Slashdot Mirror
The Thirteen Greatest Error Messages of All Time
Technologizer writes "They add insult to injury — and computing wouldn't be the same without 'em. So I rounded up a baker's dozen of the most important error messages in computing history — from Does Not Compute to Abort, Retry, Fail to the Sad Mac to the big kahuna of them all — the mighty Blue Screen of Death. And just in case my judgment is off, I include a poll to let the rest of the world vote for the greatest error message of all." I can't believe that "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" didn't make the list.
Error, Windows Vista detected on Drive C: prepare to acknowledge, confirm and reboot.
www.thedailywtf.com has a great selection of error messages. Some are absolute genius!
FIVE
missing /etc/passwd, tried to login as root:
"you don't exist. go away."
Surely "Keyboard Error: Press Any Key To Continue" should have been in there somewhere?
Username or password invalid. It's probably got the most face time...
Kernel Panic? Why not just teach that damned kernel some self-defense lessons. Or, at least tell it to grow a set of balls. Just stop the damned Panic.
Politics is the art of looking for trouble, finding it everywhere, diagnosing it incorrectly and applying the wrong fix.
Somehow, spreading an article across many, many ad-ridden pages is not considered an error.
Move along, nothing to see here.
Better known as 318230.
SYNTAX ERROR
:^)
That's all I ever got out of one when I'd play around with them at Sears back in the day.
Error, Water Detected in Drive C:
And Windows still blue screens on you. Poor thing...
They should associate a wav of a Microsoft engineer's whimpers in the face of Balmer.
Deleted
"Congratulations, your Lotus Notes installation is complete."
Having recieved many of these errors in the past, I can't help but point out there is very little that I would consider "Great" about them.
No mention of Pac-Man's infamous split screen of garbage on the 256th level?
+++ Divide By Cucumber Error. Please Reinstall Universe And Reboot +++
The page cannot be found The page you are looking for might have been removed, had its name changed, or is temporarily unavailable. ___ Please try the following: If you typed the page address in the Address bar, make sure that it is spelled correctly. Open the asdf.com home page, and then look for links to the information you want. Click the Back button to try another link. Click Search to look for information on the Internet. HTTP 404 - File not found Internet Explorer
I just run the "BSOD" screensaver on my linux machine, with all error messages enabled. I love having people come in, pause, say, "Um... looks like your machine is really screwed up". Then I bump the machine out of screensaver mode, and their jaws drop.
Bad Sector
It wasn't. It is in the article.
See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
The Mac, having 4-channel wave sound from the beginning, went one better than the PC when it came to the startup failure beep. While the PC would beep out some sequence of single notes indicating hardware errors, the Mac would simply play one chord. A successful bootup was a pleasant chime (sometimes heard on Futurama or other shows when something boots up). However, hardware errors not only produced the sad mac, but a discordant anti-chime. For those with good ears, it was sometimes possible to diagnose some errors by the particular musical dissonance. In particular, some familiar with upgrading the Mac Plus became familiar with a chord indicating bad RAM.
Good times.
E pluribus unum
"HAL is no longer here, Dave is dead and you now have to talk to BILL and BILL doesn't answer."
--- Oh Well, Bad Karma and all . . .
Beer is proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
I did the write-in option:
"Aiee penguin on the SCSI-bus."
That's the only time I've thrown back my head and laughed when debugging a crash. I can understand how "lp0 on fire" won out for historical significance, though.
"A system call that should never fail has failed."
A customer read that to me over the phone once. I made him confirm the wording twice to make sure.
Yeah, its a legit error message too - not a malware scare tactic to get a user to click yes, which I had half expected.
I just like the wording. The fact that you bothered to include this error implies to me that you knew there was a chance that the system call could fail.
Kevin
Inserting the wrong memory in a RS/6000 43p machine would yield an error that included the famous phrase: Danger Will Robinson!
/. error ftw!
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
Some time ago I was running a batch job and the system returned the message, "The system is unwilling to process your request." I figured it was tired of running my programs, and wanted to quit for the day.
I remember getting "BLAT FOOP" as an error message in emacs and finding out what it was.
Now I don't remember how I got it or what it meant. And there isn't much about it online.
Does anybody else know?
My personal favorites are Guru Meditation and "lp0 on fire". I had actually forgotten about the printer on fire error because it has been so long since I have seen it (probably 15 years) but that one made me laugh when I first started on UNIX-like systems.
The following story comes from Andy McFadden:
lp1 on fire.
Just a comment from the system-side of the keyboard;
Sometimes you know a system call can fail but cannot account for or recover meaningfully from that failure in your code. This can be especially true with scientific computing, but is also true for humble malloc()'s and fork()'s.
I once implemented "Homie don't play dat" quite by mistake. One of those, "the users haven't defined this error but I have to put some string here in the mean time" things. Never did go back and clean it up either.
A603 - Load Module Does Not Exist
(I think that was the response to a command line typo from the 'shell'.)
As a student learning this stuff, I saw that one a lot! More than 30 years later, I still remember it...
dave
This should of been on the list.
"Segmentation fault (core dumped)", :-)
"Parity Error"
and of course "With what? Your bare hands?"
Its in there, #8.
-- "So they told me that using the download page to download something was not something they anticipated." - Bill Gates
In similar vein: PC LOAD LETTER
Btw: Of course they didn't modify this message for countries which don't use the Letter format, making it even more confusing...
I don't read replies by ACs.
My favorite is from Windows 3.1:
"This application has violated system integrity . . ."
"Few users will like an error message no matter how well it is designed."
--Roger S. Pressman, _Software Engineering: A Practitioner's Approach_
Pleeding Man: Please Don bot, can't you search your hard drive and command dot run your sympathy file?
