Slashdot Mirror
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!
Earned me $1000 bugs bounty from Netscape back in the day. When you tried to access the URL in the history file through java, it threw a security exception to the effect of "You cannot access the information about http://the/url.here". Chop off the beginning of the sentence, and there's your URL. Silly Netscape programmers.
This error is documented in MS's KB:
"Sometimes Barney Starts Playing Peekaboo on his own." Scary.
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!
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. :)
Anybody that's used C++ templates a lot would know that compile errors can easily be 10-20 lines long (per error).
I don't remember who said it, but C++ templates are clearly the work of the devil.
My personal favorite: Somethin' be hosed with da proc
There's this little gem from Real Media.
C - A language that combines the speed of assembly with the ease of use of assembly.
Yeah, that's a helpful one. *Anything* would have been more useful than that.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
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.
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").
eth0: Something Wicked happened! 0400.
well.. it would be a favorite, if i didnt see it so often.
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!"
This one has been pissing off quite a few people as of late:
/bin/laden
/bin/laden: Not found
# rm -f
#
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...
NET_Send ERROR: NO ERROR
Comment forecast: Bits of genius surrounded by a sea of mediocrity.
Things get fun fast - new boxes are appearing on the screen as fast as it can create them, meanwhile I'm hunting for the xterm session somewhere under 50 boxes that I created the program from and trying to retain focus so that I can type enough to kill the damn thing ....
I remember the first time I seen the Half-Life error "ERROR: Dormant entity is thinking!!" I was impressed with the AI that it had a function built in to kill it off when it became sentient, I laughed forever. Literally.
I can't remember which game it was, something under linux, I got the error "HOLY $HIT there's an error!" Open source kicks a$$
*DrugCheese rants*
"Cannot Start Transaction While in Firehose Mode"
Call on God, but row AWAY from the rocks!
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...)
WTF Does PC Load Letter mean!!!
That's like the fun command you could use on some older versions of make:
$ make love
make: don't know how to make love. Stop.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
For sheer length, it's hard to beat C++ template errors.
I had a friend at work who hund a nice full page error message hung on his wall as a monument to C++ templates.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
[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
"A Catastrophic Error Has Occured.
yeah "too many errors on a line - make fewer" was always one of my faves
Error message: Abstract error.
* Please choose 'formkeys' for the category!
Thank you.
PHP has a pretty bad one. If you try to do a passthrough or fopen of a file that is loaded over http, and the file is 404 or permission denied you get something like:
Error on line 65: fopen("http://my-url/","r") - Success
The developers have some contrived argument about why this isn't a bug, but it sure is confusing the first time you see it. Maybe they are trying to make a philosophical statment, that success is an error?
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
We replaced our financial system this year with the shinest new version of Lawson, so this one has been around for a while. They have something like eight front ends, but the terminal based front end -- The Lawson Insight Desktop, or LID -- happens to be the fastest, and has been around the longest. Each form you load has a default action (Inquire/Add/Chage/etc), but sometimes you run into this:
In an Action Mode of 'No Action' You Must Select an Action to Perform.
"All I ever wanted was to see Larry Wall give Bill Gates a Perl necklace."
http://www.eisenschmidt.org/jweisen
Thats standard error code. You just specify a boolean situation that SHOULD never happen and if it does do this. Thats how errors are done in major programs.
unzip; strip; touch; finger; mount; fsck; more; yes; unmount; sleep
Way to diagnose the problem...
"Because this program is running as root, the error message below cannot be properly formatted and may appear incorrectly:
Failure while attempting %s"
We may make fun of Microsoft, but that really, really cheesed me off.
Service unavailable due to link posted on Slashdot.
Hero's Quest 2 (aka Quest for Glory 2). It was possable to get the game to throw an error that was to the effect of "Oops, you did something we didn't think of" and it would then crash. I was able to do this fairly repeatably against a certian enemy by throwing a fireball at it right as it got close enough for the game to try to switch to the combat interface (you could damage enemies in the normal wlaking around interface with long range stuff, but it switched to combat mode when they got close).
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?
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....
When you're short on disk space and you attempt to start Weblogic, it will log a reflection exception that says
"Error while verifying magic: expected EOF"
If you are unable to see this press Cancel.
Message i got when installing Windows XP
There isn't much like the scent of a fresh harddisk
Actually, that is very poor error reporting. It gives no indication of what the error is. It gives no indication of *where* the error is.
At the very least, the line number should be written to a log file, with as much data as you can pull together. A better thing to do is to write a stack trace to a log file, with a snapshot of the environment when it occurred (what you tried to do, locals, globals, etc).
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!
While in college, we did our assembly programming on an LSI-11 single board computer. Whenever you mistyped a command it gave you the most helpful of all error messages: What?
The dogcow says "Moof!"
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!
A popup dialog box saying:
Error: Operation completed successfully.
No indication of what software generated it or why.
On windows of course.
According to the Camel book Perl may output the following error:
but only if there's a bug in the regexp parser. (I've certainly never seen it).IIRC awk on HP-UX used to only have one error, something along the lines of:
And I remember a long time ago seeing some Windows service fail to start "due to the following error: Success".
#exclude <ms/windows.h>
* Need To Add Memory Dealication Code Here *
-Message after exiting Gnome from an exported X session.
This has to be my all time favorite, but PCAnywhere for Windows will give me "Error loading error message." on boot.
Q325038: Calendar Type May Change to Japanese Emperor Era When Outlook Runs
cpeterso
After a 20+minute download (with 33.6kbps isp)I launched the Virus Definition Update package only to get the confirmation:
"The following file may have a Virus, contiue anyway?"
This was a NortonAV popup messagebox, not netscape or ie.
If you think
I cam across this error while trying to trouble shoot a hardware problem on a Win98 machine.
"The device is not working properly because the device is not working properly"
Thanks Bill for the info!
This page in particular has the forbearer error to Ellen Feiss:t ml
http://www.mixed-up.com/markb/humor/mpc.h
"Huh ?"
Does it make you happy you're so strange?
I am sure that everyone who has used Linux has at some point or other made the mistake of putting a blank line at the top of the /etc/passwd file - then when you try and login or pretty much do anything on a console, you get that message :
:)
"You do not exist - go away."
I had hit happen once or twice when I was new to Linux.. it can be a little concerning
"Hey! Unless this is a nude love-in, get the hell off my property!!"
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
A couple of years ago the company I worked for used SCO Unix. Once an error popped up that said "No Sleeping in Stream Head of Pipe".
____________________________
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
I used to label my drive "DEFECTIVE" - so that whenever I did a DIR, it said - "The volume label on drive C: is DEFECTIVE"
These are my friends, See how they glisten. See this one shine, how he smiles in the light.
Yep. I had a Mac LC. I changed my bomb error to say, "someone set up us the bomb!" Fun, editing error messages. There's a hack somewhere that replaces the BSOD with Haiku:
Windows XP crashed.
I am the blue screen of death.
No one hears your screams.
One for some disk-scanning tool was:
Three things are certain:
Death, taxes and loss of data.
Guess which has occurred.
Then there's the
+++OUT OF CHEESE ERROR+++
+++MELON MELON MELON+++
+++REDO FROM START+++
error, copied from The Hogfather
I hereby place the above post in the public domain.
Has these funny errors to laugh at
Nero-burning ROM for Linux!
1. MS Excel: Cannot quit Microsoft Excel. [OK]
.... bla bla
2. MS Outlook: The COM Transaction Integrator Resync TP service depends on the SnaBase service which failed to start because of the following error: The operation completed successfully.
3. Cannot copy 16SID_~1. The file exists.
4. MS FrontPage: Out of memory while attempting to allocate 0 byte.
5. MS Word: Cannot execute the command since Unknown is busy.
6. MS Windows Update: This update solves the security problem with an uncontrolled buffer in the SNMP service in Windows XP. You can find more information in MS Security Bulletin MS02-006. Download the problem now to stop malicious users from
7. The window Internet Explorer or the ActiveX-control on this page is busy. If you close this window there might be problems. Do you wish to close the window? [OK/Cancel]
8. Winsock Error: -10000. No Error.
9. Dreamweaver: An unnamed file contains an invalid path. [OK]
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
...but they're mostly graphic. I hold a "Windows Gems" folder with screenshots of the best ones.
One is a confirmation dialog box in which you have FIVE buttons: Yes, OK, Abort, No, OK.
