Microsoft’s lead software engineer, Raymond Chen, in a blog post said that video has “the power to break a laptop”. Confused? Chen – who did not name the brand – said that a mainframe manufacturer had discovered that playing the music video for Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation” would damage certain laptop models. Not only one brand, but a few laptops of other competitors also had problems playing music videos.
How does a music video end up with a laptop crash?
Chen revealed that the popular song “contains one of the natural resonant frequencies for the 5400 rpm laptop hard drive model they and other manufacturers have used”. So, every time a video is played on a laptop of the aforementioned brand, a laptop sitting nearby crashes, even though that other laptop doesn’t play the video. Simply put, do you know how loud noise can break glass? So this is something just like that. Think of it like this: when a song is played on computer speakers, the sound waves it produces eventually cause the hard drive to vibrate, thus crashing the computer.
How was the problem solved?
“The manufacturer solved the problem by adding a custom filter in the audio pipeline to detect and remove offending frequencies during audio playback,” said Microsoft’s lead software engineer. .