Don bot: .....File Not Found! (Shoots him)
stuff |
I believe this was from a relatively screwed up install of Rational Rose at school.
"Error ~ in module ~".
Very informative.
The article cites Wikipedia in claiming that the Sad Mac dates from 1987, not 1984. Nope; it's 1984. Just hit the interrupt button on the programmer's switch and you got a sad mac (000F 000D, if I remember correctly -- 2 groups of 4 hex digits for the 68000-based machines). Of course, that's from personal experience so Wikipedia: No Original Research means I can't correct the erroneous Wikipedia page. And then some idiot bot is wanting to remove the "bomb" image from the wiki article because of copyright issues....
Someone else removed the 1987 date, but the 1984 date still isn't there.
"Error: The operation completed successfully"
I kid you not. This one was repeatable on any windows box whenever Dr.Watson was invoked after a program crashed. It appeared in win 3.0, 3.1, 3.11, 95, 98, NT, 2000 (don't know about win me, xp or vista). Just click the "save as" button for the error log, then click cancel. Then the magic error appeared in its own box:
"Error: The operation completed successfully"
Dr.Watson terminated as well, of course.
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
Bah. What ever happened to the user complaint "Who is General Failure and why is he reading my hard drive!"
"Windows needs your permission to continue"
I've never run into the FailWhale, because I've never tried Twitter. Although I'm confused by TFA's comment:
If you can explain what the image has to do with a Web 2.0 service buckling under extreme traffic, please let me know.
8 little birds trying to carry a whale they have tethered seems like a perfectly appropriate image to accompany a server strain error IMO.
He's getting rather old, but he's a good mouse.
cat << EOF > foo.c
long long long foo;
int main () {}
EOF
$ gcc foo.c -o foo
foo.c:1: error: 'long long long' is too long for GCC
Monkey + keyboard =
And yes it took me 1/2 an hour to figure out wtf that meant, which is why I'm posting as Anonymous Coward. It's also why I *love* *nix. No BS, straight to the point.
TRS-80 level 1 basic was a joy.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
"...And the lord said, `lo, there shall only be case or default labels inside a switch statement'"
"a typedef name was a complete surprise to me at this point in your program"
"`Volatile' and `Register' are not miscible"
"This struct already has a perfectly good definition"
"Symbol table full - fatal heap error; please go buy a RAM upgrade from your local Apple dealer"
"type in (cast) must be scalar; ANSI 3.3.4; page 39, lines 10-11 (I know you don't care, I'm just trying to annoy you)"
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
$ ed
help
?
list
?
quit
?
bye
?
die
?
FSCK OFF and DIE you fscking BASTARD!!!
?
^C
My blog
You never know.
And mine have definitely come in play for my personal stuff, which I change as-needed. change how an input value is processed prior to the if? the conditions are different. the else that never happened before might happen now. better to print a warning message and at least let the user 'trap the exception' than to do nothing...
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
As a system administrator, I hated this message test. Especially when it happened to me!!!
One day I got a call from engineering that told me they where getting a error in a vb application. When I get
there to have a look they told me the engineer that wrote the code had unfortunately died the day before at a
fairly young age of a hear attack. The error showing was, "Beware The Man Behind The Curtain"...talk about creepy..
Got Code?
Back in the DOS days, I once used a hex editor to find the string "Bad Command or Filename" and replace it with "Reply Hazy, Ask Again". That was fun, but when my coworker got that machine in a reshuffle, she was confused. I explained what I had done, but she couldn't get her brain around the idea that that error was just a string of characters on the disk; that it didn't mean anything different. So she kept asking me about it until she got a new machine along with her promotion to head of tech support. Wow, that job sucked.
My Favorite is an unrecoverable error from GEOS:
"System Error Near $37BF*"
*Or insert any 16bit Memory address here
from screen segfaulting
2001 is one of my all-time favorite movies.
...the future crusty old bastards are already drinking the Kool-Aid.
I think everyone remembers their first segmentation fault or core dump.
I happen to have an Amiga Joyboard and a copy of Mogul Mania. Anyone know how much weight this thing can handle?
I'd like to try it out, but I don't know if this thing can handle 180lbs of adult male.
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
They missed this one:
"Too many pages on the article."
factor 966971: 966971
PC LOAD LETTER
What the fuck does that mean?
Username or password invalid. It's probably got the most face time...
True, but I would think this generally indicates that the system is working the way it should... giving you appropriate feedback with the input it received. It's not an error message in the sense that the system got itself into some unexpected state and is crashing or otherwise indicating that something went wrong and it doesn't know what to do next.
the first Macs could also show an error dialog listing a "DS xx error." In the very first Mac developer documentation, a listing revealed that "DS" stood for "Deep Shit." Later revisions changed that to "Dire Straits."
"National Security is the chief cause of national insecurity." - Celine's First Law
Save as a batch file (.bat) and execute on Windows...
@echo off
echo a > dbg.txt
echo int 18 >> dbg.txt
echo. >> dbg.txt
echo g >> dbg.txt
debug.exe < dbg.txt
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
Little Britain? Anyone?
"unknown file not found" in Windows...
What? You didn't find the file you weren't looking for?
"Aieee, killing interrupt handler" (Linux kernel)
PS, hey, I still have Excellent karma... why no bonus? Now I'm, like, nobody!
PC LOAD A10
They have Warthogs???? COOL!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
The best error message of all: "Keyboard not detected. Press F1 to continue."
...and it's "Spinning Wheel of Death" (later adopted by the Mac) has to be right up there. It's so pretty, so hypnotic, and it tells you absolutely nothing except "Time to hit the power switch."
I didn't see the most classic: Excuse me, but there's a moth caught in one of my relays.
"It's the height of ridiculousness to say for those 9 lines you get hundreds of millions."
