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Blue Screen of Death for Mac OS X

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the creative-wastes-of-time dept.

An anonymous reader writes "Possibly nothing in the OS world has as much of a bad rap as the infamous BSOD (blue screen of death) in Microsoft Windows. On the other hand Apple hides the ugly kernel panics behind a nice looking GUI which only tells you its time to restart your dead system. Interestingly Mac OS X kernel has a secret API which lets you decide what your kernel panics are going to look like! In this Mac OS X Internals article Amit Singh explains how to use this API. Apparently you can upload custom panic images into the kernel and there's even a way to test these images by causing a fake panic. The article also shows the ultimate joke is to upload an actual BSOD image for authentic Windows looking panics right inside of OS X."

62 of 349 comments (clear)

  1. Not like Microsoft invented it... by ackthpt · · Score: 5, Informative

    It's not like Microsoft invented it, either. I remember these quite unfondly. Before that I had a frozen screen on a C64. And before that I had stopped lights on the PDP-11 display. And before that we had random characters all over the screen of Ohio Scientific (OSI) computers.

    But Microsoft is widely credited with perfecting the BSoD and giving it fame.

    A system crash with a tasteful little box can be as easily dispised as all the the preceding. I suppose, like everything Apple is doing these days, they've given it a certain panache and now everybody will want one.

    --

    A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
    1. Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... by DingerX · · Score: 4, Informative

      Guru meditations were awesome, and I fondly remember that flashing red border.

      But Amiga wasn't first. The Mac "Bomb" preceded it, and was notoriously useless for troubleshooting.

      Still, most Windows XP users haven't seen a BSOD ever. Go ahead and ask them. See, Windows XP solved that. But mysteriously, their power supply is unreliable, and "trips" on the slightest whim.

      You gotta love that. "BSOD is bad for marketing, and most people don't know what to do with the information anyway. Let's just reset the computer and pretend it's a power spike."

      I'd advise people to change their default settings, but one time I had "write memory contents to log file on BSOD" enabled when I was moving data about, and hand less free memory on my HD than in RAM.

      Don't ever, ever do that.

    2. Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... by MyDixieWrecked · · Score: 3, Interesting

      A system crash with a tasteful little box can be as easily dispised as all the the preceding.

      that is precisely true.

      My machine at work has some kind of hardware problem that was never quite solved while it was under applecare. it "panics" at least once a day, some days, it'll "panic" 5-10 times. Some things that set it off are scrolling in a terminal window (such as when I'm sync'ing portage on our server) or putting an audio CD in the lower optical drive.

      The last time we brought it to tekserve, they claimed that both scsi drives were bad and they replaced them, and we didn't have a panic for a couple months, but by the time they came back (and with a vengence, I might add), there was no more applecare coverage...

      I quote "panic" because sometimes I get that nice pretty "please restart your computer" screen, sometimes I get the text dump on the desktop, and sometimes the machine locks up, altogether.

      luckily, we're getting one of those nice quad-xeon machines as soon as adobe releases the new creative suite, at which point I'll throw this machine out of a window.

      --



      ...spike
      Ewwwwww, coconut...
    3. Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative
      It's not like Microsoft invented it, either.

      Microsoft had a single DEBUG line in the registry for Windows 95 -- it allowed the application of your choice to intercept the crash.

      The first commercially successful program to implement it was "Power Utilities 95 with Crashproof" that handled/exposed many hardware conflict sins without just covering them up.

      About 50K copies later and good shelf space at Frys/COMPUSA/BestBuy , Symantec took notice and put out their $29 Crashproofing program that didn't perform dozens of system checks or even unmask the cause of the crash.

      If version 1.0 of that Norton floppy disk consisted of anything more than copying a 1 line registry change and a pointer to a bitmap, then it never showed in practice.

    4. Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... by Frequency+Domain · · Score: 4, Funny

      No, MS didn't invent it. They just perfected it. Remember when there was talk about adding a BSOD hotkey to the MS keyboard, so you wouldn't have to go through the hassle of running software to get it?

