Apr 23 2006
This is What I Think About!
One of the recent television commercials for the U.S. Navy depicts two police officers in their cruiser, patroling a shady urban neighborhood. Suddenly they pick out a boy in a group of friends, and call him over to the vehicle. One of the police officers points to his laptop, annoyed, saying, “It, uhh… it crashed again.” The boy glances at the laptop screen and says proudly, “Reboot with F8 in Safe Mode.”
Now, it is true that pressing F8 during the boot sequence will allow you to enter Safe Mode. However, going into Safe Mode is a very temporary measure, and by no means the solution to the underlying problem! Booting into Safe Mode should only be done in the most extreme situations (e.g. a malfunctioning video driver), and should never be used for anything except repairing critical errors in the operating system, and then making sure the computer can boot back into normal mode.
The Navy-bound computer whiz-kid should never have let the officer drive off with the computer still in Safe Mode. If anything, the officer will encounter more problems (or at least annoyances) trying to work in Safe Mode than working normally with an occasional crash. Is this kid really the kind of person we want working as an Airborne Ops Tech?
April 25th, 2006 at 7:15 am
Maybe it was left in safe mode intentionally. Doesn’t the kid say at the end of the commercial: “This is my little way of… sticking it to the man”. Or is that a different commercial.
June 4th, 2006 at 2:34 pm
YES! Finally someone else caught that!
You rock.
July 25th, 2006 at 10:32 pm
I know this is your Blog, Dmitry, but this is what I think about… I think about the fact that 200-plus people died and 700-plus people injured in the India train bombings… yet how quickly they have faded from OUR news. We expect the world to rally around our 5-year-old “war against terror” sparked by 9/11 but we give all but lip service to the price that others around the world are paying. Americans (conservative Americans, anyway) believe we should be our brother’s keeper, as long as those brothers are us.
You have a segment on your website about things Americans say wrong. Well, some Americans say a lot of wrong things, and the grammar is not the problem.