One is Easy Cd creator saying that "The CD cannot be erased. The CD could be dirty of damaged. Clean the CD and retry. Usually, erasing the CD is an acceptable solution". Never figured out the last part of it.
Then I have 2 different flavours of dialog boxes titled "System Error" saying "Operation Completed Succesfully" and only an OK button.
I also have a scary "Cannot exit Microsoft Excel" (!!!) one, plus a whole subfolder of terrible Italian messages translated from the English original with some automatic software..... some real pearls in there ("Guidatore" instead of driver, "Galleggiante" instead of Floating Point)
Vacuum cleaners suck. Kings rule.
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.
The Progress-based POS system we were developing indexed into a text file of error messages. We would often edit the file to spice up the error messages that filled our days with development horror. Occasionally our development databases got mistakenly deployed to customer sites.
I still remember the call from a curious CFO who called to inquire as to the reason behind the "**no ad_mstr record available you chowderhead!" messages he kept getting.
And personally I prefer the ones that said "Keyboard not found; press F1 to continue"
RMN
~~~
What really gets on my tits, is microsofts excuse for an error message:
"Please contact your system administrator."
- I am the fucking adminsitrator and I still don't have a fucking clue!
One day at work a guy a few isles down starts screaming, and everyone went to see what was wrong. Apparently, his NT machine got a Red Screen of Death! Totally not making this up. Don't know what he did to make it so beat red mad...
-- Kircle
I loved the Atari ST error messages. Compared to some things Windows sometimes spits out, they were actually quite clear and helpful.
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
I was graced with this error when I compiled the FreeBSD kernel with GCC's "-malign-double" option.
Malloc type lacks magic.
I still have no idea what that is supposed to mean.
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
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"
I got the title as an error message from RSX-11M Fortran-IV Plus in about 1982. Turns out, after bothering the folks at DEC for days, that the problem was a mis-aligned named COMMON section. Why didn't they just SAY so???
Dog is my co-pilot.
once wrote some code to control a wafer-handling robot. Most of the problems the robot would run into could be fixed with operator intervention. There were all kinds of messages in there like "please move the arm to the home position."
An engineer was in the lab late one night working with the robot when he got the error message "You're screwed pal."
It was alpha code, and never would have gone into the field, but he was pissed nonetheless. After he cooled down, he admitted that the message was in fact very accurate and that at least he knew that it was time to go home.
Hehehe....That brings back memories. I was a kid when I had that. I can remember opening up the file and changing all the phrases to contain rude words. Of course, it took me a while to figure out how a hex editor is different to a normal text editor.
[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.
IIS...
--- Hindsight is 20/20, but walking backwards is not the answer.
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.
The POP3 server service depends on the SMTP server service, which
:-)
failed to start because of the following error:
The operation completed successfully.
-Windows NT Server v3.51-
Error 95: Bad user input, replace user and try again
What the fuck is that?!
pr0n - keeping monitor glass spotless since 1981.
I had a program called Topez Sound Studio that repeatedly gave me the error message:
Shit.
I was compiling a program once (I sure as hell wish I remembered which program it was) and it told me that my refrigerator did not have enough beer. The program still compiled of course...it just flashed that error across the screen.
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
From a TI-86 calculator, in the middle of my math final:
ERROR 29: BAD GUESS
Not exactly what I wanted to hear from my calculator.
This space intentionally left blank.
'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
A Friend (not a FOAF, just a friend) worked for a company that wrote software for optimising the layout on ICs. The error they coded wasn't ever supposed to be encountered outside the development area, unfortunately the got a call from a customer asking what
"Error: Wrong Gender, unable to have sex."
meant.
"Draco dormiens nunquam titillandus."
"Too many flobject code blocks in room 87."
I got this one once at about 4:30 in the morning trying to get a sound card to work with the game Full Throttle
"The guide is definitive, reality is frequently inaccurate."
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.
I work in the bowels of an internet company, designing conversion scripts which are invoked by a web scheduler and whose output is never seen by anybody save me. So for the first few months I was there I generally didn't bother cleaning up any of the debug error messages.
Occasionally, something I wrote a while back will break and generally I'll go in and fix it. I usually get a chuckle out of the old error messages which generally are based around whatever non-sequitor humor is popular that week:
"File Not Found. But I'll look harder."
"The invoked class started Okay. Anything else you can't deal with is your own problem."
"All your ads-20021003.xml are belong to httpd!"
"Server reports status as: 'Zzzzzzz....'" (and the genious here, see, is the number of z's corresponded to the number of 30 second wait states between database checkups.)
"An unknown error has ocurred. Don't ask me, I just work here."
Hey freaks: now you're ju
Not just a bad error, a catastrophic one. Bizarrely this error never happens when it really is a bad error, but every time I see it I picture Hiroshima.
Schnapple
...on a 60gb IDE hard drive (just a few months ago). "Cannot install Windows NT, Hard Drive too big!"
No joke. And I have a sneaking suspicion that windows 95 wouldn't install because I had 512 mb of ram, and it didn't know what to do with it.
--Robert
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.
I used an IBM 1130 in college (yes, we had electricity in those days). There were half a dozen or so status lamps on the front console. These were bulbs inset into rectanglar holes, with a chunk of translucent colored plastic containing a phrase for the status. One was a green piece of plastic labeled "Power" and another was a red one labeled "Parity Error".
The computer was down for a week due to a parity error when the system was powered up. The IBM tech couldn't figure it out. Eventually somebody looked at a picture of the console in the manual and noticed the Power and Parity Error indicators had been switched. The system was working all along!
Probably an old one but it would appear relevant.
I know someone who, in college, changed our local instance of OS/360-MVT to that instead of giving the traditional
message, it would say
Adrian
An unknown error occurred because an unknown error occurred.
exception in swapper - core file dumped (failed!) ...but worst of all:
oops - kernel panic:
epc = 0xdeadbeef
vaddr = 0xdeadbeef
ECC uncorrectable double bit errors reported!
sda0 reports bad blocks!
sda1 reports bad blocks!
fsck failed - inodes missing!
processor temp exceeding threshold!
fan tray 0 failed!
Coffee supplies dangerously low.
Someone you trust is one of us.
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".
I was playing around with a compiler a friend wrote for a compiler class..... it had only one error message: "You lied: You told me this was a program."
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
Error: I have no root and I must scream.
(Couldn't find the hard drive)
Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes. --E. W. Dijkstra
Comment removed based on user account deletion
and two buttons:
For a while I kept getting blue screens on my win2k box at work (turns out it was a hardware issue). Most mornings I would come in to:
IRQ LESS THAN OR EQUAL TO ZERO
RFC2119
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"?
Maybe the programmer coding the errors is a parent, and had read Alexander and the Terrible, Horrible, No Good, Very Bad Day recently.
Are the error messages the same globally (i.e., even in Australia)?
(Okay, if you're not giggling yet, read this link)
Get off my launchpad!
Earth Rotates in Wrong Direction
When men used to be men
My favorite error message was the single word "jackpot". It issued from the version 6 Unix "diff" program on seemingly random occassions. (This was the same version of Unix that contained the comment in the kernel "You are not expected to understand this.")
I was messing around with an old parallel port drive in DOS, when the device driver flaked out or something. DOS helpfully printed out this error message :
Out of paper on Drive D:
Hum, sure.
Religion is the best example of mass psychosis
That's why you make every "never-see" error message slightly different. For example, "Error: You should not see this", "Error: You won't see this", etc.
Then you just grep for the exact error message and you know where it was, without having to bombard the user with gobbledygook like "Exception 035 occured at ab098643:e80sd98, eax was 09843609" etc. If I were a dumb user I'd rather see something I can read
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?
I got this one when working in VB6 one day...
"Not enough memory to display error message"
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
"Slashdot requires you to wait 20 seconds between hitting 'reply' and submitting a comment."
I don't know about the other stuff, but your OSPF adjacensy errors are caused by the routers not being level with each other. This can cause hello packets to pool near the interface of whichever router is nearer the ground. You can fix this problem by violently shaking the cable near the router interface for about 1 minute while it's plugged in.Good luck!
Maskirovka
My spelling is checked by Tacospill 3.1
That's a javascript error in IE. Real helpful.
Everyone knows that damage is done to the soul by bad motion pictures. -Pope Pius XI
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 used to label my drive "DEFECTIVE" - so that whenever I did a DIR, it said - "The volume label on drive C: is DEFECTIVE"
A sign of hacky developers is a bunch of production files, tables, and directies named things like "test5" or "try3".
