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Gnarly Error Messages
Veeru writes "In my career, I have run across some whopper error messages, but a call from the mainframe sysop one night beat them all: 'We are experiencing MVS processor spin loops, the programs are running while holding a disabled CPU. This is causing XCF communication delays to the point where we are losing VTAM RTP routing, are suffering OSPF adjacency failures on TCP/IP dynamic routing and MIM VCF failures. Whatever this code is, it should NOT be propagated to production or we run the risk of losing the development plex if XCF signaling is adversely impacted by processor disabled spin loops'. My friend once got an error message 'Error 2 while trying to report error 2'. I would be curious to hear from the Slashdot community on encounters with other bizarre error messages."
The random bomb that used to pop up using Mac LC's... not explanation, just BOMB. That used to freak some people out.
sig.
Press F9 to continue.
Had a Mac program long ago that featured the following error msg:
I must remember to put an error message here
And in another:
Whoops !
If you see this error please report the code as I have forgotten put an error message here
beauty is only a light switch away
i once received the following at work in the proprietary software used for cable tv tech support/etc....
"You need help. Please call 1-800-xxx-xxxx for assistance."
Remember the Amiga 500/1500 error message that said
"Guru Medatation"
"An Error Occurred Because An Error Occurred"
Ah, so that's why!
"Error: No error"
I got that one a few times; always memorable. Almost as fun as seeing your GUI melt into the joy of a KDL:
"Welcome to Kernel Debugging Land!"
***
Gentlemen, you can't fight in here, this is the War Room!
This error is documented in MS's KB:
"Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on his own." Scary.
I've encountered "Error: too many errors" several times before.
---
Hello, Slashdot user. My name is Dr. Sbaitso. I am here to help you.
While doing some JavaScript programming with and old version of Netscape:
Undefined is not definedAppleWorks GS on the Apple IIGS... "A serious system error has occured" and two buttons appeared. The first button said "Reset", and the second button had an arrow pointing to the first button. :)
The fax machine in my office's mailroom displays this to confirm that your outgoing fax was sent. It confused the heck out of me the first time...
My favorite Windows Error.
Though now on NT/2000 these errors are logged in the handy-dany event logger.
Or something to that effect. It was a few years ago, so probably MacOS8. Just the standard error box with no explaination besides "Oooooops"
There's always the old favorite "This application has performed a fatal error and will be shut down: Windows" and the similar "This file appears to be corrupted or infected, and should be replaced: Symantec AntiVirus." I'll post the screenshot of the antivirus one if i find it.
I still put those in for giggles.. Usually in something like this:
if ($a > 0){
#something
}elsif($a 0){
#something
}elsif($a = 0){
#something
}else{
die "Error: You shouldn't see this."
};
Serious? Seriousness is well above my pay grade.
(1) Winerr 00E : Unexplained Error - Please tell us how this happened0 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 00000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000 0000000000000000000000000000000c0000240".
(2) 01B - Error Removing Temp File; Kernel.dll Will Be Substituted
(3) 01C - Wrong Disk Formatted. Sorry About That.
(4)Title: setup32.exe - error in application
The instruction "0x77e0a053" points to memory at "0x0f1366b8". The data was not transferred into RAM because of an I/O error in "0x0000000000000000000000000000000000000000000000
That's a lot of zeros... I thought addresses were only 32 bits long in Windows2000...
Rapid Nirvana
I like this far more than is acceptable:
>cat food
>cat: cannot open food
At a DN300's boot prompt I typed:
:)
> ?
You must be from Prime. Use 'h' for help.
Prime was Apollo's competitor at the time.
Hedley
My favorite on the NT servers was a popup explainging that the Dr. Watson process had generated a Dr. Watson error. If the system hadn't frozen I would have screen-capped that bad boy.
Also, twice when using Veritas Backup Exec NT 7.3 I received a warning error messages stating that there were over 1 billion administrators currently connected to the system, so I should be careful making changes. I wasn't aware Backup Exec was so popular.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them."
"Gnarly Error Messages" make me picture the Dell dude popping up like the M$ Clippy and saying something like "Dude, your program just totally crashed. Bummer!"
"Cannot Start Transaction While in Firehose Mode"
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
Comment removed based on user account deletion
[in soothing voice]"Dave, I'm afraid I can't let you do that."
If you think
When installing linux you can get this error:
***Kernel panic: I have no root and I want to scream
if you don't tell the kernel where to find it's root filesystem.
Travis
Service unavailable due to link posted on Slashdot.
Is when Windows Media Player 6 (before all the gooey interface stuff) gave me an:
Error #112233:
Catastrophic Failure
And then it continued to play the Divx movie fine....