They mention Abort, Retry, Fail as somehow more memorable than the original Abort, Retry, Ignore, which I'd disagree with.
I seem to remember a few times getting all four: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail. Ah, DOS.
Quidquid latine dictum sit, altum sonatur.
My personal favorite - an error message originally inherited from HP developers who lost a contract because the HP2116 mini-computer (about the size of a dorm refrigerator) would not fit thru the forward hatch of a 1960's era submarine.
The error message appeared in Prime minicomputers (probably for some sort of impossible error - but could be viewed by grepping the error message files). It got included into Apollo's code base where it similarly appeared in various hacks.....
I've always been a fan of NO CARRIER. It's obscure and makes a good internet meme.
I was able to generate this message up to Windows Me. After 2000/XP, I have not been able to generate it again:
Interrupt Divide by 0
Not only was your software frozen, but your CPU too! Cold boot for you.
"Be particularly skeptical when presented with evidence confirming what you already believe." -
Printer out of paper, I'm guessing. Although, one does wonder why they couldn't just say that.
Alexander Peter Kristopeit bought his basement from his mommy for one dollar.
I like the Fail Whale, but I think that rather than being accompanied by birds, he should have the company of just a bowl of petunias.
Much more fitting.
(...tip of the hat to DNA.)
eleven plus two / twelve plus one
My Crystal Hammer disk had a side-scrolling space game on it. Whenever I exited, it went into an immediate Guru Meditation--but then the screen would start slowing flashing yellow in time to a Darth Vader type breathing noise from the speakers. Had to kill the power completely to get it to stop. It was awesome. I loved it.
Skilled in differentiating ravens from a writing desks.
I had InterVideo's WinDVD Creator (version 2.x methinks) fail once with a warning message that said "Some Error Occurred"
Either a programmer was too lazy to write descriptive messages or s/he was prick and didn't want to tell me
And I would probably put a unrecoverable error up with the red stop/critical icon, not the yellow exclamation/warning icon
The operation completed successfully.
C'mon, at least the hex-filled BSODs admit there was something wrong in the first place.
No problem is insoluble in all conceivable circumstances.
i once got a popup error message from MS Access that said:
"Error #some-large-number: There is no message for this error"
I thought that was so existential...
I get that here when a computer tries to print something on Letter paper, and the printer knows it only has A4 in stock.
The main culprit is Word which defaults to Letter even when you select a locale that uses metric paper sizes.
It wouldn't go off unless you did something successfully, polled the error channel, or rebooted the drive.
The fact that you bothered to include this error implies to me that you knew there was a chance that the system call could fail.
Maybe. Or maybe the programmer was just really anal retentive, like me.
I don't really consider myself a programmer, but I do write a fair share of CGI scripts. In my scripts, I detaint the user inputs and provide appropriate error codes for user inputs that fail the detaint. The error trapping almost always leads to one (or more) of some finite set of possibilities, but I *always* include a catch-all along the lines of...
1) Didn't match valid input;
2) Didn't match expected error #1;
...
n) Didn't match expected error #n;
n+1) Catch-all (just on the off chance that I failed to account for a possible error).
For the catch-all case, I include an error message similar to "This error message shouldn't be possible. Please send an e-mail to tell me how you got here."
MCSE? No, sir...I don't do Windows. Yes, I am an idealist. What's your point?
It was just epic and funny to boot. Yes, it was for my kids game.
The preceding post was not a Slashvertisement.
Where's the Multics error-message that was written in Latin on the list?
"Hodie Natus Est Radici Frater"
Someone doesn't know his hacker-lore...
Once I made a program that would give that screen and the chimes, and put it in my friend's start up folder. Priceless...
RS
Shoes for Industry. Shoes for the Dead.
Old timers will recognize "360" not as a MSFT game machine but arguably the most financially successful operating system - the IBM mainframe. ABEND is short for "Abnormal end". If had a line printer on your computer you'd get a print of the ENTIRE contents of registers and core memory. From the Program Instruction Address register you figure out which memory instruction you executing and the registers and core memory contents it was operating on. It was straightforward debugging, but tedious. As core memory reached 16K or 64K bytes, many forests worth of printouts were sacrificed in the name of poor programming.
I just like the wording. The fact that you bothered to include this error implies to me that you knew there was a chance that the system call could fail.
Usually these sorts of errors mean that this is not an error that should happen if the OS behaves as can be expected; situations where stuff like memory corruption, broken drivers, or other unpredictable stuff is to blame.
That's at least where my code tends to spew out such seemingly self-contradictory statements.
GAAH! MY PRINTER IS ON FIRE!!! PUT IT OUT! PUT IT OUT!
That was it. Nothing else. Couldn't even bother to spell the word properly. It meant that somewhere in your 10,000 cards(!) of Fortran there was an error. Over time I learned what to look for when this happened.
We were real programmers then. Didn't have these girly compilers that tell you exactly what and where the problem is.
"You have been chosen as the victim in a deadlock. Your child process has been killed and will need to be resubmitted."
The nurse we had recently hired to provide domain knowledge had essentially no computer experience, and was quite mortified at some of the terminology in the error message.
I'm in my right mind and I have the answer to everything!
"Cannot delete filename: there is not enough disk space
Delete one or more files to free disk space, and then try again
This happens when you try and delete (as in move to the recycle bin) a file on a disk that's almost full, probably due to the extra space needed to store where the file was deleted from
Exigo spamos et dona ferentes
I always liked:
SYS$F_FUBAR -- Failed UniBus Adapter Register
I was never sure if they named the register this way just so they could use this error message, or otherwise. It was indeed on a UniBus adapter. And,as the SYS$F prefix indicates, it was _very_ fatal.