Even I have fell into that trap once or twice when there were deadlines looming and there is not enough time to change a bunch of test references back to real names.
Table-ized A.I.
Error: Success
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.
Not exactly an error message. More of a message error, but I'm sure alot of people have heard of the "Please insert dick and press any key to continue..." urban legend. Ouch.
Imagine the lawsuit when some newbie takes it literally while running porn software.
Tech support line: "You reformatted your what?"
Table-ized A.I.
Beep beep beep beep!
Yep. You gotta love people who either a) mess with things they don't understand or b) deliberately try to break things...and then find that they're broken.
Granted, there exists an argument that even when apparently working correctly most MS products are badly broken, but that's for another post...
~Idarubicin
Recursive error due to recursive error due to recursive error due to recursive error due to recursive error due to.....
Table-ized A.I.
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.
ERROR ERROR: FATAL ERROR
At which point not only did Wordstar hang, but so did the Apple ][+!
ttyl
Farrell
CAN-CON 2019 - Ottawa's only book oriented Science Fiction Convention! October 18-20, Sheraton Hotel, Ottawa, Canada h
$ man "my ass"
No manual entry for my ass
bytesmythe
Hypocrisy is the resin that holds the plywood of society together.
-- Scott Meyer
Also of interestError message hall of shame
After finishing a database application I got a complaint from the accounts payable office that the new program was telling her "money is not an object"
"I propose we leave math to the machines and go play outside." - Calvin
"Microsoft Word cannot edit the unknown."
"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
If you try and install SQL Server 2000 Service Pack 1 on Windows 98, it proceeds for a while and then fails with a messagebox:
"Unable to run the script files."
Of course, they didnt think to mention which files, or why they couldnt run...
"You're running me on a live system! That's incredibly stupid."
This popped up in a RedHat 7.1 system while trying to get some QLogic HBA adapters to work.
One of the hex crashcodes of the X25 packet-switches I worked on on the JANET network in the 1980s had a crash code of "EEEEDEAD".
Matt
Stack traces from within a servlet/J2EE container can be just as bad. "An exception was raised in Blah (called by Foo called by Bar called by Baz called by Quux called by yo mamma called by the illuminati called by the paper boy called by the log cabin republicans called by yo mamma again (boy, she done get around) called by larry wall called by 'jenny' the transvestite stripper homless man called by cowbody neal called by ..." on and on for several hundred lines...
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Many years ago on my Amiga (call me a fanatic, but I still love that machine) there was a very cool file management program. For the life of me I can't remember the name. Anyway, if you tried to do certain things, like delete a floppy disk, or format a directory, it would pop up a message "User Stupidity Error." Finally, some code that tells it like it is. I wish I could put "User Stupidity Errors" in my programs at work . . .
Does anybody remember what the name of the program was?
Heh, I had some funky x86 hardware that often caused Linux to crash. I can't remember the details exactly, but I think there was usually a big dump to screen, followed by:
Aiee, killing interrupt handler!
And the system halted. I always gotta kick out of my computer screaming "Aiee!"
Once I nearly went "Aiee!" because my system crashed (in the same manner) after a 175 day uptime, my personal record.
-kidlinux.
"The Lord helps those who help themselves"
A riot those old Bell Labs guys!
Cheers,
Bill
bamph
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.
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.
With tcsh enter 'bill gates'. tcsh's helpful spelling corrector will answer 'kill gates?'
Karma: Bizzare (mostly affected by varying internal caffeine levels.)
someone please explain why this is funny, or at least what the picture means. or is it just the fact that there was a picture?
The best error message I ever received was from an older version of Eudora on the Mac.
If you close all the windows for Eurora but still have the appliaction open, nad start typing a message it will respond with:
"You might as well stop typing because nobody is listening".
Totally Zen.
Grounded wrist straps are a bit extreme (I ground myself against the power supply - ie; grounded metal, and our carpet isn't very succeptable to static build up at all), but remembering not to plug/unplug a keyboard while the computer is powered is simple and requires little or no effort on your part. Why do something that's potentially dangerous - just because you can?
For the record, I have fried the keyboard controller on a motherboard by plugging in the keyboard while it was powered, and we have a motherboard on ice right now with blown PS/2 ports because the owner unplugged the keyboard before it was powered off.
Isn't the extra 10 seconds worth saving an hour's labour and the cost of a new motherboard? Come on; use a little common sense.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
wait for it...
Your browser is wrong.
Give a man a fish and he will eat for a day.
Teach him to eat and he will fish forever.
This was in the back of PC Magazine a few weeks ago. Sorry I can't remember the specifics.
Setting: A published piece of software, in a moderately obscure error case. The first half of the error message is fabricated (since I don't remember the specifics) but the second half tells volumes about programmers and their motivations:
This feature has not yet been correctly implemented. Bad Programmer. No donut.
Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana.
.
Barbara and Victora... ACCESS FORBIDDEN!lameness
filter
sucks
She approached me because she couldn't understand why she kept getting this error. It said, "Not a logical operator." I think she took it personally. ;)
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
In the 70's I worked in a college computer center equipped with an RCA Spectra 70 batch-oriented system. I was fixing a problem with one of the line printers (paper stacking) when I got a bad static shock from the printer cabinet, at which point the printer abruptly stopped printing.
I walked over to the operator's console to report the problem, and was interrupted by the console teletype printing a message (paraphrased):
Job 00371 has device LPT1 in silent death
While we were trying to figure that out, the console continued to print out messages every 30 seconds or so:
Job 00358 has device MTA0 in silent death
Job 00364 has device CDR0 in silent death
Job *SYS* has device CPU0 in silent
Classic Mac OS had a great error. When you had a window for a folder open, and tried to drag and drop the folder's icon into that window, you'd get something like "A folder may not be placed within itself."
- Dan I.
one afternoon, while pushing the limits of an Apple II+, me and my cousin managed to get the system to display "Call Kernel xxx-xxxx"
at the wise age of 13, we decided to pick up the phone and call the "number" (hey, call kernel - why not, maybe he could help us!)
to further weird things out, there was some funky "government-sounding" answering queue on the number we called, so we hung up quickly and watched the doors and windows for the next hour...
A former colleague of mine encountered a gem in Win95. Unfortunately, I have no screen shot, but and it's not really an error message, but anyway;
While, I believe, double clicking on a directory icon in the explorer in order to open it, a dialog box occurs:
"The files in this directory are corrupt. Do you want to move these files to the trashcan? [OK]"
Only one button, OK, was providing for answering this fatal question...
Which reminds me of a wonderful message I got when I was installing a version of Rational's UML modelling package Rose back in... 97 I guess. No screenshot here either, and I probably remember the exact wording wrong, but something along the lines of:
"Rational Rose has detected that UNKNOWN is installed on your computer. Do you want to uninstall UNKNOWN before continuing? [OK] [Cancel]"
May we live long and die out
When I program the message that kills me is:
"Error Expected"
I wish I was expecting it.
Classic Mac apps had some cool error messages. OS 7.6 had a crash that produced a "Bluets and Granola Bars!" error. OS 7.6.1 went one better with "Just figured out what BETA stands for". This is documented at MacVirus
Course I'm also partial to Amiga's "Guru Meditation error" or the Atari ST's cherry bombs (the number of cherry bombs indicated the severity of the error, leading one writer to comment that if you got six or seven (forget the number) bombs, your Atari might as well jump off the desk and hurl itself into the trash!)
Error: PERROR17 - Error description for 'ERR:GeneralErrMsg' not available.
I'm still not sure where it came from
09
try setting the computer name to com1 on any version of windows
http://Lenny.com
4 great justice!
In 1996 I was working at a Web development firm called Giant Step in Chicago. At that time a lot of people (including Bill Gates) still thought the Web wasn't going to change much. I had referred a friend, named Andy (who may read this) for a programming job there. He was immediately assigned to work on the new Oldsmobile Web site, which accounted (at the time) for something like 3/4 of our annual revenue. The is old enough to have been missed by the Internet Archive. What a shame. Oldsmobile was going to use a really new markup feature: Frames. Andy was (like most geeks) a pretty antisocial person, so in his tag, he always typed: You're a loser, get a real browser.</noframes> When Oldsmobile launched the new Web site, they launched it on dialup capable consoles right in some dealer showrooms. The consoles were shipped running the latest and greatest (Windows 95) and a brand new browser from Microsoft. Yes, it was flawed back then too. Andy didn't know he had it right -- MS wasn't even a player then, and no one took them seriously. The time between when the first dealer called our client-service rep complaining that the new system had called him a loser to the time Andy was fired, packed, and gone was about 10 minutes.
