicating data into free space is effectively a no-op until the file system is updated to point from the old location to the new location.

It think most versions of windows that included a defragmenter as part of the OS were XP and later, all of which would have used NTFS, which is a journaling filesystem.

DOS defrag goes back a lot farther than that. It even predates FAT32, let alone NTFS.

That's an obvious sign of OCD.

I think in this case that would expand to Ordinary Childish Deviousness, though.

Obsesive compulsive Defragmentation

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