Now UNIX took the exact opposite tack to IBM OS verbose error messages and was terse beyond belief. The original UNIX text editor command "ed" (shortened to "e" in some systems) just typed a question mark at you if you did something wrong. Usually by context you knew what error you made. I think this was because the earliest UNIX's may have worked on teletypes and no one wants to wait ten seconds for a line message to be typed out. I recall some later versions of the program were polluted with the less elegant double question mark error message, but I forget what that stood for.
My favorite from ME was: has caused an error in and will now close.
I'm a little stunned that there's no listing for the MacOS 6-9 messages: Error Type .
Error Type 11: Your system is borked.
Error Type 3: Your system is borked.
Error type 10: Type 10? What's a type 10?
I seem to recall a less painful type 6 you could force quit past as well...
See KB276304
Most of use [sic] don't come across POST beeps very often these days-but I still get them sometimes when hit too many keys before my computer is ready to accept input. It always makes me a tad nostalgic.
Not POST beeps. His keyboard buffer is full.
summary: "I can't believe that "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that" didn't make the list."
TFA: "I chose to limit myself to one fictional error message in this list, but I could go on: If I ever produce a sequel to this story, I guarantee you that 'I'm sorry, Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that' will be on it."
Oh, and by the way, this is a classic.
My all time favorite - "You shouldn't be reading this" dialog box from (antiqued version of) Microsoft Office.
ELOI, ELOI, LAMA SABACHTHANI!?
As a developer, our team was once taken to task by a client for having messages of "An unexpected error has occurred..."
They wanted to know what expected errors there were that we were hiding.
Design for Use, not Construction!
Your system has been halted in order to prevent a loss of data.
Ummm, shouldn't that read "Your system has been halted in order to guarantee a loss of data"?, since I was never given a chance to save anything before the system halt.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.
http://www.homestarrunner.com/404
The two greatest bits of error nostalgia for me are the Commodore Amigas GURU MEDITATION errors and the Atari ST screen bombs.
I will not be pushed, filed, stamped, indexed, briefed, debriefed or numbered. My life is my own.
I do. :)
There was this crazy guy I knew in college, who went to work for Microsoft. We'd drifted apart, though we both still lurk in some private email groups of friends from that timeframe. About 5 years ago, I saw his name in a Newsweek article about some crazy-hip new MS project, calling him "a relative codger" at 33, brought in to rein in the young guns on the project. The official Microsoft web page for the project featured a "meet the team" section, which next to him, included the phrase "Wrote the BSOD."
I couldn't let that lie, so I wrote him a quick note asking if it was true, was he proud of it, and most importantly, "Why blue?" Here's part of the response:
I chose white on blue because that was the same color that the firmware on the Mips workstations we had used for their boot selection screen. Plus that was the default for the old character mode SlickEdit code editor that most of the devs used.
and:
No, it is not something I am particularly proud of, but once the kids I work with found out about this little skeleton in my closet they never let me forget it.
(He also avows responsibility for the Win 9x blue screen, "which gets a lot more air time.")
Whoooosh! Mod grandparent up for office space reference!
Similes are like metaphors
BSOD on request!
I liked "lp0: on fire". I wonder what other things they could extend this too?
"Dell0: on fire."
"iPod0: on fire."
"TheRoof0, TheRoof0, TheRoof0: on fire."
"Heart2: on fire."
Check out my sci-fi book "Lacuna" at http://goo.gl/MVxX8
From the old Unix days, at times, almost anything could give a "Not a Typewriter" error. Seems like what you said, that the computer does not want to do something, but that it is also offended.
----
This sentence contradicts itself -- no actually it doesn't. -- Douglas Hofstadter
idleispants Why is this not in idle, and real news is in idle? Secret Nazi Alien conspiracy to make Idle format the default /. format?
The Longhorn RSOD had a typo. Well it's appropriate i guess.
An error message from their Basic interpreter:
Oops, Basic goofed.
Tandy Xenix used to have "Sucking Mud."
Citation needed.
"Keyboard failure, strike F1 to continue"
"NONE 0" ...
"NONE 0"
"NONE 0"
"NONE 0"
"NONE 0"
"NONE 0"
"NONE 0"
This appeared in messages from an MTC1230 when used for military satellite tracking. It appeared in marching rows once per second when the computer received no telemetry data. Normally, it meant that you simply weren't looking in the right place in the sky. But if it appeared immediately after you send a command to the spacecraft, it was almost always very very bad.
For example, someone once sent the command to fire the AKM (apogee kick motor, a large, usually solid-propellant rocket engine buried inside the satellite) and started getting "None 0". That was very very bad, a cloud of debris was later tracked in the same orbit as the former spacecraft.
Another time, someone intended to send a pretty benign command called S-0702 that caused a change in the telemetry readout of a particular parameter. Very routine, do it 4 times a day. However, they got the digits transposed and instead send S-7002. This command turned off all the communications to Europe, and also caused the data link from the tracking station to the operations facility to go down. "NONE 0".
Brett
An error has occurred on the error logging device.
Help! I'm a slashdot refugee.
The error message that I've come to love most after working extensively with .NET-based software is "Object reference not set to an instance of an object." It's so poetic. And so specific.
ERROR: No keyboard found. Hit F1 to continue.
(No, I'm not kidding.)
As it was too important, the number of workspaces has been reduced.
The document cannot be unloaded, because he is dirty or one of its linked documents is dirty.
Error primitive value is not an aggrinstance.
Prepare: At least one repository failed.
Error: Error stack is empty.
Error: An error condition has been detected but no error information.
Error: The lock action is immediate. So, the fields you modified have not been saved.
Clean: You have synced several times without cleansing.