I've done it a few times myself, same thing, no problem. I know 2 people that fried motherboards while doing it with the older AT-style connector though. (Which, again, I've done a half dozen times without problem..) since I heard of the problem I stopped doing it. How am I supposed to know if the mb was designed correctly to prevent that problem?
While running some trajectory simulations through MacSpin 2.0 on my Mac Classic back in 1991, I had MacSpin bail on me and the entire System froze to this bizarre gray screen with a single dialogue box. It said:
You have entered the Twilight Zone at sector -27359. Continue?
The only button said 'OK'.
I actually called Apple about this error, and after chewing on it for about 12 hours, they called me back and said they felt it was a trap left in by the programmers of MacSpin, and to just reboot.
My all-time favorite is the old "ren" error - "Duplicate file name or file not found".
If it's not immediately funny - parse it:
"Duplicate file name" = "The file exists"
"File not Found" = "The file doesn't exist"
So...basically the error message says "the file exists or it doesn't"....
Hacker Public Radio is our Friend
I didn't make this up. I saw it in someone else's signature file. Obviously a response to the MS error message:
General Failure reading drive a:
Naturally I laughed.
- IP
KMAG YOYO ... reportedly an MVS error. Displayed only when a theoretically impossible state occurred. Once, while testing the system, it came up. The old programmer said it meant: "kiss my *ss guys, you're on your own".
I'm not sure what version of Windows it was with, but I once saw the error message that was something like...
Error deleting file: No more disk space.
gotta light?
was pretty good. (It was "No match").
Also earlier Unix make, (not GNU make) had a nice error response to make love. ("don't know how to make love. Stop.")
One of my favorites, as a complete newbie in 1979, was probagly the consequence of typing ld in place of ls in some long forg The result was "bad magic number". That truly had me baffled.
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
TeX can produce the error
"Interwoven alignment preambles are not allowed"
and all the TeXbook has to say about it is:
"If you have been so devious as to get this
message, you will understand it, and you will
deserve no sympathy"
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.
Are you sure some of those aren't ebonics error messages?
I remember way back in the 2.0.x days , I tried enabling SMP support on a dual P150 machine. This was when doing so entailed editing the makefile by hand.
Well , I apparently did something wrong , because on booting my shiny new SMP enabled kernel I got the error message,
"This should never happen. You must have done something extraordinarily stupid. I suggest you fix it."Oddly enough , that day I considered myself honoured.
The fact that no one understands you doesn't mean you're an artist.
Of course. If you are saving a file to disk, disk full, write error, write protect, etc are all examples of errors that should be expected and allowances made. Getting a seg fault would be UNexpected and falling back to the apps generic error handler is probably acceptable.
Democrat delenda est
A few years ago, we were installing some drivers for a scanner on a computer in a classroom... The installation appeared to go fine, but the software added something to the RUN= line in Win 3.11's INI. When Windows restarted, and that program executed, it brought up a dialog that said:
"System was destroyed."
ESC:wq
Who's the genius that came up with this one?
Pretend I said something meaningful or insightful here.
Sh!t !!!
Could this be why I have a machine with an intermittently working PS/2 keyboard port? I'm almost certain it's been hot plugged.
(Just for the record, I've probably hot plugged PS/2 keyboards hundreds of times but I can only think of this one instance where it POSSIBLY caused a problem.)
Noooo, no, no, no. Just rewrite the 'autoexec.bat' file and stick in a memory manager, that's all. Just take a minute. Don't worry!
But the funniest "error message" I've ever seen was:
win.exe not found:
(A)bort, (R)etry, (C)heer
utter rubbish
This is from the classic MPW C 68k compiler. There were lots more messages, most of which I've forgotten. Apparently the writer was an englishman with a truly droll sense of humor.
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;
I have heard, however, that there are special versions of Solaris that, when coupled with the correct special Sun hardware, let you pull out the processor while the OS is up. Now that's cool, but _why_ would you want to do such a thing?
Message to confirm the creation of the CPU
firmware IOCDS file:
File is Writed
A friend who used to work on Burroughs equipment told me he once that message.
I like the 'possible' part. (It could be neither! Quantum physics no doubt involved!)
What's really scary is I understood most of the message that prompted this article...
Garg
Garg
Alumnus, Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters
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
We sent this out to the big-six accounting firms in our tax-compliance application several years ago:
"Shut 'er down Clancy - She's pumpin' mud."
Another year this one went out:
"So sad, too bad, nighty night, zzzz."
In a zero downtime environment, you may need to replace a faulty processor while the system is still hot. Most of these systems are multiprocessor though, which is why it exists.
Tired of legitimate data sources? Try UNCYCLOPEDIA
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.
Unknown Error in "step 5. Profit!"
Table-ized A.I.
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.
You mean it's impossible to write an endlessly recursive loop in ASP? I guess I must have missed the fanfare when Microsoft solved the halting problem.
This is where the problem and solution goes (ErrorCode, ExtraInfo)
Help Brendan pay off his student loans
What, I need to elaborate?
Totally OT but here's the deal on that:
- most newer PS/2 keyboards can be hot plugged with no problem
- most older (AT-style) keyboards with a PS/2 adaptor will cause damage
- the damage is actually caused by a filter capacitor in the keyboard drawing too much juice initially for the poor little fuse on the PS/2 port to handle. If you look at any mbd with PS/2 ports (and you know what a surface mount fuse looks like) you'll see one each for the mouse and keyboard
- newer keyboards (anything made in the last 4 or 5 years) are better designed and have smaller filter capacitors, hence less risk (if any) of blowing the fuse
- if you do blow the fuse you can just bridge it with a carefully bent paperclip or a bit of careful soldering; I've never seen any other part of the circuit take any damage after bridging, even with repeated hot-plugs of the keyboard (or mouse) which toasted the fuse originally
But yeah, hot-plugging anything that isn't actually designed for it is kind of asking for trouble.
A friend who has since moved to Chicago had described to me the kernel panic message in SCO Unix. When it finished panicking, the machine's last words were "Aieeee! I'm going to die now!..." The machine never rebooted after than, and they just installed Linux on it afterwards.
For the record, I had an older version of Linux on a 486 once that KP'ed on me - it had a similar message at the bottom of the screen. Have any other Linux users out there experienced this?
This sig no verb.
Yeah. It's some pretty amazing stuff. A friend of mine attempted to put together (It didn't work) a linux kernel patch that allowed hot swapping of kernels (updates).Didn't work tho the theory was reasonably sound. How would ones microsoft friends feel on that? "I just upgraded to a new operating system and the web server was up the whole time."
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Return_Value = Otay_Buckwheat;
Right up there with 0xDEADBEEF- RS6000 proc's when the registers aren't initialized.
In the future, I would want to not be isolated from my friends in the Space Station.
from a driver/application package belonging to a commodity..
"This program no work under this version Windows!!!"
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.
I was in one of those intense periods where we needed a clean compile every day. So I would code for a couple of hours, fire off a compile, and then monitor it into the night. Needless to say, after a few days, I was pretty wiped.
Late One evening, deep into the compile, the dreaded hang occurred (you could tell because the cassettes stopped turning). With trembling hand, I reached for the red button to see my fate. I pushed the button (at least I think I pushed the right button).
The console began to print... In my sleep-deprived stupor, I could only stare. Then I hesitantly reached out and pushed the red button again. The machine burped, The cassettes began to turn, I could only watch and wait the remaining hours of the compile to see if I had running code.
And no, I could never reproduce the message! (Note: if anyone cares, this was a Burroughs B-80, compiling Burroughs S-1000 software)
My fave is still an error from the TRSDOS days:
Error: Unprintable Error
Come on! You can tell me.
Viv
Gmail invites for ip
Needless to say, he was pissed, and I was laughing...
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
No - what should happen is something like ...
An unexpected error has occurred. The details of the error have been recorded in the log file:
Log file name
Please email the above file to devteam@company.invalid.
Your currently-opened files have been saved as the files:
Filename 1
Filename 2
[Application name] will now quit.
and then quit as gracefully as possible.