    5. Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... by LurkerXXX · · Score: 2, Interesting

      I take it you don't run any servers. SCSI is vastly superior to SATA in a server role. SATA is better for single user work, but if you are tossing many file read/writes at the same time at the drive, SCSI will simply way out preform SATA.

    6. Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... by LurkerXXX · · Score: 2, Informative

      SCSI drives have been aimed specifically at the server market for years. Their electronics have been specifically geared towared performance in that area.
      SATA is aimed for desktop systems. Almost no early SATA systems had NCQ, although more and more newer models have it now. It's been tacked on, not central to the design for decades like in SCSI.

      Just take the baddest SATA drive around, the Western Digital Raptor 150. A 10,000 RPM drive with NCQ (Note, the earlier 36 GB and 74 GB Raptor SATA drives did not have NCQ. It's a new tack-on)

      1) Look at it's benchmarks vs a bunch of SCSI drives for single user benchmarks.

      Wow, look. It not only blows away other SATA drives, but kills those expensive SCSI drives. This is why the uninformed grandparent things SCSI is 'ancient' tech.

      2) Now look at it's benchmarks vs a bunch of SCSI drives for multi user benchmarks.

      Notice in the top graph where it slaughters every other SATA drive out there except for it's earlier sibling, the Raptor74. It's obviously pretty much the best SATA has to offer.

      Now look at the next graph where it is compared to those 'Ancient' SCSI drives. Those SCSI drives beat the hell out the piss-poor excuse of NCQ that that high end SATA drive has.

      That's why SCSI is still king for server work.

      I've got a Raptor 150 in my home gaming machine. It's great. But I'd never think about it in my RAIDed servers at work. It just couldn't come close to the job the SCSI drives do.

    7. Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... by kabloom · · Score: 5, Funny

      But Amiga wasn't first. The Mac "Bomb" preceded it, and was notoriously useless for troubleshooting.

      Error: Type 11

      "But I keep typing 11 and nothing's happening"

    8. Re:Not like Microsoft invented it... by gad_zuki! · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Power spike conspiracy? Umm yeah. Here's what the XP BSOD looks like. Its real. Sheez, I never thought I would have to defend the BSOD on slashdot.

  2. Sort of unrelated by rodgster · · Score: 2, Funny

    Sort of unrelated:

    I used to have BSOD as my screen saver for an earlier version of Fedora (IIRC). It was always amusing when people would stop by to chat, a little while later, they'd see my PC suddenly BSOD! The looks I'd see (on other people's faces) makes me laugh just remembering.

    --
    Who will guard the guards?
    1. Re:Sort of unrelated by ac7xc · · Score: 2, Interesting

      There was actually a number complaints about the BSOD and another about kernel panic screen savers that RedHat removed those from screen savers. If you search the fedora-list archives you should find the original emails complaining about it. ;-)

    2. Re:Sort of unrelated by Reverend528 · · Score: 2, Funny

      I used to use that screensaver too. One time, my old roommate accidentally locked my computer. When BSOD came up, he thought it had crashed.

      That's how I discovered he was looking at porn on my computer.

      --
      Badass Resumes
  3. Likewise by Umbral+Blot · · Score: 3, Informative

    Likewise in windows you can change the background color and text color of the BSOD (or at least you could uder 98, I haven't had the desire to play around with it under 2000 / XP since they crash much less frequently).

    --

    Philosophy.
  4. Let me be the first to say by GungaDan · · Score: 4, Funny

    I, for one, welcome our new department-wide goatse.cx kernel panic message.

    Any of you guys hiring?

    --
    Eloi are stupid, throw morlocks at them!
  5. Well on the upside by OverlordQ · · Score: 4, Insightful

    The Win32 BSOD does give you better information so you can try to diagnose the problem.

    Which is kinda lacking in the OSX Panic screen.

    --
    Your hair look like poop, Bob! - Wanker.
    1. Re:Well on the upside by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 3, Interesting

      But then MS made the brillant decision to reboot the system right when the BSOD appeared, robbing it of any usefulness. Or perhaps they didn't do it on purpose, but I've seen plenty of displays just go blue for a split second, then blank as the system started rebooting.