I remember I was using an old Amiga disk-doctor type utility, and I got this wonderful error message:
'Cannot mark bad blocks because the block used for marking bad blocks is bad.'
Say THAT 10 times fast.
I've been telling this wonderful story to my computer friends for ages, and finally, I have an online outlet for it! Yay!
A friend once got a javascript error that would have made Bill Clinton proud:
'is' is not defined
I once got a Windows message telling me to insert the CD labeled 'Windows 98' into the floppy drive C: (really! all three in one!)
But my favorite was an old mainframe warning:
Warning: Starting system abort routine. Enter 'go' to continue or 'no' to stop.
To this day I don't know whether 'go' would continue aborting, or continue running, nor whether 'no' would stop running, or stop aborting!
Q325038: Calendar Type May Change to Japanese Emperor Era When Outlook Runs
cpeterso
I work tech support now. Dont' get any of those, but one of our production systems threw this at me the other day:
"System Error: You need to contact technical support."
Unfortunately, the guy in the next cube over wasn't much help...
Feel the fear and do it anyway.
All IBM MVS error messages end up saying this in the manual:
ERROR: Error on open macro at the address indicated
PROGRAMMER ACTION: Fix and rerun.
No joke.
You were mistaken. Which is odd, since memory shouldn't be a problem for you
____________________________
Internet Explorer
Line: 142
Char: 7
Error: 'null' is null or not an object
Code:0
URL: http://jobs.microsoft.co.uk/working.asp
________
http://remember.mine.nu/null.jpg
elsif($a 0)
die "Error: You shouldn't see this unless I forgot a less than sign (or Slashdot removed it)."
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Or how about:
:-D
"You can't modify a constant, float upstream, win an argument with the IRS, or satisfy this compiler."
Oh for the days when Apple had a since of humor.
And personally I prefer the ones that said "Keyboard not found; press F1 to continue"
RMN
~~~
It's really really easy to change your error messages in a pre-OSX Mac system. When I was in 8th grade I got a good shot in at my music teacher. I booted up our studio computer, fired up ResEdit and changed a resourse or three. So instead of "Please re-insert disk" he saw "Hey! I was eating that!" Instead of the standard Error type-11 messages (application crashed - out of memory - restart) he got "what did you do that for? - (poke again)" and the restart / shutdown dialogue was replaced with "play God." - restart, Shut Down and Cancel turned into Resurrect, Eternal Damnation and Have Mercy. :)
Good times.
triv
The year was 1989, and I was installing Interactive 386/ix (AT&T licensed UNIX) on a pc. At some point in working on the box I got the error "bad magik". I have loved unix and unix-like operating systems ever since. DOS was always boring.
-Chris
-- This sig is only a test. If this were a real sig it would say something witty. --
My favorite error message (not really an error, more informational) came from a driver for a Cannon office printer (floor model copy machine + printer + fax) when requesting a size for a margin. The message stated "Enter an integer between 0 and 1.2"
[root@localhost]% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].
[root@localhost]% gotta light?
no match.
[root@localhost]% ^What is saccharine?
Bad substitute.
[root@localhost]% cat "food in cans"
cat: can't open food in cans
[root@localhost]% rm God
God not found.
[root@localhost]% talk VladimirPutin@Kremlin
Cannot find VladimirPutin@Kremlin: Your party is not logged on.
More funny UNIX commands here.
I'm the Devil the Windows users warned you about.
The old SWTP microprocessor kits used to output a single * as a prompt. I prety much knew how the day was going to go when I saw one that, the first time it was powered up, type out FU
I'm an American. I love this country and the freedoms that we used to have.
The Selecting Blendolini Causes Choco-Banana Shake Hang From the BSOD-on-my-toaster dept issue was a real error in a Microsoft related program, "Someone's in the Kitchen." There used to be a whole technet article describing the crash involving the choco-banana shake recipe, but it was pulled. For reference, check this out: Q157668 Mystery solved.
I once worked with this woman with poor vision who was hysterical because something about an "illegal abortion" had appeared on her machine.
She said that she had advised a girl who had made some mistakes on such matters but never was actually involved in such a thing. Only later she realised what it really said.
Back in my VAX/VMS days, the powers that be decided to name the machines after planets. The limit was six characers, so the names were "VENUS", "MARS", and "PLUTO". So far, so good.
Certain conditions, (such as a reboot) were generally accompanied by broadcast messages that would (in our case) be sent to hundreds of dumb terminals in about 12 different cities.