This does a couple of things:
1. It saves the state in a logfile.
2. It tells the user what is going on, without confusing them.
3. It allows the user the option of opening the logfile and seeing what info they will be sending the developer.
4. It allows the user to recover their work (hopefully - not always possible).
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
My favorite machine erroring and dying has to be an Amiga - aside from the standard "Guru meditation error", Amigas die spectacularly when faced with a non-AmigaDOS program running. Typically, when such a program dies (I would suspect a buffer overflow from what happens), rather than an error, you get a sound and light show. Because of the way the custom sound and video processors are tied into the system, such an error gives snow, funky sound, etc until the system either freezes or (rarely) reboots.
Reason is the Path to God - Anon
Ok. This is a bad admission but here goes. I *used* to have a bad habit of using bizare dada names for test variables so they would stick out at me when cleaning code up for production. Some of them where just ludicrous. I realised the practice was getting way too whacky when the boss came in red in the face asking what the fuck a variable called "MaryCarefullyWipesHerFrock" was doing in his precious code, and why it was commented that it was "being taken from behind by intDuckMonster"
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
I always liked:
%man arse
no manual entry for arse
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back in the old TRS-80 model 1 (level 1 basic), there were ONLY THREE errors. wow. how generous.
they were:
goto and gosub line numbers that didn't exist
syntax errors and things like that.
divide by zero, overflows, general errors like that.
--
"It is now safe to switch off your computer."
If you type GET LOST on a Commodore 64, it will respond with ILLEGAL DIRECT,
For every post, there is an equal and opposite re-post.
How would ones microsoft friends feel on that?
Personally, I don't think they'd give a shit as you stated it didn't work. That being said, I think they'd ask you why that mission critical server was not in a redundant load-balanced cluster/farm.
I played a joke on my company a few years ago. I screen capped and altered an error message to say "The radiation shielding on your monitor has failed, please do not sit directly in front of your monitor."
I placed this image in the middleof a copy of a page from our website, then sent a company-wide email exlaining the new update they needed to see. After a few people asked me about the error message (also asking me to order new monitors...), I copied a CNN health page and gave it a few minor alterations. I wrote a fake explanation of a new virus going around called the "Microwave Virus" that overloaded the UV guns in your monitor. This exposure can cause people to feel tired, irritable, and a few other normal things you feel while you're at work. I then renamed my computer to 'www.cnn-news.com' and posted the page using MS Personal Web Server. I sent out a 'Sysadmin Virus Warning' and went to lunch.
When I got back from lunch, a group of my coworkers were trying to figure out if they should go home or if they should see their doctors first. Heh.
They weren't so stunned that I faked the message, but rather that I had faked CNN's site so well. Pity they missed the typo in the error message.
Needless to say, I didnt go back to programming for the rest of the day...
I once put a message "Low Revenue Alarm" in a system for a commercial time-sharing service bureau, back when CPU time cost real money. When billed revenue per unit time fell below a reasonable value for a few seconds, but there was work queued to be done, this message came up. Usually, it indicated some kind of resource deadlock, although it would also come up when the operators fell behind on tape mounting. The operators hated it; the CEO loved it.
...happened when I was trying to free some space on a small drive being used on a NT4 machine.
Upon selecting the desired files and hitting Delete, I received the following error:
Cannot delete XXXXXXX: Not enough free space.
Perl - $Just @when->$you ${thought} s/yn/tax/ &couldn\'t %get $worse;
Of course, if the computer has "Halt on Keyboard" enabled, that's a sure-fire way of discovering the problem.
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
Not really an "error", but still sounds strange.
Trolls lurk everywhere. Mod them down.
The next reboot gave us "NVRAM insanity error." Quite descriptive. :-)
jim frost
jimf@frostbytes.com
My boots usually take so long that I turn the machine on and then *leave*, go get something from the 'fridge, come back in time to answer the LILO question before it times out and picks a default.
It takes my machine at least 20 seconds just to get to the part where it starts looking on the hard drive for a boot sector.
Don't label something "offtopic" unless you know the topic well enough to tell what's on topic.
For starters, there was the original PDP 11 C compiler. It only had three error messages:
Syntax Error.
Undefined Symbol.
Register Lockup.
But the real classic came from the Honeywell Level 6:
"Not enough memory to log off."
A hint to all you coders out there: Allocate any message buffer you will need to logout/disconnect/close at login/connect/open time (this rule is especially applicatble to streams drivers).
An engineer who ran for Congress. http://herbrobinson.us
I got one of those also... it still bugs me to this day. This was upon bootup:
The dump
because an error of type 84 occurred.
One time I mounted a floppy disk that had some problems under Linux. I know it had problems because when mount mounted it, it said it was mounting it read-only because there were errors detected in the filesystem. I copied some data off it, then unmounted it. When I unmounted it, I got a message that said, "Attempting to write to a read-only filesystem. uhh..."
I don't know why something was attempting to write to the disk on umount.
I think one of my favorite messages was the message that, that old Apple ][e printing program (what the hell was it called? Printshop? I can't remember) would display when it was calculating what commands to send to the printer next. It would flash the word `THINKING' on the screen in a huge font and alternate the "colors". (It wasn't actually a color monitor--it was monochrome but it had the capacity for bright text as well.)
And let's not forget the error message Haikus (sp?) that people were playing with before. I really liked some of those. I think that some real programs (for programmers, not regular users) should try error messages delivered as Haiku. It would be neat. The point would be to have more than one Haiku for the same thing; then always follow that with the no-nonsense error message down below the Haiku. The Haiku would be like a little treat to offset all the compiler errors. Sort of like a quote of the day.
Now back to Linux. Quite a long time ago, I foolishly tried to run X Windows on a 486 with only 16MB. It didn't exactly crash, it just kept the hard drive going non-stop. Even when I didn't move the mouse for over a minute. When I would go to shutdown X Windows, over in the console where I had typed startx&, there'd be a status message like this:
Sending server the TERM signal,
waiting for server to shutdown...
Sometimes, that's all there'd be. But because this machine had only 16MB and the hard drive was thrasing so much from running X, everything was drastically slowed down. Sometimes, after about 30 sec-1 min, I'd see:
Server too slow to shutdown
Sending server the KILL signal,
waiting for server to die...
In plain vanilla MS-DOS, if DOS fails to read from a floppy disk in a certain special way, what can happen is this:
C:\>dir a:
[the disk churns and time passes...]
[some more time passes]
Volume in drive A is unlabled
[again time passes]
[still more time passes]
Fail on INT 24
C:\>
If you're stupid or unlucky enough to be in a situation where you have to make a batch file for COMMAND.COM, then all the error messages are cryptic. Because, as the script executes, there's no indication of what line caused the error message (unless you do an echo on and there are certain situations where that won't help. All you see is stuff like:
Bad command or filename
Syntax error
File not found
all the way down the screen.
Oh yeah, and then there's INTERCAL, where the compiler error messages are actually intended to be not understandable.
Actually, the message ?Syntax error was really cryptic the first time I saw it, since I had no idea what the hell `s-Y-n-tax' was. (I was 12.) In general, every (status or error) message a computer gives you is cryptic without context. Ironic since computers can't really understand context, eh?
Furry cows moo and decompress.
Kernel32.dll is using too many system resources and must be terminated...
It couldn't be MORE accurate!
-=Lothsahn=-
if qmail-send can't talk with qmail-spawn (or a few other processes) it simply quits with the error:
cannot start: hath the daemon spawn no fire?
We've banned the usage of qmail because of it. Any software package that prints out unhelpful errors like that doesn't belong on our servers.
I remember a job I had a long time ago where a co-worker was trying to decipher similar messages on a NEC telephone switch. They (nec) have since gotten a lot better since then, but I got the impression that the program was really only have translated properly. Either that or the original program was written in engrish and that was that.
Wouldn't suprise me - I mean the only way to log into it was using a 300 baud modem/terminal (I kid you not - you could not make it go any faster) - the thing reaked of not being complete.
I get a similar error (same hhgttg gfx) if I load my old sparcstation 10 out to much (like compiling a kernel - 2.4.17). It seems to do firewalling just fine otherwise.
I've had people tell me that you cannot fry a circuit which is energized via static. If this is true, then it must be because I hot-plugged it. On the other hand, people tell me that it's easy to kill a keyboard controller with static. If the first set of people are wrong, then that could be it.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
They made Motorola 68k-based (I had some with 68020s) Unix workstations (which ran DomainOS) which are the source of UNC paths, except they used forward slashes like sane people; //machinename/usr/src or what have you. The machines I'm familiar with (DN4000) are ISA-bus and basically look like full AT desktop PCs.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
GURU MEDITATION Software Failure
Error#8001 000C
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
Installing SAGE Idrix on their cute little 68000-based machine (I think it had 16mb ram! cute little machine) produced a message about how you ought to go get a cup of coffee because "this will take a while..." etc. Those pesky cartridge tapes were slowowwwwwww.
