A
term of
criticism given to me by one of my
roommates after I managed to
partition the
hard drive of his
Mac Classic into 40 little chunks. My early forays into the
voodoo of
resedit also caused considerable
havoc.
Since then it has become a term used to refer to my own roommates and folks who plunk themselves down in front of my unprotected computer and manage to rm -rf / my machine without having any previous knowledge of unix. (A word to the stupid - even when you have a workstation not connected in any way to any other machines you still need to log out of root. Trust me - it took two separate diasters to learn me right.)
Human electromagnets are often people who know just enough about computers to be dangerous and too little to fix any of the damage that they've done. They are your roommates, your significant other, and other well intentioned strangers who somehow end up at your keyboard. Often times attempts to reproduce the particular fuckup they've made is completely impossible. They may well be the worst threat to computer security and data integrity there is.
Log out! Log Out! Log Out!