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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."
Working in Technical support for a government website frequented by technophobes with college aged children, I can't count the times I have had people scared to death because their computer had encountered an illegal operation. One woman started yelling at her kids for putting that &#*!ing nappy (napster I am guessing) thing on their machine. It took me 15 minutes to explain the situation to her.. after the 10 minutes of telling her to calm down.. at least she wasn't one of the criers.
Sigs? We don't need no stinking sigs!
Yeah, that's a helpful one. *Anything* would have been more useful than that.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Apple once put out a C compiler famous for its error messages. Who else would make a compiler that states "This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message"?
Searching for Apple compiler error messages on Google picks up dozens of sites with the error messages from this compiler, as well as spreads out the slashdot effect.
Doing a search for Eudora humor error messages on Google shows Eudora to have a similar sense of humor as well ("Memory is tight-Live Dangerously").
Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, and disable all services. At no time does Win2k give you a warning that this might be dangerous, but upon rebooting your system will be totally and irrecoverably screwed, as Win2k will tell you that you need the plug and play service to enable any service that you try to enable, INCLUDING the PnP service itself! Reinstalling restored the services to their settings, but it was still not working very well for reasons I cannot understand, so I had to do a clean install to a separate directory!
You gotta love MS's monolithic integration...
First time my boss went away and left me in charge of everything, our baby, the SGI Indigo2 ( this was a few years ago) decided to die big style. I am not a full blooded geek so scuse me if I don't describe this right, but...
...screen filled with text, went up the screen rapidly filling the whole thing, I think it was like when you start up and all the boot stuff goes past. Finally the screen flashes then does a sort of blue screen of death and the only text on the screen in the top left is DON'T PANIC.
I swear I saw this, if I hadn't seen this with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it, but there I am, the boss is away for the first time on holiday and the computer is saying 'DON'T PANIC' . I knew things were very, very bad.
Can somebody tell me about this error message, how SGI got to put it on their machines, and why?
(end note is boss was cool as ever and the engineers fixed it and we got our data back, but boy, was I afraid to touch that machine again...)
Many years ago, one of my colleagues fell into a weird situation. He was quite good in Assembler and wrote some quite long program. When he finished, he said that he doubts that the program could work. "I should have done some checks before finishing it..." He compiles the program, gets ready for some long debugging and... the program works... He stares at the screen.
"Something is wrong here..."
"What?" I ask.
"The program works...".
"Well it should doesn't it?".
"No, it shouldn't, no one can write Assembler in such volume and avoid errors..."
"But does the program give the right result?"
"Yes, but that's impossible! I nearly guessed how to do it. How can it work?.."
So he starts checking the program. Finds nothing. Debugs it, all seems to work. Then he starts to doubt that the results are correct. So he makes two three checks by hand. Then he writes a small segment of the program and things go nuts.He gets back to the whole program and starts debugging it, step by step. In the end, and after taking four times more what took him to create the program, he approaches me with some clear relief.
"There were errors..."
"So the result was wrong..."
"No, the result was absolutely right!"
"!?!"
"Well, the fact is that I did one offset wrong but in other section of the program, another error in made returned the values to normal. That's why the program worked fine..."
How many such programs exist?
That was a little easter egg/joke put in by Linus I believe, ran to my printer the first time that happened to me (was too worried to wonder how Linux knew my printer was on fire)
Did you try booting from the installation CD, installing the Recovery Console, and then manually reenabling the services using the enable command? Or does the enable command require PnP too?
begin 644
The web browser that came with BeOS had haiku error messages built-in. The only one I remember was a 404 error that went something like
The page that you seek
No longer exists
But many others remain.
Anybody remember any others?
This story from Dennis Ritchie tells of an error message in old versions of Unix that was actually sort of a Bell Labs version of "All your base".
From personal experience, one that sticks out in my mind is from Microsoft's Flight Simulator. If you auger into the ground, it says "Crash". If you bellyflop into Lake Michigan it says "Splash". But if you make a perfect landing, forgetting the minor detail of putting down your landing gear, it'd say "Crash! Lower your gear next time!" This message dates all the way back to MFS 1.0.
N4st0r, trixx0r h0bb1tz0rz! Th3y st0l3 0ur pr3c10uzz!
Microsoft Windows 2000 presents:
; en-us;Q276304
Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Everyone likes to malign the Amiga system crash dialog, simply because it bore the term 'Guru Meditation'. "Ha ha," they joke, "see how primitive and useless the error message was."
You have to understand that this was a massive advance forward. Prior to that, the major systems were first-generation Macs (which displayed a certain number of bomb icons and nothing else); and Apple ]['s, Commodore-64s, and MS-DOS-running PC clones -- all of which displayed nothing; it just (if you were lucky) silently locked up.