I wonder how much work it would be to design and build a 68020-based computer with a PCI bus.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Probably not verbatim, as I haven't seen a BSOD since I started running XP, but here it is:
"Windows was not shut down properly so Scandisk is running to check the hard disk for errors. To avoid this happening in the future, always shut down windows properly"
Gee thanks! Maybe next time you will LET ME SHUT DOWN WINDOWS PROPERLY!
"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"
When will sysadmins ever learn to keep their anti-virus software up to date, lest they become the victims of the Good Times virus like these poor souls?
Changing a bunch of configuration settings in a GUI should not be something that's unrecoverable through normal, documented means.
While I believe that PS/2 hotplugging can damage controllers and such, it's not really all that common an occurrence.
In my experience, however, PS/2 hotplugging rarely works very well, with results from just plain not working until reboot to things working slower than usual until the next reboot.
If I hotplug the keyboard in my laptop, the repeat rate becomes significantly slower until reboot. I have a USB mouse, so I'm not sure how PS/2 mice behave, but I seem to remember them not being very happy.
www.timcoleman.com is a total waste of your time. Never go there.
Go to Control Panel, Administrative Tools, and disable all services.
An easier way to screw up any NT kernel based OS is to set its pagefile smaller than 2M. It'll still run, but it won't be a happy bunny...
It wasn't exactly an error, but a friend of mine inherited a Mac in her office that every so often would yell out, "Hot Pants!" in James Brown's voice. She never figured out what it was trying to tell her.
yup, it turned out that the hard drive had died in some very sick manner. 3 months later, the replacement did as well - turns out SGI UK had a bad batch, oh great. Interesting to hear about the SGI jokes though because I really think it said 'Don't Panic' rather than 'Double Panic'. Of course I could be wrong but being pretty into Hitchhikers GTTG , that was one of the things which freaked me out the most. A kind of 'Oh no reality and fiction are starting to bleed into each other ' kinda ting.
Cheers for your explanation...
The default Win95 install included a desktop icon for "The Internet" which was just a shortcut to MSIE if I remember correctly. If you dragged it to the recycle bin you got the message: "Are you sure you want to delete The Internet?"
Heh, the first BeBox had dual CPUs, and a common demo was to run some processor-intensive task, open the CPU load monitor application and disable one processor. It was actually quite impressive, seeing the system moving processes from one processor to another...
And then, you could of course disable both processors... instant freeze!
--Bud
Uh-huh.
--Rick "If it isn't broken, take it apart and find out why."
Setting all your services to disabled is directly equivalent to chkconfig --disable'ing each "service" in Deadrat... and then wondering why your system doesn't go multi-user.
At least it's possible to recover from both using command line tools on each OS.
Andrew
Andrew van der Stock
XP allows you to survive without a pagefile.
Andrew
Andrew van der Stock
The joys of moving debugging code to production.
I remember those old Sierra-On-Line error messages: "OOPS! You did something we didn't think of" and then some advice to restore your last saved game. And there were those creative people from Origin that made my Wing Commander game crash sometimes with the enigmatical message: "Error: Forgot to salt the fries..." I never figured out what that meant.
Of course, the assert() macro in C is a good alternative. Simply writing assert(0) will give you the filename and line-number, unless you deliver applications without runtime checking. Of course, writing a NEVER_EXCUTED macro isn't that hard, so that would be an even better alternative. But both assert() and NEVER_EXECUTED leads to excessive bloat, and the debugger solution might be better after all...
Another quite popular alternative, is to put a unique insult to the user in each error-message. This is quite popular. E.g. die("you son of a bitch"), die("you moron"), die("you filthy fever-ridden faggot"), and so on... Since the error messages are not supposed to be seen by the user, this is in theory ok. Just don't tell the boss it was you when they one day complain...
The first time I saw a significant increase in POST speed was when I upgraded to a thunderbird-950 (with a gigabyte GA-7ZM mobo IIRC). I missed the POST the first time I booted because it took about 2 seconds between power on and booting from the HD. Surprised the hell outta me.
He who defends everything, defends nothing. -- Fredrick The Great
I like the message I got from VM 370 many years ago:
Illegal Error: Device returned illegal error code.
Translation is "You bought a third party compatible disk drive and it returned an error code to the OS that wasn't defined".
user: "Hello, I have a problem with my computer"
me: "What does it say?"
user: "unable to find pointer device"
me: "I think that means there is a problem with the mouse"
user: "Oh my god! It's been stolen"
All things in moderation; including moderation
Int 33h is the DOS mouse driver interface. BIOS interrupts are int numbers < 20h. The standard PC BIOS doesn't have a mouse driver interface to my knowledge.
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
The oddest error I ever saw was this one
For those not interested in the 15k image, it says:
Error: The operation completed successfully.
-= Why can't I add 'Anonymous Coward' to my list of Foes? =-
From a Sperry Univac System 80 RPG II compiler, non-reproducible, upon being fed a piece of code by a certain gentleman who is still with us, still writing code that bad.
Same gent wrote an order-N-cubed sort algorithm (on the same machine, still in RPG II) that occasionally lost up to four results - from the top of the list, no less, and for the business's key revenue-raising activity, no less - and when ordered out of that business by a court, his successor replaced the monstrosity with a simple order-N-squared(ish) bubble sort that didn't lose anything and generally worked well. A few months later, however, our ace programmer returned armed with nastier court documents - and put his broken, slow sort back in again...
An interesting error non-message from a DEC CoBOL compiler: you didn't need an INDENTIFICATION DIVISION but if you had one, and it was wrong, the compiler silently deleted your source code. Get the message? (-:
Got time? Spend some of it coding or testing
Our customer support group received a call one day from someone asking to talk to Bob. The cs rep replied that this was Foo Inc's support line, and gave them the head office number. The customer insisted that this was a legitimate problem with the software.
When the cs rep dug a little deeper, the customer said: "I was running your software, and an error message came up that said 'This should never happen. If it does, call Bob' ".
Sure enough, I grepped the code, and Bob had left that error message in an obscure part of the code.
Phemur
The lack of money that is prevelant in 99% non-lala-imaginary real world small businesses.
Excuse the Unicode crap in my posts. That's an apostrophe, and slashdot is busted.
Try running Bill Gates the Road Ahead CD-ROM on windows XP.
You get the following error
Installation Problem
Sorry, The Road Ahead does not run on Windows NT. Please install on a computer running Windows 3.10 or greater
It's one of those things you never believe until it happens to you. This machine right here is a testament to me ignoring good advice.
> Forth will rise again
:)
ITYM "again will rise Forth"
Yoda You Like Are If FORTH Understand You Will Then
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.
Quite frankly, if people are going to be investigating (and changing) settings under Administrative Tools inside the Control Panel then they should realize that their actions might have consequences. (I'm stretching the analogy a bit, but do we say computer hardware is badly designed because any idiot with a screwdriver can open the case and impale his or her CPU?)
~Idarubicin
Actual message from an industrial control app, at least during beta:
"The error handler didn't."
I got, when my Win32 program was leaking brushes/pens:
A Required Resource Was Not
This was in production Lisp Machine system code for a long time. I don't recall what triggered the error, but I did manage to get it once on a TI Explorer (Texas Instrument's Lisp Machine):
Something really bad happened. See if RMS is in the building.
Since RMS was responsible for much of the system code, this kind of made sense. But it was in a commercial machine! And, yes, it meant *that* RMS.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.
"Error: Operation completed successfully"
Of course, lately I'm starting to wonder if it's some kind of error checking for DRM, as in:
Do(ForbiddenOp,DRM_data)
DoOp(DRM_data)
If (No DRM_permission)
Error(Operation completed successfully)
EndIf
EndDo
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Ok, so, I work in a lab with several programmers from a rival company (at my client's facility). While there, I sit at a Sun workstation.
Ok, so, from bash I use name completion in the shell right. Every time I do that, the keyboard beeps. I'm sure that these windows programmers think that I'm breaking that damn computer with all of those "error beeps."