*** Reply received from operator on MARS ***
System shutdown in 5 minutes
'I'm crushing your head!' error appears after leaving open a pop-up slider
Product: Flash
Platform: All
Versions: 5.0
ID: 15438
Issue
After leaving a slider pop-up open, the user switches to another functio] such as accessing a menu or testing a movie. Flash then behaves unexpectedly. Sometimes an error message appears which states:
"I'm crushing your head!" "Crashing at gPopupDail should be new!. Yes = go to debugger, No = keep running, Cancel = terminate."
At other times the slider may continue to appear independently of the panel.Reason
This error is caused by leaving the a pop-up slider open while attempting to perform another function.
Solution
Click out of the slider area to close the pop-up slider before testing the movie or accessing another menu.
Random Musings
It's the "Jovial" one right now, but for a while it gave an error:
HTTP error 403: file is none of your business
You have a lot of nerve even clicking on this link.
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Here's a kernel dump I got once while creating a software raid. I tried to post it, but the lameness filter keeps stopping me.
Kernel error
No datacenter is secure if it has windows.
Probably an old one but it would appear relevant.
this is just funny.
Back in the 80s, we got an Amiga 1000, and my dad was trying to hook up an apple image writer to the serial port. Apparently, the Amiga would dump error messages to the serial port, expecting a terminal to be connected. So at some point, he tries to print something, it doesn't work, the machine trys printing an error message to the serial port. So the printer makes it laborious dot matrix printing noises, and then advances the paper, which says "Printer not found".
If the internal temperature on your TiVo reaches a certain point, you're greated with an image of the TiVo dude in flames, with a message "Your TiVo is on fire! Call 911 now!". http://tivo.samba.org/download/belboz/firegood.jpg .
I read a case history that was somewhat similar. Except the error message was in Latin. Someone who had once taken Latin was tracked down, and asked to translate. The translation was something like, "Unto the son is born a brother". When the original programmer was tracked down, he was embarrassed. "But that condition was never supposed to arrive. He had some kind of complicated data structure, where each element could have children and siblings. Except the element at the apex of the tree was supposed to be a special case -- no siblings.
But since it was never supposed to happen the original programmer didn't bother to put a meaningful error message.
Back with good old version 7, make gave error messages like:
make: stop. don't know how to make foo!
if you had typed "make foo" and there was no makefile, or no rule for foo in the makefile.
When computer naive people (remember them) would ask what computers could do, it was fun to have them sit down and type:
make love
Which would, of course, result in:
make: stop. don't know how to make love!
"make war" was another good one.
As a Systems Administrator, I must concur that the most annoying error messages are the ones that tell me to "Consult your Systems Administrator".
load "linux",8,1
"The printer doesn't work."
"Is there an error? What does it say?"
"It's all the way in the next room."
"Ma'am, I need to know the error."
"It says printer error."
"Could you read me exactly what is says?"
"I remembered. That's what it says. Printer error."
"Ok, ma'am? You're talking to the guy that wrote the software. I know for a fact that it doesn't say printer error, because I never wrote an error message that says printer error. Now please put down the phone, go into the other room, and read me the real message."
*click*
True story.
www.HearMySoulSpeak.com
PC Load letter? What the fuck does that mean?
That bitch is lucky I'm not armed.
Remember that what's inside of you doesn't matter because nobody can see it.
Well this one is not really an error message. There was a multimedia company that had a promotional floppy (this was before CD's) that had this gag error message pop up on your mac (it's been a while so I might not get the wording exactly right)
"How would you like if I erased all your files?" with two buttons both of which said "OK". If you clicked on the button it would say "just kidding" if you clicked anywhere else it would call you a coward.
An amusing error I got when trying to run VirtualPC for Windows inside VirtualPC for Mac. Yes, this is real.
$x='S24;r)>63/* h@<5+oZ)32"5cz';$me='phroggy'x$];
$x=~y+ -xz+\0-Tx+;print$_^chop$me for split'',$x;
There's a lightweight library designed for very small programs called owfat.
The switch to link against this library was thus -lowfat
May we never see th
I doubt you could get that message past the suits these days. If you did, I'm sure Paramount would demand a royalty every time the message appeared (Star Trek franchiise).
Gdk-ERROR **: Fatal IO error 9 (Bad file descriptor) on X server :0.0.
attraction: domain error: forces on balls too great
Here is a screenshot.
Not that it's exactly on topic, but here are links to a few other pictures of Windows error messages and bluescreens from the same site that I thought were funny.
Needless to say, I didnt go back to programming for the rest of the day...
The next reboot gave us "NVRAM insanity error." Quite descriptive. :-)
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com