      --
      Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
    2. Re:Well on the upside by mattgreen · · Score: 2, Insightful

      It gets logged to the system's event log, which you can check out later.

    3. Re:Well on the upside by mybecq · · Score: 5, Funny
      The Win32 BSOD does give you better information so you can try to diagnose the problem.

      Kind of like knowing that there were:
      - 56 bulbs
      - 24 horizontal grill bars
      - 72 vertical ridges on 1600 sq ft of 1/4" steel
      - 20% full gas tank
      - 209,000 miles driven
      - 3 tread patterns
      - 5 axles
      - 18 wheels

      You still got hit by a truck.
    4. Re:Well on the upside by shawnce · · Score: 4, Informative

      Kernel panic information gets logged on reboot to a file and you can capture a kernel core dump if you want.

      Review... TN2063, TN2118, Debugging the Kernel, etc.

    5. Re:Well on the upside by chrisv · · Score: 2, Informative

      Actually, it's possible on Windows as well. Not that I particularly *like* Windows by any stretch of the imagination, but XP and 2003, at least, will write a memory dump to the system swap file to be copied into %systemroot%\memory.dmp on the following startup, provided that it's configured to do so. The memory dump can then be loaded into a debugger to do post-mortem debugging. It does have a talent for not being the most useful on some configurations - I've run into issues on systems with >2G of memory, generally with the end of the dump file being truncated, but it certainly does save those details for later analysis.

      --

      Dogma: Dead (mostly because your Karma ran it over)

    6. Re:Well on the upside by kevmo · · Score: 4, Insightful

      I find it very useful for the rare occasions that I get BSODs anymore to at least know what driver caused the problem. If the BSOD lists something like atixxxxx, then I know that my video card screwed up, and so on. Because almost all of my crashes are caused by driver or hardware problems, its helpful knowing just what that problem is so I can fix the driver or replace the hardware (and thus almost never get crashes on that computer in the future).

  6. The world's funniest joke by Malc · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Hardly the ultimate joke. Jokes are supposed to be original. This has been a screen saver under Linux for years.

    Anyway, couldn't this be described as the ultimate joke?

    1. Re:The world's funniest joke by Incadenza · · Score: 2, Funny

      You must be new here.

      Jokes are supposed to be original.

  7. Old Hat by overshoot · · Score: 3, Funny
    Yawn.

    Once upon a time, I was chairing an out-of-town meeting with a roomful of engineers. We spent most of the morning working a spreadsheet with margin calculations on it trying to come up with a margin budget that everyone could live with; I was running the machine that drove the projector.

    The conversation took a turn away from the spreadsheet, and after a bit the BSOD came up onscreen. The panic in the room was palpable -- everyone figured we'd just lost the whole morning, and quite a few had afternoon flights out.

    So I hit the shift key and entered my password to unlock the screen.

    The classic BSOD screensaver gets the same amusement factor without the hassle of hacking OSX.

    --
    Lacking <sarcasm> tags, /. substitutes moderation as "Troll."
  8. Leave it to apple! by lostngone · · Score: 3, Funny

    Leave it to Apple to give you a choice when it comes to Panic screens. Does Vista do this yet?

  9. Keep it simple by EmbeddedJanitor · · Score: 3, Insightful

    If you have an unstable system (BSOD-worthy), then it is probably best to rely on as few system resources as possible. THis includes GUIs etc. That's why a simple text-based BSOD or oops handler is a better idea than something that tries to do a whole bunch of cute graphics etc (which relies on a whole lot more hardware & software to be working properly).

    --
    Engineering is the art of compromise.
    1. Re:Keep it simple by Sqwubbsy · · Score: 5, Funny

      THis includes GUIs etc. That's why a simple text-based BSOD or oops handler is a better idea than something that tries to do a whole bunch of cute graphics etc (which relies on a whole lot more hardware & software to be working properly).

      You are so not a Mac owner based on these statements.