It kind of makes sense, oddly enough. This error was thrown by a
preprocessor on PDP/11, if I remember the tale correctly. It was
induced when you screwed up your data types (float, int, +, or
something like that). In order to turn this into a valid assembly
instruction, you have to reverse the order of the elements (add $r1
$r2). If the preprocessor didn't have a function for generating the
proper assembly, it would hang. The program waiting for its output
would then report an unrecoverable IO error... while reading reverse
Polish notation backwards.
How's that?
In spite of the suggestions and all the tests that I have made, I have not cavato a spider from the hole.
'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'.
You're confusing an error message with an operator's description of a problem. MVS can't display error messages while in disabled spin loops, the I/O interrupts are blocked by the "disabled" part!
You want a good example of bad error messages? How about anything except MVS messages? I'm serious - the MVS "Messages and Codes" manuals are huge, and list every message issued by the software complete with advice on what to do when you receive the message! How, one asks, can you find the right advice? Easy: every message begins with a "message identifier" - a short alphanumeric sequence that uniquely identifies it and points directly to the place where the doc lives.
Try that with your average Open Source project. Hell, try to just get a list of the errors reported, let alone advice on what to do when they are reported.
I once spent a couple hours trying to debug somethign like this... proof that you should set the warning level to the max (then read the warnings). VC++ warns you about this, but only if reporting level 4 warnings. The default is level 3. (Personally, I'd put assignemnets in an if statement at perhaps a level 2 warning, maybe at level 1, because it's almost never done, so 99.9% if it happens it's a typo.)
That one is for a product called the elmo-phone that I used to do tech support at for this outsourced company. The other good one was if your voice can not be recognized by the product (it wasn't REALLY voice recognition, it just tested to see if there was any sound), elmo would say "elmo can't hear you!" in this really urgent voice. God damn that scared the crap out of a lot of kids.
That's just part of the oops text on any SPARC Linux kernel.
;-)
Dave Miller has a weird sense of humour
himi
My very own DeCSS mirror.
I realize that "Japanese Emperor Era" must sound a little silly to North American ears, but it's Japan's traditional system for measuring years, and is still used, just as frequently as (if not more than) the Christian year-of-our-lord. Google found me this great little explanation that just taught me more than I ever knew about it, myself.
And since this involves the Japanese version of Outlook, this is actually quite a run-of-the-mill bug.
Accountability on the heads of the powerful.
Power in the hands of the accountable.
Woha, this topic has gotten posts quickly! I guess people get errors every now and then :)
My oddest one was when I got a blue screen of some type, that seemed recoverable, because it said it any key to try to continue or something like that (hard to remember it was in Windows 98 years ago...). Anyway, I hit the spacebar about 30 times, getting different error messages, until I got one that indicated I had to then reset my computer, and reload Windows... That's pretty odd.
I get plenty of Protools errors that are outright as well. The damn program tells me that I dont' have a fast enough hard drive to record one freaking track of audio some days. For some reason, other programs will record fine...
Tibbon
tibbon.com
Back in the '80's there was a peer-to-peer network called 10Net.
A version was released to allow the use of Ethernet cards as well as their own proprietary cards. I was trying to upgrade to the new version without removing the old version, which turned out to be a no-no.
When I ran Install.BAT, the program started, but instead of asking the required questions to set up the network, the screen went completely blank. After about 15 seconds, a message appeared on the screen.
The message was "Help me, Obi-Wan".
This page accidentally left blank
While poking around the Knowledge Base I found an article Q276304 discussing this error message which pops up under certain circumstances when changing your password in Win2k:
"Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords"
I have been hounding people who have weak passwords on the network I administer and it's been tough getting people to come up with 8 character passwords!
It turned out that every driver starts out as an unknown device before it gets installed, but still depends on the presence of the unknown device. So all, yes *all*, my drivers got flushed and the machine being a laptop, I had to reinstall all the firmware from scratch.
Of course I got the default message that all drivers that depended on this driver would get deleted as well, but this is something you also get when no drivers depend on the thing. But no, a simple list of the stuff it is about to delete was too much trouble.
"Ignoring this, everything works fine, but clicking OK will of course close all instances of the browser."
I've seen this many a time on our old Pentium struggling with Netscape 4.7. If the browser is still operable, I just push the error dialog down under the Taskbar and go merrily on my way.
Another problem that NS likes to throw up on that machine is an infinite crash loop. The first box looks like a normal crash, but all the ones after Close is clicked say something about advert.dll.
That machine is so old, it came with Netscape 1.x. I have no idea when my mom will give it up, though.
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
Laptops are about the only systems that I would hotplug ps/2 devices on as they have the inputs buffered because this kind of abuse is expected. Regular desktops don't have the ps/2 ports buffered and I have seen about a dozen blown ports over the last 5 years or so due to hotpluging. Thankfully this will go away in the future as ps/2 goes away in favor of USB which IS designed for hotplug.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
I didn't see this firsthand, but my father did, so it's not quite urban legend yet.
He was doing something on the mainframe one day at work (back in the day when 1200 bps was fast!) and got the following error:
Unusual use of parentheses accepted with some reservations as to intended meaning.
Very few people there had ever seen that particular error.
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
A few ones we had fun with in the lab...
"Error: The system has reported that you have a small penis, do you have a small penis?"
The "No" button has a mouseover that switched it with the "Yes" button. The coder missing the tab button (you could tab to no), but only clicking "Yes" would exit the app anyways.
There was another funny one, not an error, that turned the user's desktop into a mosaic puzzle that had to solved before he/she could continue.
A guy I work with had shakey hands and with taps enabled on his laptop, he managed to drag the Start menu stuff in Win98 to another directory.
When I tried to drag the Start Menu Dir back to where it belonged I got:
Cannot perform this operation as it is a Rooted Explorer
Amen to that.....
Burma?
If Debian's apt-get can't find your nameserver (i.e. the network's down or your DNS daemon's died), it will still respond:
n trib/source/Release
Something wicked happened resolving 'ftp.uk.debian.org:http' (-3)
Failed to fetch http://ftp.uk.debian.org/debian/dists/unstable/co
Some others:
When my CD-burner fails in Linux (I don't entirely blame it, I'm using cheap no-name media), cdrecord will sometimes complain "scsi sendcmd: [...some hex...]: no error" as it spits out a coaster.
The BBC Micro had some great (if rather terse) error messages, like "Mistake" (triggered by BASIC it couldn't parse) and "Silly" (triggered by renumbering lines and requesting a gap between line numbers that wasn't between 1 and 255).
Back in the days when 286 processors were all most people had in their PC (including mine), one guy at school got a 386SX based system running at a whopping 16 MHz. Now this was all good and fine, but for the fact that he was constantly nagging us about our systems being slow, outdated, ridiculous and whatnot. So we made a little TSR (Terminate Stay Resident) program that did nothing but count to 20000 ~18 times per second (the frequency of the DOS time clock). When it loaded, it wrote "CPU instability detected - switching to XT mode" and of course made the machine run sooooo slowly (XTs are the slowest PC-compatibles ever made, in case you're too young to know). It took him several days to figure it out, and it was REALLY difficult not to laugh our a**es off in the meantime.
Black holes are where God divided by zero
Your .sig is correct--you are wrong. The Amiga gave out 32-bit errors, with a period between them.
In case anyone cares, for the error number you give, that's an illegal instruction encountered at address 0x8001.
My favorite meditations were the equivalent of the UNIX bus error, when the given address was way outside the 24-bit space that our A500 used.... "87FFFFFC? What's it doing there?"
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
This one occasionally bites me ever since I trashed the MBR a couple of years ago. (I am still grateful for gpart.) Because of the way I reinstalled things, Win98's file system is not quite as big as its partition, and occasionally it emits the error on booting, with no removable media in any drive:
The volume that was removed had open files on it. Next time be sure the volume can really be removed before ejecting it.
Attempting to continue causes a squall of SODs in both blue and black, proclaiming the death of everything multiple times. Eventually it locks hard and has to be reset in hardware.
Simply trying to give the three-finger salute causes the same hard lock.
Then, of course, it bitches that it wasn't shut down properly. Sheesh, it didn't even get started!
~~~LXT~~~
Life is like a computer program: anything that can't happen, will.
My all-time favorite:
The data could not be "read"
(yes, the quotes are part of the error message)
Surface mount fuses seem stupid to me.
I'd rather replace any burned out surface mount fuses than figure out how to repair a circuit traces. They are just a tweezer away from replacement. You want to protect those smaller than hair diameter traces that look like viral dna snaking into many layers of the circuit board.
