{"id":28013,"date":"2007-02-14T10:00:10","date_gmt":"2007-02-14T10:00:10","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2007\/02\/14\/technology-hypochondriacs\/"},"modified":"2007-02-14T10:00:10","modified_gmt":"2007-02-14T10:00:10","slug":"technology-hypochondriacs","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20070214-10\/?p=28013","title":{"rendered":"Technology hypochondriacs"},"content":{"rendered":"

One phenomenon I’ve noticed quite a bit is something I’m going to call “technology hypochondria”, the belief that you are suffering<\/a> from whatever problem you just read about<\/a>. It reminds me of this joke:<\/p>\n

A man goes to his doctor. “Doctor,” he says, “I’m pretty sure I’ve got this disease here. All the symptoms match. I’m suffering from fatigue, sleeplessness, irritability, and memory loss.” <\/p>\n

“Mr. Jenkins,” the doctor responds, “I’m fairly certain you aren’t suffering from menopause.” <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n

One of my relatives who is a medical doctor in a public hospital explained to me that in his experience, you should never trust the diagnosis of a med student. “When we bring them along on rounds and show them a patient and ask them what they think the problem might be, they always answer with the disease they just studied last week.”\n When I describe one way a program can become unresponsive, that doesn’t necessarily mean that that’s why your<\/strong> program is unresponsive. A program can become unresponsive for any of a million reasons, most of which have the same basic symptoms: “When I click on the program, nothing happens.” That’s really not enough information from which to make a diagnosis. To make a diagnosis, you need to whack a debugger under the program and see why the UI thread isn’t processing messages. (Mark Russinovich did exactly that<\/a> to investigate a process startup delay he was experiencing, and the cause in his case was something I hadn’t seen before.)<\/p>\n

If you post a comment to one of my articles asking, “Could this be why my program also has a similar problem?”, don’t expect much of an answer from me. It’s like writing a letter to a newspaper’s medical advice column saying, “I’m suffering from fatigue and loss of appetite. Do I have AIDS?” <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

One phenomenon I’ve noticed quite a bit is something I’m going to call “technology hypochondria”, the belief that you are suffering from whatever problem you just read about. It reminds me of this joke: A man goes to his doctor. “Doctor,” he says, “I’m pretty sure I’ve got this disease here. All the symptoms match. […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-28013","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"

One phenomenon I’ve noticed quite a bit is something I’m going to call “technology hypochondria”, the belief that you are suffering from whatever problem you just read about. It reminds me of this joke: A man goes to his doctor. “Doctor,” he says, “I’m pretty sure I’ve got this disease here. All the symptoms match. […]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28013","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=28013"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/28013\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=28013"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=28013"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=28013"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}