Most wordy, non-useful dialog:
Question: Instead of directly transforming an input, we recommend you to apply the Add Position command onto the solid. Then, the required GSD transformation mist be applied on the axis system of the Positioning Set. Do you want to go on with the transformation or quit the command and follow our recommendation? ()Yes ()No
A few graphical favorites: A dialog box is presented. It has two buttons, OK or Cancel. No other explanatory text is shown. Neither button has any effect, other than to make the box go away.
Also: A dialog box is presented. It's title bar says "error". The error text is "fail", and there is an action button which says "OK"
Maybe they aren't seen by many people, but they were heard by lots of people.
whoosh!
(You need to watch Office Space again... do not pass go, do not collect $200)
My blog. Good stuff (when I remember to update it). Read it.
I seem to recall the MS-DOS 2.x suffered a problem with the Int 21 BDOS interfaces. If you made certain BDOS calls with the direction flag set, the message "A evird rorre etirw daeR" ("Read write error drive A" backwards) would be displayed on the console. It wasn't fixed for years. I remember we rigorously enforced the "Clear the direction flag before calling into MS-DOS" rule.
Another one from Lotus Manuscript that I loved: "vnam:nankin Nibble too large." So much more informative to the user than a numeric error code.
And, of course, "Printer is on fire!" was always my favorite.
I was a serious bit flogger before the days of windows. I used to go into the dos directory and hack the Abort Retry Ignor command so that it looked like latin(Abo Ret Igno). It was also a way to determine if people had been messing with my installs because that was a file that was always overwritten during patch application or reinstalls.
I saw that on a BSD system around 1980. In retrospect, I realize that I must have typed "ld" instead of "ls"
Prime numbers are exactly what Alan Greenspan says they are -S. Minsky
People have been known to spend lifetimes reconfiguring all the HP printer settings to use A4 instead of Letter because what should be the number one accessible configuration option (and, of course, set by the locale by default) for any printer out there is actually one of the hardest things to change in Windows, at least with HP printers.
BSD (4.2 and 4.3-Reno) had such fun error messages. One of my favorites:
> rm God
rm: God does not exist
My personal favorite error came from the game Wing Commander III, which had such high system requirements that I used its installer's test app to benchmark my machine for a few years.
Sometime about when I got a 6x CD-ROM, it gave me the classic warning:
"Error: Your CD-ROM reads data faster than is possible."
True story, Windows 98 has given me this error message.
"Error Loading Kernel. You Must Reinstall Windows"
As far as I'm concerned, there is something inherently WRONG with an error message that admidts Microsoft KNEW the OS would be borked, you'd have to reinstall, but couldn't come up with anything to prevent or fix it. Just a handy error message.
"This should never happen." - OK
Clearly Spaghetti Cat is one of the greatest error messages of all time.
I think Abort, Retry, Ignore summed up early MS-DOS frustrations beautifully. From what I remember, it never mattered which option you selected -- you were trapped in an endless cycle. Does anyone else remember the Abort, Retry, Ignore poem, in the meter of Poe's "The Raven"?
Back in the day, Sperry/Rand error messages had Star Trek (original series) in-jokes in them.
I'm sorry, Dave, it did (essentially)—it got distinguished mention among the fictional error messages at the end of #5.
What about "PC LOAD LETTER"? Am I the only who thinks it should be on the list?
"Error: An unnamed file was not found"
and
"Fuck off! Shit will be edit" -- This was a real error message put in by our outsourced programming team.
"Dude! Like, something went wrong!"
No shit, that's what it said!
Another time when it was refusing to read a CD, the error message suggested unloading the CDROM driver to improve matters. [scratching head]
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?
From IBM's OS/2 tokenring network driver. "Open error during physical insertion phase". Ouch!
For those who just want the lame list:
And in refernce to the summary:
UTF-8: There and Back Again
My favorite isn't really a message, but a device. I used to work with some old Univac computers that were originally designed to be installed on Navy ships for an integrated fire-control system (NTDS). Whenever the computer crashed, it would set off the fault horn, at about 150 dB SPL. It was guaranteed to wake up anyone inside the building and give the computer operator a heart attack. It also had a "battle short" switch that disabled all safety features.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
Blank screens of different colours when an Amiga failed to start up. Also the caps lock LED flashed different codes. Both equivalent to the PC's POST codes, I guess.
they missed my favorite:
OUT OF HUNK
The Ubuntu install botched on an ATI card, and this popped up:
Waiting 2 minutes before trying again on display :0
D:
My favorite ever I found by doing a hex dump of a Tandy computer. I don't think many users saw this message. It said:
ERROR 0: POWER NOT ON
My second favorite came from a General Electric time sharing computer. It was:
EVIL DO LOOP
**CONTROL-FRAME widget does not fit in parent FRAME fMain. (6491) [OK]
Why is this thus? What is the reason for this thusness?
Shouldn't web servers have a standard 4xx message for being slashdotted by now?
420 Slashdotted
The requested URL has been slashdotted on this server.
.
Nevermore.
In large friendly letters.
but still hilarious =)
$man woman
no manual entry for woman
its all in the presentation
this and that and some more and some more more more and a littlemore.
"Three eyes are better than one" -- Lieutenant Columbo
I can't believe that ?SN ERROR didn't make it.
"It is our blasphemy which has made us great, and will sustain us, and which the gods secretly admire in us." - Zelazny
Hmmm - BSOD vs "I'm sorry Dave"
Well, perhaps more people have experienced the BSOD (frequently) than have seen 2001: A Space Odyssey :)
I left my body to science, but I'm afraid they've turned it down...
In early versions of Vista RTM (like, really early, as in MSDN or corporate customers-only RTM kind of early. Don't know about Betas, I've never used it), you could end up at the login screen, enter your password, and attempt to go in, only to be greeted with a popup with a message along the line of "A catastrophic error has occured", with absolutely no other detail. No crash either, so you could try again and sometime it would work just fine.