      --
      $30 Off All Plans: Use code TRIPLESAWBUCK
    2. Re:Keep it simple by blaster · · Score: 4, Informative

      The graphical version takes slightly fewer resources. You have to run a single buffer through an RLE decompression routine directly out into a linear mapped framebuffer. To display text you actually have to use all of the console code. Remember, there is no hardware console, so you have to actually do all the text element positioning in software, and the graphics card is in exactly the same mode either way.

      It does not take appreciably more resources either way, and both code paths are fairly simple and well tested.

    3. Re:Keep it simple by Jahz · · Score: 5, Interesting
      Keep it simple AND keep it informative. A real BSOD will include information about the stop code and arguments at the time of death. If the system knows which driver caused the crash it will tell you this as well.
      The Mac panic screen not only takes more resources to display but they tell you far less. "Please restart" in 23 different languages is not helpful. The 10.0 and 10.1 version looked much better.

      Obviously you are NOT ready for the Mac. Come see the light, friend.

      Do you really think that Apple have decided error codes and detailed crash reports are not important?? No, of course they have not. There are two reasons Apple does this.

      1) The truth is that the infamous blue page of kernel farts that windows spews out are only to technicians or sysadmins. The home user, and in fact, the power users, can do nothing with it. Nothing, of course, except Google for the stop code and hope Microsoft has a techhelp article on what it means. You can reply to this and say that

      STOP: 0x0000008E (c0000005, bf875fc3, f07bcd48, 00000000)
      KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED

      makes perfect sense to you... but you'd be lying. I know that the relevent part is 8E but 99% of users NEVER NEED TO SEE THIS and will NEVER USE IT.

      Back to Apple. Apple has a little ditty called the "CrashReporter" and it has an OSX front-end to the system's log filed in /var/log/. The logs contain all the nitty gritty about what was in the registers when the sytem exploded, what driver/module caused it, etc readily and easily recorded in the system log. Said information (like STOP: 0x0000000000000000008E) is for a tech or sysadmin, not a standard user.

      2) What do you do with the BSOD info displayed?? A true nooblar would write it all down. That's a waste of time, becuase its also in Windows' system log. Assuming you're going to Google for it, you would presumably reboot the machine, right? So why did we even need to see the error when it happened? The machine is up not, and the logs are visible...??

      Bottom line: Apple's goal is to keep things simple, clean and friendly. What would your parents rather see?

      1. A pleasant semi-transparent overlay that asks them to reboot their machine (in their native language)
      2. A solid blue screen reading "KERNEL_MODE_EXCEPTION_NOT_HANDLED" followed by 30 rows of random-like numbers

      Which one?

      P.S. - Don't even think about saying "what happens if you cant boot." If that is the case, remove the new hardware. Otherwise you are in DEEP trouble... the code doesnt really matter and you'd actually be better off reading the error from /var/log.
      --
      There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.
    4. Re:Keep it simple by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Funny
      There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.

      What about the other 8? I think you've got a typo there.

    5. Re:Keep it simple by jericho4.0 · · Score: 3, Insightful

      Regarding your first point; I'm more than a power user. I can actually figure out what those funny numbers mean. But, I never, ever, do. Who the hell does?

      --
      "A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing" - Alan Perlis
    6. Re:Keep it simple by ArwynH · · Score: 3, Funny

      Real Programmers don't mix up array indexing and counting the length of an array.

      And since the joke envolves the length of the array and not the index of it's last member, I guess the jokes on you.

    7. Re:Keep it simple by Gnavpot · · Score: 2, Funny
      > There are 10 types of people in the world. Those who understand binary and those who do not.

      What about the other 8? I think you've got a typo there.
      There are 11 types of people in the world. Those who can count and those who can't.
    8. Re:Keep it simple by 1u3hr · · Score: 2, Informative
      a simple text-based BSOD or oops handler is a better idea than something that tries to do a whole bunch of cute graphics etc (which relies on a whole lot more hardware & software to be working properly).

      From TFA, the crash screen is a single image file, a screenshot. It's probably no harder to load a single screen than a stream of text. And OSX does have an option to display text error messages if you really want to see them.

