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Longhorn: Fewer BSODs, More RSODs
Jan Theofel writes "Windows Loghorn will present you less BSOD. Joi Ito reports that Windows Longorn will get additional ROSD (red screen of death) for 'really bad errors.' So you will get less BSOD but some new RSOD. You can find a ROSD screenshot in a virtual machine in his weblog entry."
Since last night, I get this gem.
My own RSOD
As of 10/06/03, I hate COBOL developers.
I see Linux crash on our cluster of 100 Sun Opteron boxes daily.
The hardware is rock solid because it originally shipped with Solaris. The Sun reps said that we are one of their few customers running 64-bit Linux because it isn't stable enough.
Well, if they follow IEEE, US Military, SEI CMM, and other related standards 'really bad' is a 'critical'/'show stopper' roughly defined as 'System can not perform a necessary function or data loss occurs'. One step below that is 'high' meaning basically 'problem can be avoided, though it's a PITA'.
Critical errors can be categorized from 'system or application crashes before it can be used completely but no data loss occurs' (bad) to 'system silently corrupts data' (nasty).
If you want better definitions, check the specs for any of the above and look for a rating system called "Severity levels". (Note: not the same as priority levels.) Typically there are 4 levels of severity.
A firewall can not protect you from yourself. Turn off what you do not need. Do not use the firewall to do your work.
Red screen reminds me of the infamous Amiga "Guru Meditation" error. I always said the Amiga was ahead of its time.
Very true, i was getting annoyed by frequent BSODs. They were random, seemed to pop up without warning and always at the wrong moment.
They've all gone away after my PSU blew and i replaced it with a decent one that didn't come with the case and weigh less than an empty cardboard box.
In the geek community blue screens are assumed to be hardware faults but in the general community I don't think this is the case. I'm wondering if the introduction of the RSOD is designed to blame hardware rather than MS.
Before the BSOD, it was the General Protection Fault. Before the GPF, it was the Unrecoverable Application Error. Was there anything prior to the UAE, or did the system just lock up?
Who has seen a real-live Guru Meditation Error? I'm sure we've all seen linux oopses and unix panics, just to be fair...
--TheOrangeSquid Is it any wonder things seem so awry? We swim in a sea of confusion and don't have to think to survive
You realise the blue screen isn't set in concrete. You can change it in the registry like a lot of other things in Windders. I haven't seen it in ages, but I seem to recall I set mine to purple. Makes me think of easter eggs.
"Is this Winkhorst a nova criminal?" "No just a technical sergeant wanted for interrogation."
So there's actually a lot of BSODs that are 'preventative' in nature. That is, the kernel says "uh oh, that call should never have been made, the system *might* become unstable, shut it *all* down before any real damage is done".
Then there's "Boot disk not found", or "Boot disk failure", which are in fact real serious, because it's the end of the line for the machine.
Maybe they've broken down errors that are likely Kernel driver programming mistakes, and errors that indicate the system is severely damaged.
The basic psychology of colors tells you why. The user is going to get more angry and is more likely to do something radical - like changing to another operating system. A more soothing color like blue or green would be better.
But then, this is just another Micro$oft mistake that is going to help us Linux (or OSX) zealots ;-)
What if you've seen blue screens in Windows on a machine that previously was able to run Linux for weeks or even months at a time without ever locking up? If the hardware were really the culprit, wouldn't linux also be affected and crash just like Windows does?
Actually, it isn't in the registry, it's in system.ini. I haven't been able to verify whether this works, as the computer I'm on hasn't had a BSOD since I got it. I take good care of it.
warning: This post is likely to contain gobs of dripping sarcasm. Consume at your own risk.
So essentially, they're taking any BSOD's that are already happening and divide them into two categories?
I like this idea. It would be nice to tell at a glance if my goddamn video card has frozen the computer again or if it's actually something serious.
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
I've been seeing a lot less BSOD's in general since using 2K and XP.
In Windows 98, I would run the comptuer for a few days, and for no reason it would just start being slow and throwing random BSOD's at me.
Since using 2K and XP, I've seen a few recently, but they're all realated to a piece of faulty hardware that I've been too lazy to replace. Other than that, I can't reacall seeing a single BSOD in years on a computer of my own.
I'm honestly asking people. Have you run into BSOD's that really truely was 2000's/XP's fault instead of being some sort of hardware fuckup?
I'm the guy with the unpopular opinion
I have used XP for 2 years now (job, not at home) and I have only seen a couple BSODs on it. HOWEVER, I don't think that the OS is that much more stable than 2k. I still get lockups, massive slow-downs, and unresponsiveness. In fact, I think I get them more in XP than in 2k. XP does weirder things. Does it matter that there is not a BSOD if I have to reset the machine and lose my work anyway? That happens. In my opinion, XP is not more stable than 2k. Microsoft are a bunch of dopes. Windows 2000 was widely regarded as "pretty darn good" even by the Linux crowd. So instead of improving on it by making it more secure and stable, they come out with XP. I don't get it. It's like putting a new gaudy paint job on a reasonably well-running car, and all of a sudden it starts misfiring and stalling.
My beliefs do not require that you agree with them.