That was quite entertaining the first time I saw it.
It's a question of weight ratios!
"I only speak the truth"
Karma: null(Mostly affected by an unassigned variable)
"Richard Keil Memorial Abend #27" on Novell servers.
Yes, this is a valid abend message. From Novell TID101112,
"The Abend stems from debug code, used to debug a server problem, that was mistakenly left in the NetWare v3.12 code base when NetWare v3.12 shipped"
From a Novell engineer,
"This is the error message for abends that do not have a documented abend message", which could I suppose cover debug code that wasn't fully removed, even though the NetWare kernel includes a debugger in production versions. He claims Richard Keil didn't do a good job with abend messages in his code. Dick, you out there? Say it ain't so...
I believe the engineer. And this does exists in Netware 4.x, despite Novell claiming it does not, unless they did finally include the patch in some release package, which they had not as of 5.0...
A close second is the message "Device deactivated due to non-media defect". Returned when a storage device fails for, and this required some careful reading to realize this is an error 'other than' data... For instance, disk drive being disconnected, or powering off, or failing with smoke and flames. I haven't seen the error in response to device errors other than storage devices, but one engineer claims it can be used for any hardware device...
We asked him what other sort of device might there be, besides hardware. He had an answer. Smartass.
deleting the extra space after periods so i can stay relevant, yeah.
Here's an amusing Win32 error (error 4006) that a friend showed me. Execute the command for the error description.
C:\> net helpmsg 4006
That's still my favorite for sheer quirkiness of wording.
My all-time favorite that I saw on a Windows 2000 server displaying the Blue Screen of Death (BSOD) showed the hex error as 0xDEAD BEEF. That was about the only time I saw humor in a Windows error message.
amongst a block of various ASCII messages was the string "USER ERROR"
On of my favorite tricks for code reviews is to search for the comment "should never happen". As others have noted, sometimes system API calls don't work as documented. More often, though, it's a programmer error.
Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
The first two were found in source code, but never encountered in the wild (as far as I know):
I wanted a Mallomar; why was this prevented? This was an error message for an "impossible condition" in Lotus Agenda. A customer did find this message by dumping the .EXE file, and saw fit to complain about it.
DOS FORTRAN SUCKS This message was generated in one of the two FORTRAN modules (amid hundreds of assembler modules) in an Applicon CAD system in the 70's. "DOS" refers to DEC's DOS/BATCH operating system, and "sucks" was less socially acceptable than it is today.
These were actually observed on an RCA Spectra 70 that was crashing after a nasty encounter with static electricity on one of the line printers.
PROCESS nnnnn HAS DEVICE LPT0 IN SILENT DEATH This message was displayed repeatedly on the system console, one for each device (and the process that owned it), until the final message:
PROCESS *SYS* HAS DEVICE CPU0 IN SILENT
One particularly opaque error message I've encountered several times but haven't seen mentioned here is the DriveReady SeekComplete error in Linux. It doesn't sound at all dire, but it usually means its time to buy a new hard drive.
The funniest error messages I have seen are from games: (from memory, possibly innacurate)
We've got a really big error here :-(
- Diablo II
Help Kyle! help Kyle!
- Joint Operations
Success![Cancel]
- World of Warcraft (not actually an error but still funny)
Also one from windows that I havent seen here yet
Not enough space to delete try deleting files to make more space
On older versions of HPUX
`make love`
don't know how to make love. stop.
I remember quite clearly encountering this message when I killed a process to see what it did. I got the interesting "windows will restart in 0:59..." message but quickly discovered that if you set the windows clock back, you ended up with more time, and could still use the computer with no problems. So it was kind of a stupid error really.
A close relative of the common '404 page not found' error, 418 I'm a Teapot is the response specified in the RFC 2324 - Hypertext Coffee Pot Control Protocol (HTCPCP).
Any attempt to brew coffee with a teapot should result in the error code "418 I'm a teapot". The resulting entity body MAY be short and stout.
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
Old SCO XENIX (circa mid-80s) had a message like the above if I recall. Anyone know more about it?
Shut her down Scotty, she's sucking mud...
I worked on a large military system once with about 200 programmers. At some point it was decided that the error messages would be centralized and they made rules for when we had to issue them. One rule was that EVERY exception in the code had to produce a message and EVERY case statement had to have a "default" branch. Then associated with every message had to be some "operator action", some way to fix the problem. All the 20,000 or so messages were inside a database. We were reviewing these for grammar, spelling and the like and found one "operator action" that read
"Try walking through walls or flying, the laws of logic no longer apply."
This is my all time best favorite message. We looked at the code that cause it. Something like this: If A=0 do_someotherthing Else "..rules of logic no longer apply". The programmer was kind of forced into this by the combination of project rules.
I just like the wording. The fact that you bothered to include this error implies to me that you knew there was a chance that the system call could fail.
A friend of mine once programmed an if..then..else sequence that had a result that should never occur and it came with the error message "You should never see this message."
Essentially (If true then...else if false then... else You should never see this message!)
BD Phone Home!
Shameless plug. Like you weren't expecting it.
So let me add, if memory serves correctly, "ABEND036. Probable Programmer Error." An IBM OS360 message basically meaning "your program crashed, you probably made a mistake but it could be something else"...
The tyrant will always find a pretext for his tyranny - Aesop
Well, Wikipedia for one knows about more than just blue for a STOP error.
--
"Outlook not so good." That magic 8-ball knows everything! I'll ask about Exchange Server next.
BSOD's produce countless variations of error messages (some software, some hardware), so shouldn't they be viewed as a vehicle for error messages, rather than error messages themselves?