    9. Re:Keep it simple by HeroreV · · Score: 2, Funny

      Yes, displaying an error message in a billion languages instead of just the language the computer is setup to use is definately much more helpful. You know, just in case you forgot how to read your prefered language at the exact same time that the kernel crapped out. You do know a backup language for those times that you forget the primary one, right?

  10. This is taking things too far... by __aaclcg7560 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I know that Mac users are supposed to be more friendly towards Windows users switching over but changing the kernal panic screen to match the BSOD is going too far. If you want it that badly, install Windows on a separate partition.

  11. What about the Guru? by lennywood1 · · Score: 2, Funny

    I'd personally go for a nice old fashioned Guru Meditation Error. :) *Digs around his garage for his A500*

  12. Hidden? by exp(pi*sqrt(163)) · · Score: 3, Insightful
    hides the ugly kernel panics behind a nice looking GUI
    It must hide them really well because in 4 or 5 years I haven't seen one. (I did once about 5 years ago though - that'll teach me to mess with third party USB drivers.)
    --
    Doesn't it make you feel good to know that our freedoms are protected by politicans, lawyers and journalists.
    1. Re:Hidden? by Stele · · Score: 2, Informative

      Funny - about the same amount of time since I saw one on any of my Windows boxen. YMMV.

  13. Stupid boring new crash screen... by Moofie · · Score: 5, Informative

    That's not NEARLY as cool as the car crash sound Macs used to make when they really, really, REALLY blew up fierce. Get a good pair of speakers, and that sound would scare the tar out of everybody in the area!

    I think it only happened to me once, on a junky old LCIII, while I was just working. There was a key combo to induce it on boot, though, and I got a lot of mileage out of that...

    --
    Why yes, I AM a rocket scientist!
  14. Gray screen of death by azav · · Score: 3, Informative

    I have gotten the gray screen of death twice on my Quad.

    When capturing QuickTime video, QuickTime writes one copy of the file and then makes another. If you are capturing to a mastering codec (ie animation) minutes can become gigabytes. It is easy to fill up the internal HD in this case.

    What can easily happen in this case is the file writing routines will start writing over allocated blocks. System files, even track zero. If it writes over track zero, your internal hard drive will be destroyed.

    How do I know this? It happened to me twice.

    The second time, I was left with a 17 GB file on my hard drive that can not be deleted by any means other than reformatting the disk. The first time it happened, the HD was borked so bad that plugging it into another Mac caused that mac to kernel panic. Apple replaced the drive but I lost everything minus my backups.

    As I was told by an Apple tech, when a hd starts up the dirve itself checks the validity of track zero. If it is invalid, you have a hardware fault and this generates a kernel panic.

    This was all validated by Apple techs.

    You have been warned. Hope this helps someone.

    --
    - Zav - Imagine a Beowulf cluster of insensitive clods...
    1. Re:Gray screen of death by plasmoidia · · Score: 2, Interesting

      Uhh, am I missing something? Any sensible OS should not allow a program to write to a full disk. Period. It should return from the fwrite (or equivalent) syscall with a failure and the worst that would possibly happen is the program would crash because it did not handle that correctly (well, aside from losing the data that the program was desperately trying to write). If it decides to start randomly overwriting already allocated disk blocks, then that is a very poorly written OS indeed.

    2. Re:Gray screen of death by slamb · · Score: 3, Informative

      This has been a serious flaw in Unixes since I knew about it. The OS will let your HD fill up and overwrite itself. Many *nix flag wavers often defend this behaviour. Why they do is beyond me.


      You're completely wrong. When the free space reaches 100%, write() will return ENOSPC (no space). The superuser will still be able to use the system, because traditionally, there's a 5% reserve which only uid=0 can use. (The "df" goes up to 105%.) The correct semantics are well-defined. If you've seen anything else, it's a bug in whatever system you were using, which no one could seriously defend.

      Now, if you're talking about user applications breaking when encountering this condition...yeah, there are certainly some out there that break. There are buggy applications written for every platform. It's just laziness - Unix gives them well-defined semantics they can use to handle it correctly and an easy test environment (quotas).
    3. Re:Gray screen of death by blob.DK · · Score: 4, Informative

      Excuse me, Sir, but that is a misunderstanding on your part. Mac OS X does not overwrite track zero just because the disk is full.

