Computer Failure
The term catastrophic failure is occasionally used in computer software to indicate an unexpected error from which the system cannot meaningfully recover. This usually results in a screen of death. This however, is likely to be recovered by a simple pressing of the reset button, unlike most of the examples above. Under some circumstances the hard drive itself can experience a catastrophic failure resulting in physical damage, and in some circumstances may not be recoverable or only so by highly specialized technicians.
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Famous quotes containing the words computer and/or failure:
“The analogy between the mind and a computer fails for many reasons. The brain is constructed by principles that assure diversity and degeneracy. Unlike a computer, it has no replicative memory. It is historical and value driven. It forms categories by internal criteria and by constraints acting at many scales, not by means of a syntactically constructed program. The world with which the brain interacts is not unequivocally made up of classical categories.”
—Gerald M. Edelman (b. 1928)
“I am dead against art’s being self-expression. I see an inherent failure in any story which fails to detach itself from the author—detach itself in the sense that a well-blown soap-bubble detaches itself from the bowl of the blower’s pipe and spherically takes off into the air as a new, whole, pure, iridescent world. Whereas the ill-blown bubble, as children know, timidly adheres to the bowl’s lip, then either bursts or sinks flatly back again.”
—Elizabeth Bowen (1899–1973)