Editing 1912: Thermostat

Jump to: navigation, search

Warning: You are not logged in. Your IP address will be publicly visible if you make any edits. If you log in or create an account, your edits will be attributed to your username, along with other benefits.

The edit can be undone. Please check the comparison below to verify that this is what you want to do, and then save the changes below to finish undoing the edit.
Latest revision Your text
Line 15: Line 15:
 
This is so abnormal that Hairy is briefly struck silent and, upon recovering, he suggests Cueball {{tvtropes|SuicideBySea|walk into the sea}}, rather than try to solve the issue.
 
This is so abnormal that Hairy is briefly struck silent and, upon recovering, he suggests Cueball {{tvtropes|SuicideBySea|walk into the sea}}, rather than try to solve the issue.
  
βˆ’
The title text elaborates that the situation is so absurd that it must be divine punishment, so Hairy does not want to try and help him for fear of invoking the wrath of whatever deity is issuing it.
+
The title text elaborates that the situation is so absurd that it must be divine punishment, so Hairy does not want to try and help him for fear of invoking the wrath of whatever deity is issuing it. An example of such reasoning in literature can be found in the character of {{w|Aeolus_(son_of_Hippotes)|Aeolus}} in the ''{{w|Odyssey}}'', who, having made an unsuccessful attempt to assist {{w|Odysseus}} by giving him a bag containing unfavorable winds, refused to provide further assistance on the grounds that the gods were clearly hostile to Odysseus.
  
 
Part of the humor is in the problem being only a slight exaggeration of real software issues. The symptoms are unlikely, yet possible (a thermostat could be running Android and could generate a report as a .doc file; given some data corruption, the name of the .doc file could get into the boot script and a volume could appear unpartitioned). It would take an expert Android or Unix engineer to fix, particularly on an embedded device with no obvious way to connect remotely or attach a keyboard. In real life, it would probably be easier to just replace an embedded device whose software was this broken.
 
Part of the humor is in the problem being only a slight exaggeration of real software issues. The symptoms are unlikely, yet possible (a thermostat could be running Android and could generate a report as a .doc file; given some data corruption, the name of the .doc file could get into the boot script and a volume could appear unpartitioned). It would take an expert Android or Unix engineer to fix, particularly on an embedded device with no obvious way to connect remotely or attach a keyboard. In real life, it would probably be easier to just replace an embedded device whose software was this broken.

Please note that all contributions to explain xkcd may be edited, altered, or removed by other contributors. If you do not want your writing to be edited mercilessly, then do not submit it here.
You are also promising us that you wrote this yourself, or copied it from a public domain or similar free resource (see explain xkcd:Copyrights for details). Do not submit copyrighted work without permission!

To protect the wiki against automated edit spam, we kindly ask you to solve the following CAPTCHA:

Cancel | Editing help (opens in new window)