Large fuses may seem like a good idea, but think about circuit board real estate, connection integrety, and inductance generated by large fuses. And many of these fuses are solid state, autoresetting. This would be the only valid reason to power cycle your computer to fix your errors.
Funny, I have a bad connector on my keyboard.. it's an IBM M-series (clicky monster), the type with the removable cord. Whenever I set the keyboard down sharply, it must jiggle the power pin or something, and it doesn't work until I reseat the connector.
Of course this causes the keyboard to reinitialize, which hoses up my typematic rate, so I have a hotkey (Ctrl-Alt-X) which pops up the Keyboard control panel. I just change a setting then change it back, then hit OK. Windows commits the "changes" by writing them to the keyboard, and my repeat rate is back to normal.
I've done this hundreds of times now, it happens once or twice a day and I've been using this keyboard at least since '99. Nothing's fried yet. You'd think I'd have the common sense to open the thing and resolder the connector.
Y'know what DOES cook motherboards? Remeber when cases had keyboard locks on them? The two-wire lead from the keyboard lock was installed backwards, so the metal body of the lock wasn't connected to ground, but to the keyboard lock sense lead. One dry winter day, I touched the lock and drew a large spark. The machine locked up and by the time I reached for the power button, I was smelling smoke.
Opening the machine revealed that the keyboard BIOS EPROM had gotten quite hot, enough to wrinkle and discolor the shiny sticker placed over the erase window. Just for kicks, we plugged the machine back in and powered it up to see what would happen.
Much to our surprise, the machine booted normally! The keyboard worked and everything, and that system remained in service for another 2 or 3 years before bloatware forced a motherboard upgrade. During the upgrade, we got a good chuckle out of the memory of the melted sticker.
Actually, that's just the last part of the error, I left out quite a bit because memory did fail me.
However, the final part of the error message was two sets of four numbers.
The first part, if I remember correct (and I don't claim to be remembering everything perfectly), had something to do with the ROM range, and the second was an error number, at least, in some of the GURU types anyway.
000C -- Failed Sanity Check.
Look it up.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
My all-time favorite error message was this, encountered while emptying the recycle bin:
"Unable to delete files due to insufficient disk space. Try deleting some files to free up more disk space."
That green slime had it coming.
Sorry I missed this posting over the weekend.
I always got a kick out of the Primos message on the subject line. Conjured up the images of a cross-eyed little stick figure expiring as he was attempting to crawl out from under a pile of bricks and rubble.
John.
> ADB and PS/2 keyboards are not hot pluggable
PS/2 is not _guaranteed_ to be hot pluggable. It's up to the
motherboard manufacturer whether to make it hot pluggable. _Most_
motherboards don't do anything worse than fail to reinitialise the
device (keyboard or mouse) so that it won't continue to work until
after a power cycle, but that's not guaranteed. Some especially
nice motherboards will actually manage to reinstate the device
on the fly and go on as if it had not been unplugged.
But the reason it says "press [some key] to continue" is because
it's possible to get the message when the keyboard _is_ actually
plugged in. (I've seen this happen as a result of a stuck key.)
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
> Thankfully this will go away in the future as ps/2 goes
> away in favor of USB
Don't hold your breath. USB is a nightmare, both for the hardware
people and for the software developers[1]. PS/2, aside from the hot
plugging issue, just works, and people are sticking with it, for
the most part. ADB is going away, but that's because Apple has
monolithic control of all Mac motherboards, as well as the OS, so
they can ensure that USB works on the Mac, at least for hardware
devices that Apple controls. The keyboard and mouse that come with
the Mac are fine for this reason; the minute you go buy a digital
camera or somesuch, though, you start having the same sort of
nightmarish driver issues as on the PC. Out of 3 non-Apple USB
devices I've tried to install on Mac systems, one of them worked
without hunting down extra drivers from the manufacturer's site;
one of them took me hours to hunt down the driver (which was very
well hidden on Epson's site) but then worked fine, and the third
never worked correctly. All 3 devices claimed to support MacOS.
It seems to me that few hardware manufacturers have a decent
working understanding of USB, and this seems unlikely to change
very soon.
Anyway, back to the PC side... some major manufacturers started
making "legacy-free" (USB, no PS/2, no serial, no parallel) PCs a
while back, but they didn't sell well, and I haven't seen as many
of them lately as when they first came out. (The Compaq IPaq, for
example, was available legacy-free (the vendor-preferred, more
advertised model) or with standard ports, the latter being slightly
pricier; it has now been discontinued in favour of the Evo, which
just comes with standard ports. Because legacy-free didn't sell.)
Conclusion: PS/2 is not going away. Especially not for keyboards.
Serial isn't going away as such either, although before very long
most home users won't have any serial devices. (It will remain,
because it's VERY firmly entrenched in the industrial specialty
device market.) Of the three long-standing standard port types
on the PC, parallel is the most likely to go away soonest, IMO.
Then there's firewire... I'm starting to wonder if it will ever
actually catch on. I've seen half a dozen systems with firewire
ports (granted, five of them are Macs), but I've yet to lay eyes
on a firewire device, other than in a catalog or advertisement.
Maybe I don't hang out in the right circles, or something. I've
seen more cat4 cable than firewire cable.
[1] Oh, and for users too. Do they count anymore?
Cut that out, or I will ship you to Norilsk in a box.
The GURU MEDITATION was replaced in AmigaOS 2.0x, which was what I ran from about the time it become available for older Amigas, on up till I had my A1200 and A4000.
It was simply called a "SOFTWARE FAILURE", and they did indeed format out the error codes differently.
I would hook up the A1200 and GURU it real quick, but it's really not worth it.
In 2.0, there was also a YELLOW version of the GURU called "RECOVERABLE ERROR", it was like the standard "SOFTWARE FAILURE" except 9 out of 10 times it would shut down the application that was running and return you to the Workbench. Not too shabby for an OS without memory protection.
"Everything you know is wrong. (And stupid.)"
Moderation Totals: Wrong=2, Stupid=3, Total=5.
That horrid green thing was only on the US editions (IIRC).... because the publishers thought the series needed something similar on the cover because the names of the books didn't indicate they were in the same series....
----- One piece short of Legoland
Upon being required to enter the modem's serial number he, without thinking, pulled the card out to look at the back.
I think you hit the nail on the head here.
Try NetBSD... safe,straightforward,useful.
here
I assume one of the programmers was watching too much Kids in the Hall
Ed Wedig
Graphic design services
docbrown.net
While not a kernel error, and one that is a BITCH to reproduce. (I don't know how you'd get it without intentionally damaging your system...)
"You don't exist. Go away."
I believe it can be achieved something like this:
Log in as user
Delete user from all password files
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
One day this error message appeared on my screen:
ERROR: NETBIOS has become Twizzled.
I clicked Ok, and everything continued working normally. I searched the hard drive and couldn't find that text anywhere on the machine. I contacted Artisoft (we were one of their larger customers) and they insisted it wasn't from LANtastic. So I contacted Microsoft (back when they had support people you could talk to) and they also denied complicity.
To this day I'm not exactly sure what "twizzled" means. Never saw the error again.
Slashdot quality declines as the number of hot grits posts decreases. - Provolt's Law, Apr-09-2005
The World Wide Web Publishing Service service terminated unexpectedly. It has done this 3 time(s). The following corrective action will be taken in 0 milliseconds: No action.
First of all, arp -d doesn't take a MAC address as an argument so if you were to attempt to do this you get the error message:
ARP: bad IP address 00-60-97-db-a3-2d
If you do actually input your IP address you get the message:
The specified entry was not found
which isn't all that surprising since arp -a doesn't even show your own mac address.
I don't want free as in beer. I just want free beer.
I've been looking into this for a while, and I'm under the impression that Win XP does NOT fully boot in 10 seconds or whatever. It seems like it boots the UI first, so you get your desktop/whatever right away and can do basic stuff, then continues to start up services after you're surfing my computer. The reason I say this as I've seen multiple times when a Win XP system was started up and as soon as the desktop was up I launched a program. Depending on what the program does, you may get an error message that states the service isn't started yet. Waiting for a few seconds and trying it again generally results in the program running fine. Just my $.02 on that topic.
"Christ what a design! I could eat a handful of iron filings and PUKE a better emergency pump than that!"
Fine then, two computers. Total cost: $2000 tops. Canadian. Unless you want to play UT2k3 on it with a 60" plasma TV and GeForce4 or something that you wouldn't use a server to do.
Y2K Compliant since the late 1890s