It's like saying an ocean is my favorite type of animal, as opposed to a dolphin.
Slashdot "libertarians": Small government for me, big government for those I disagree with. -1, I disagree with you
At some point around 1984, I was using a Microsoft Basic compiler on a PC XT (or AT, I can't remember), in an office full of secretaries. While compiling for the first time, I discovered that the compiler rang the computer's (obnoxiously loud, ugly) bell for every syntax error in the entire program.
After I got done crawling under my desk from embarrassment, I immediately switched back to Turbo Pascal...
"Not an actor, but he plays one on TV."
"Please Insert Disk: " An old timer told me about this message that he ran into once. It turned out that the machine BIOS was borked and it was hoping that the user might have it on floppy.
Purely by coincidence I saw an image of the Twitter FailWhale for the first time just last night while perusing this collection of Awesome Error Pages on Buzzfeed. My vote for the coolest goes to the 404 page for the Spore website. Imaginative, appropriate, and downright awesome!
Does no one remember the haikus of BeOS?
Computers allow humans to make mistakes at the fastest speeds known, with the possible exception of tequila and handguns
You got it right. But it actually says Paper Cassette Load Letter.
And btw: I just read the article on wikipedia and I seem to be wrong in my OP by assuming that there is no PC LOAD A4. As stubborn as they were they at least considered that Letter is not the only format in the world. But still the original error message was not uncommon in A4 countries...
I don't read replies by ACs.
Happened to a friend of mine while installing Ubuntu (IIRC):
http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/2758/dsc00035ca8.jpg
While the 404 message is perhaps the error MOST often experienced, the error I think which has been experienced by the largest number of people is probably this one. . .
"Please hang up and try your call again. Please hang up NOW. This is a recording."
You can hear her voice just reading that, can't you? That message has been playing for forty or so years. Maybe longer. --Also, I don't know if it was done on purpose or just because it was so baked into the creators' minds, but in the Star Trek TNG universe, the voice of the computer sounds a lot like Ma Bell. I bet you if the phone company used a male voice, the Enterprise compy would also be a dude.
Next up. . .
I don't know how many of you use Photoshop, but I do, and the old versions would freeze up for no apparent reason and drive you nuts when really all that had happened was that you'd used the lasso tool to accidentally select zero pixels, (which is surprisingly easy to do). This locks up a ton of features by design (since EVERYTHING is outside the selected area, which being zero pixels big, also happens to be invisible,) so Photoshop just hangs in that, "WHY THE &#$!* ARE ALL THE OPTIONS GRAYED OUT?!" zone until you think to try de-selecting. If you were first trying to learn how to use Photoshop way back in version 4.0 like I was, this bug was truly frustrating.
So they fixed it, right? --Well, sort of.
It is my considered opinion that Douglas Adams' evil twin brother is still alive and well, and that he works for Adobe.
You see, instead of simply fixing the bug by making it impossible to select zero pixels, (which they did), the Adobe engineers decided to accompany this genius repair work by telling you about it. Every time it happened. Until recently, and maybe even still in the most up-to-date version, (which I've not tried), they throw up an alert window when you select zero pixels saying, Warning: No pixels were selected. --And then to ensure their greatness has been given due respect, they make you press an, 'OK' button before you can continue working. So essentially, if you accidentally tap the mouse button in a certain way, Photoshop freezes unnecessarily and makes you jump through a silly hoop to un-freeze it.
I once deliberately DIDN'T go to a big Adobe presentation at a computer show because I was fairly certain I would start yelling profanities or even tackle one of their reps to pay them back for the hundreds of hours in frustration they had inflicted upon me. "Warning: You are being attacked by a disgruntled user. OK? OK?! SAY IT!"
I was more full of the bad kind of piss and vinegar in my twenties. . .
And finally. . .
When Windows 2000 was being introduced, the Microsoft representative declared, "And there will no longer be a Blue Screen of Death!". The first question from a reporter in the audience, "What color will it be?"
-FL
For those who don't know/remember/weren't born - In IBM's infinite wisdom, I guess they decided to draw pictures in some sort of crappy BIOS low-res graphics to describe the error messages - probibly because anyone dumb enough to buy a PS/2 were to stupid to know how to read.
For example - I was working as an intern my freshman year of college, and had to set up a bunch of machines (or somehting) including PS/2's.
Now I mind you, I was actually quite computer litterate - so imagine my surprise when I turned on one system and got a picture which I could only describe as late-20th-century hieroglyphics. It had a person - with horizontal dotted lines coming out of its head, going through a rectangle or square or something - then a bunch of numbers.
WTF?!
I probably spent 10 minutes trying my best to decipher. The best I could come up with, was that it wanted me to elevate the monitor to be level with my head - probibly to avoid some sort of repetitive-strain-injury or something.
Was there some sort of water-leveling device running between the computer and monitor through the VGA cable or something?! How did it know this?! Even I knew this was stupid - but was desparate to try something. No - that wasn't it!
Eventually, I figured out the message: "Look up this error code in the manual".
If they just said that, I would have done that! If that hadn't showed anything but an error number, I would have done that!
Trying to install some old version of RHEL, I kept getting this one... Seems to me like the computer's reassuring itself.
$ echo "ceci n'est pas une pipe" | sed -Ee 's/(eci n|pas )//g'
PC LOAD LETTER
What the fuck does that mean?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PC_Load_Letter
You must wait a little bit before using this resource; please try again later.
How can you make a list of greatest errors ever without the zen-like paradox of the MS-DOS 'Keyboard not found, hit F1 to continue.' error?
"Disk Drive Hardware Fault" or, the ever popular "HIT/GAT Read Error".
WTF?
Memories...