Carl Sassenrath, designer and author of the Amiga's 'kernel', thought this state of affairs sucked, so he did something about it. Amiga's Guru Meditations, cryptic though they were, told the programmer which task was responsible for the crash (first hex number), and what exception it generated (second hex number). You could then hit the right mouse button to drop into a very primitive serial debugger to get more information. While these numbers were useless to 95% of the users out there, it was information the user could give to the vendor, helping them track down the problem more easily -- information they never had before.
Meanwhile, everyone just happily tolerated Windoze BSODs, even though they were, and still are, no more informative than Amiga Guru Meditations.
Schwab
Editor, A1-AAA AmeriCaptions
There are two classic errors that occur only on the mac (in my experience)... 1) The error window crashes before it can generate the proper code for the crash leading to such great things such as "Error: -45642487" yes, it generated negative errors. and... 2) While shutting down the computer, an error pops up "Error, please restart the computer" go back to Special > Shutdown or Restart "Error, please restart the computer" repeat indefinitely.
PS/2 connections (on real PS/2s) were designed to be hot pluggable, with the associated buffers and fuses or whatnot. I'd *imagine* ADB is the same, though I can understand why you might not want to risk it.
All manufacturers have skimped in certain designs. Still, with moused/gpm on *NIX, and direct support for hot-plugging (polling? interrupting?) in QNX6's mouse drivers, it's about time we pretended we *had* to take the downtime, and instead start holding the boardmakers responsible if it blows.
Back in the days of middle school, I got this error on one of the Macs when trying to get my floppy back:
Not enough memory to eject disk
Wish I had the karma to spend on the parent.
Here're some Secret Guru Decoder Rings, for the curious: amiga.emugaming.com's version, or the AmigaDOS Online Reference Manual's.
The latter site features a few more errors to chew on, like the colored POST codes and filesystem error numbers; do keep in mind that the 'News Flash' on the site is from 1999(?), and is now only a historical document itself. Check the comments of the recent MorphOS article here if you wonder what everyone's up to now.
try setting the computer name to com1 on any version of windows
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
Eudora is a very nice piece of software. The developers had quite a sense of humor -- I distinctly remember a checkbox for "waste CPU cycles drawing trendy 3d junk".
Eudora was also very good at actually *describing* what an option did (unlike MS software, which usually says something like "The website could not be contacted", which does the end user no good and gives the troubleshooter headaches. Error messages also contained relevant information, and the whole piece of software was fast and stable.
Definitely one of the better written apps I've ever used, and one where it seems that the engineer/techie types had more leeway.
May we never see th
Oh duh. Sorry, you're right. Pre-emptive without memory protection. Examples of cooperative multitasking are Mac OS9 and earlier(tolerable) and Windows 3.1 (well beyond horrible).
:-) )
I met RJ Mical once, the man who wrote Exec, which was the Amiga's multitasking engine. (I think it would be called the scheduler/dispatcher now.) Exec was responsible for the extremely, extremely efficient context switches that made the Amiga so fast and responsive. Motorola used to use his code as an example of 'how to do multitasking on a 68000'. I have a vague memory that Exec did a context switch in something like 11 instructions.
I am rarely speechless, but I was there... what do you aay to a demigod? (well, other than 'thank you', which I think I did manage.
Anyway, thanks for the correction. Duh.
I had a Windows 98 program I was writing and some file got linked that somehow wasn't updated. The address of the error was 0000:cafedead. At first I thought the computer was trying to tell me something. I had another one that was along the lines of "Unable to open the folder foo because it doesn't exist." So did I just double click on a non-existant folder? The one that really bugs me is when I shutdown Windows and it hangs and I am forced to power off. On the next boot I usually get an error message about it not being shut down properly. Why can't Windows unmount the disks BEFORE it hangs? I'd ask for it never to hang, but I don't think I could do that with a striaght face.
Losing faith in humanity one person at a time.
from a driver/application package belonging to a commodity..
"This program no work under this version Windows!!!"
Mac System 7 used to have a file copying progress dialog bug. You'd be happily waiting, the progress bar would reach 2 pixels from the end, then 1....then -1, then -10....huh?
Basically the progress bar would march right off the end of the dialog and continue drawing itself across the desktop. It would evenutally march its way right off the screen...
Cheers,
Ian
try deleting your own MAC address from the machine.
arp -d [your mac addy]
Note to idiots willing to try this:
You will have to completely re-install windows after doing this. You will lose all the data on your hard drives. You will not be able to restore your machine in any other way.
I haven't yet tried this on XP, but I've done demos on 95, 98, nt4 and 2000, and in each time the MCSEs could never recover the system afterwards.
the AC
Hemos is like...sci-fi fans;he thinks technology is cool, but he hasn't bothered to understand the science it's based on
Heh, 1000 comments so noone is going to read this.
The BBC micro's response to trying to renumber a BASIC source with steps of 0:
Silly.