Well, that was a scare

While watching videos off a DVD with hopeforyou, I decided to go look up something on the web. My browser folded and wouldn't come back up. So I went to a terminal and typed 'ps aux | grep firefox', to find the errant process and kill it. It gave me a BUS error and died. buh??

After attempting it again, I tried 'ls'. "Input/Output Error." um...

'w', 'uptime', and 'sync' all threw I/O errors. 'dmesg' segfaulted. Urk.

Looks like my hard disk may have died. Well, crap.

I sighed, then decided we might as well finish watching the episode (the system ran fine as long as we didn't try to run new commands or access the disk). It behaved until I packed it up and took it home. I tried to shut it down, it (predictably) failed, and I took it down hard with the expectation that it wouldn't come back up. Trip to Fry's in the morning...

I booted it to see what would happen. And.......



It loaded as though nothing was wrong. I logged in. It behaved normally, and still is. Combing through the logs showed nothing from before I rebooted (figures)... but during boot time, I caught it scanning two areas of memory for "low memory corruption". A search on the web, and careful reading of the log, revealed that the symptoms were most likely from low-register, dedicated system memory getting corrupted, which is why basic commands failed but the rest of the system (on higher registers) ran fine. The best part: it's a software issue, probably related to a sloppy BIOS, not hardware at all.

My computer is fine now, and likely to remain so. But what a way to worry me two days after a full OS upgrade!

"Insurance", my shiny metal @ss

You'd think that, given a huge pool of healthy early-20-somethings who don't need anything but maintenance, the dental insurance co. would make more money by not covering cleanings and only covering large procedures which are fairly rare. Since it's part of the health insurance bundle we all get as students, the dental portion's small premium is part of the deal for everybody. They'd get to collect monthly premiums and seldom, if ever, pay out on these people. (You could explain it by calling it catastrophic dental insurance, handy for when you sail over your handlebars and eat asphalt.) But nooooo... instead, my cleanings are covered, a cost that is about the same as the total of the premiums, and I have to pay for things like thousand-dollar crowns out of pocket, because that's not the sort of thing my 20-something pool fellows would need. No percentage -- completely out of pocket.

They end up paying back most of everyone's premiums, instead of gambling that this healthy set of college students won't need as much heavy dental work as the pool pays for. Does that make sense?

So not only is it not actual insurance (like house or car insurance), it may not be the best business model either. It's an even more striking example than most health "insurance". Why is this system in place?