      What you have experienced is the phenomenom of Mac OS X getting caught up in: "ups, the disk is full - so now I can't save any (system) preferences." Any files written during this will end up as zero-byte files.

      There is no magic "QuickTime will overwrite vital systemfiles, to which only root has access"-routines.

    4. Re:Gray screen of death by glesga_kiss · · Score: 3, Insightful

      That's not the point. A malicious user can hose the entire system by running 'cat /dev/zero >> /opt/junk'. And I mean hose as in "system unusable, 100% of data lost"; the worst kind of hosed. The fact that Final Cut has options to manage this doesn't detract from the fact that the OS should manage itself better. Writing over track 0 on the HD? Creation of undeletable files? What is this, a return to the 8-bit days again?

      When you get to 100MB free, the OS should tell the applications to go away. It should never fill 100% of the drive. Let's see you boot to remedy it when you can't write to log files.

  15. Ultimate joke.... by ROMRIX · · Score: 4, Funny

    "The article also shows the ultimate joke is to upload an actual BSOD image for authentic Windows looking panics right inside of OS X."

    Ya! and then we could like, (snicker, snicker) we could like, bring up pictures of toilet paper on the monitor (snicker, snicker) and they would think (hehe, snicker) they would think they got T.P.'ed! HAHAHAHA!!!!!111!!!

    Did anyone else just develop a twitch in their left eye?

  16. Oligatory Monty Python Reference by CrazyJim1 · · Score: 3, Funny

    If the aptly named blue screen of death is indeed the ultimate joke, people should die laughing at it.

    --
    God spoke to me.
  17. Another promise Microsoft didn't keep... by spywhere · · Score: 3, Funny

    There were rumors, before XP came out, that they were going to respond to the iMac by making the Blue Screen of Death available in five designer colors.

  18. Old and Busted: BSOD. New: RSOD by stevetures · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Whatever happened to the Longhorn / Vista 'Red Screen of Death'?
    Red is so much scarier.
    http://blogs.msdn.com/michkap/archive/2005/05/07/4 15335.aspx

  19. a good joke would consist of the following steps by Aqua+OS+X · · Score: 2, Funny

    A good joke would consist of the following steps:
    1) set an Intel build of MacOS to display the BSoD
    2) instal bootcamp and a copy of XP, but never actually boot into XP
    3) find and install a cheep faulty RAM module that allows MacOS to kernel panic with some degree of frequency.
    4) bring the Mac in for service at an Apple store
    5) claim that MacOS started displaying the BSoD after you installed Windows.
    6) wait for someone to pick up the red phone to Cupertino.

    If you're dealing with an older Mac vet, add an obscure reference to Rhapsody and "Red Box" for bonus points and added confusion.

    --
    "Things are more moderner than before- bigger, and yet smaller- it's computers-- San Dimas High School football RULES!"
  20. Bah! You young punks! by rocjoe71 · · Score: 4, Funny

    You young punks and blue-screens-of-panic blah, blah blah!

    ...In my day, we didn't even HAVE screens, just a blinking light and if that light ever stopped blinking, you knew there was trouble, boy...

    --
    Height: 38U, Weight: 0 Newtons, Eyes: #0000FF, OS: Gray Matter 1.0 (Alpha)
    1. Re:Bah! You young punks! by Centurix · · Score: 2, Funny

      Blinking lights? Luxury! In my day you had to keep the abacus lubricated, otherwise the beads would just stop!

      --
      Task Mangler
  21. Redmond... by RAMMS+EIN · · Score: 3, Funny

    Redmond, start your photocopiers!

    --
    Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
  22. I've had... let's see... by Swift2001 · · Score: 2, Interesting

    Maybe half a dozen? That's since 2000, when I installed the Beta, and then 10.1. Two causes: when I installed Panther, I got a new USB hub at the same time. Half my kernel panics right then. It was a bad hub that delivered less than its rated power. BAM! Later, when I moved up to the G5, I moved my old OS over from the G4. I used Carbon Copy Cloner, but I screwed up something -- I now use SuperDuper! because it's a real Mac app -- and something got really screwy about root and my admin account. Again, another three reboots. Did a fresh erase and install, no problems since then.

