eli5 Why does turning your device on and off often solve a technical issue?
In: 11
Because your device runs programs. They’re intended to do particular things in particular orders. But writing perfect code is near-impossible, and there are always many, many things that can go wrong (because testing code is also hard, and labour-intensive, and finding every bug almost impossible). So there are always weird things that can go wrong.
Run the code long enough, and something will. And once it does, all bets are off – the program is in unknown territory, doing unknown things, and not doing what you want it to do any more. And it doesn’t known it’s lost, let alone how to get back out.
So you turn the device off and on, and all the programs start again at the beginning again, doing things they’re supposed to. Not lost anymore. Until next time.
Latest Answers