    That's about 6 years now.

  23. What happens if... by mr_neke · · Score: 3, Funny
    System encountered a kernel panic in the panic() function.
    Cue infinite recursion...
  24. Moo by Chacham · · Score: 2

    BSoD is for the NT (and XP) lines. Win9x is a blue screen, not a BSoD.

    The *reason* it called a BSoD, is because the computer will not do *anything* without a reboot. This is not usually the case under 9x.

    --
    Have you read my journal today?
  25. Chairing a Meeting by Pfhorrest · · Score: 3, Funny

    I know it's off-topic, but I just had to share the image that came to mind when I first read this:

    Once upon a time, I was chairing an out-of-town meeting with a roomful of engineers...

    Picture, if you will, a meeting room filled with terrified engineers, all cowering behind one end of the table and desperately trying to shield their heads from ballistic chairs, being hurled by a Donkey-Kong like Steve Ballmer, who in turn is jumping up and down upon the far end of the table...

    I know the Steve Ballmer jokes are old and off-topic (and I don't mean to compare you to him) but the image of "chairing" a meeting full of engineers was just to hilarious not to share. :-)

    --
    -Forrest Cameranesi, Geek of all Trades
    "I am Sam. Sam I am. I do not like trolls, flames, or spam."
  26. Becouse you all know... by dark-br · · Score: 4, Funny

    ... Macs Crash Different

    And don't get me wrong, I'm typing this on a Mac and I would not trade it for anything else out there ;)

  27. Re:Troll Umbral Blot at it Again. by Keith+Russell · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Here we go again. Today, it's Umbral Blot's turn to have posts that came from rational, critical thinking twisted into "pro-M$ astroturfing" at the hands of the ever-spiteful Twitter.

    How do you live, Twitter? Seriously. How can you possibly function in society with this much venom and hate spewing forth from every word you say? Can you make it from Study Hall to Algebra without the kicker from the football team shoving you in a locker?

    I don't care how you do it, Twitter. Go to therapy, go to church, whatever. GET HELP!

    --
    This sig intentionally left blank.
  28. Re:I have only seen the Screen of Death on OS X on by Monx · · Score: 2, Interesting
    Here's how you get an instant crash in OS X:
    1. Open the DVD Player application.
    2. Attach a second monitor.
    3. Select Detect Displays from the monitor menu.
    4. Kaboom!

    For extra craptacularity, do this while installing a system update. Then you get to manually install the update in single user mode before your system will be bootable again. When I say manually, I mean manually extracting files from the pax archive and copying them to the appropriate location because systemupdate thinks that everything is OK despite dozens of system files modified by the update being mysteriously zero bytes in length.

    In my defense, the update was taking a long time, the second monitor was a my TV, and my PowerBook is my DVD player.
  29. Re:I've seen two and one was oddly today by Psykechan · · Score: 2, Informative

    Today no less, at the local Apple store I got a kernal panic "You need to restart your computer" message. All I did was put OmniDazzle on a new Mac Pro.

    What surprised me was that I had only ever seen the kernal panic only once before after using OS X daily over two years... and that was when I was trying to crash it. (Hint: disabling network adapters and enabling others while connected to an SMB share can cause unpredictable results under 10.3)

    While changing the crash message is interesting, it's not something that will make that much of a difference. I'm not going to say that OS X doesn't crash; after all, I managed to crash one by doing something rather safe. It's just not going to be a practical joke that has a quick payoff.

  30. Re:You want the ultimate joke? by freedom_india · · Score: 3, Funny
    Its NOT Funny, OK ???

    Once we built a system for C*tibank (T+2) in FoxPro 2.6 for Windows and one of the users actually took a screenshot of the same, put it as background, and then complained our application doesn't work.

    We spent 2 FULL days debugging the damn application before we realized the issue.

    Oh.... &&%%$$&&

    --
    "Doing what i can, with what i have." ~ Burt Gummer