"The more corrupt the state, the more it legislates." - Tacitus
The other night John Connor is swimming in the Pacific off Santa Monica Pier after jumping in to evade Terminator Cromartie, who proceeded to jump in after him and try to drown him. After escaping, John looks up and sees his protector Terminator Cameron (now subsequently referred to as "The Caminator") peering down at him.
He says, "A little help?"
The Caminator says, "I can't swim."
He says, "I just figured that out."
Richard Steven Hack - This sig is TOO GODDAMN SHORT TO DO ANYTHING USEFUL WITH! MORONS!
"Congratulations! You have now installed Microsoft Windows Vista!"
As a sidenote from my Counter Strike playing days:
Kernel Panic(my brother), General Failure(me) and Major Asshole(a friend) where always on the same team. I'm sad to say that Private Parts(other friend) never really got up to speed before our team was disbanded. He did have a great name though.
She made the willows dance
In the 80s, I was building a "syntax directed editor" system called Alice Pascal. There was also a Basic version. You can download it and its source at http://www.templetons.com/brad/alice.html if you like.
Anyway, as a program structure editor, it had the ability for you to select a block of code and "hide" it, which mean replacing it on the screen with "..." and a comment. You could expand and re-hide the tree. Nice way to see the full structure on screen at one time.
It also had an interpreter.
During development, we had a new build and the interpreter (run command) had checked out OK. However, when we tested the hide function, the program crashed. The error message was boring, it was my reaction to the error that makes the other programmer smile to this very day.
"Hmm. You can run, but you can't hide."
Has it been over a year since you last donated to the Electronic Frontier Foundation
Interestingly, the vagueness about whether it's the username or password that's at fault is deliberate. It's to keep an attacker from being able to confirm that a guessed user ID exists and just attack its password. Having to guess both at once makes the job much harder.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
The best error message I've ever seen was when I used to develop in Haskell. I don't remember the exact sentence, but it was pretty close to this when trying to run a program. "Fatal Error: Pattern match failure inside protected code". :)
-- SouNerd.com
My favorite error message has probably never been seen by any other Slashdotter...
I worked on the FCS MK88/2 (Trident-I Backfit fire control) in the Navy - a room sized collection of computers, old fashioned hard drives the size of footlockers, and associated electronics. In normal operation is was medium noisy what with the disk drives clattering, dozen of power supplies humming (including two big 2kw 120VAC to 28VDC converters), the printer occasionally printing a status or system report, and sometimes a switch rolling as the system operated. It also looked somewhat like you'd think a computer looked like if all you had to go on was Hollywood... Though the lights didn't blink (except for one set on the MDF's), there were a couple of hundred indicator lights scattered across the system plus the console had a couple of dozen more usually lit.
One day, cruising along at [mumble] feet under the North Atlantic, the generator that provided power to the system ate itself... In an instant all that humming stopped and all the lights went dark.
Except one.
On the alarm and monitoring portion of the console (powered by a separate supply) one red light came on, the only light lit and the only portion of the whole massive pile of machinery that had power...
"Input Power Fault".
Well, duh...
"apt is not installed. please use 'apt-get install apt' to install it." I have actually gotten this message :(
I've had a few great error messages...
"Provider error '80004005' Unspecified error filename.asp, line x"... which is a blank line! Had fun finding that one... I created a new file, copied the content of my file to the new one and it started working again...
This one isn't an error bun it's funny anyway: in the same project as the one in which I got the above error, I had to try to compress the images to the smallest size possible... I convert my psd file to a .gif, look up the size... and it is a negative number of bytes :P
"Error automation" when an app in visual basic could not find a ressource... quite instructive :P
"Please reinstall ms office" or something like that... while trying to open an ie window!!!
I've always been intrigued by the cobol function "MakeErrorAndExit" but I've never used it...
"Guidance failed to converge on a solution. Retry?"
Shuttle GPCs - sadly, it is just a logged error.
Setting the flyback frequency of your monitor by hand in the video setup of slackware circa 95: add an extra zero and, ah, the peanut-buttery stench of frying capacitors. I guess the smell-based error message movement fell out of fashion a while ago.
i\hbar\dot{\psi}=\hat{H}\psi
and yet on the first page we see one (RSoD) which probably almost no one has ever seen. Why not just make it 12?
Any Key? I can't find damn "Any" key.
How did that one not make the list? I get it at least a couple times a year in Win XP. It usually requires a repair install from the CD. Very annoying.
Some of the functions in the Windows API sometimes (or always) forget to set the error code after failing, or clear it instead. Obvious bugs and it baffles me that Microsoft hasn't done anything about this. The hours I've wasted because a function call failed without giving so much as a hint to what went wrong... Maybe the error message should instead be something like: 'Something went wrong. According to Windows, everything's just dandy. Nonetheless, it's fucked.'
Obviously they aren't African Swallows: 8 of them could easily handle a whale.
European Swallows, on the other hand...
FLAGRANT SYSTEM ERROR Computer over. Virus = Very Yes.
They also had PC LOAD legal.
I thought it was Paper Cartridge Load Letter.
John McAfee 'It was like that time I hired that Bangkok prostitute; to do my taxes, while I fucked my accountant'
How is this original research? The computer is a publication, is it not? Starting the computer with buttons 1, 2 and 3 pressed is just as easy and verifiable as opening a book at page 123, is it not?
My favourite error message is when the Linux kernel encounters an NMI error (can be due to bad memory) on boot:
"Dazed and confused, but trying to continue"
There use to be something about bad chips in the messages about 10 years ago when I encountered it, but the error messages have been changed in the kernel since then.
These posts express my own personal views, not those of my employer
Actually, they do.
But what frequently happens is that someone hasn't gone through the page-size dance (it's painful just how many places you have to set that to make it work properly all the time) and as a result the printer has been asked to print a US Letter sized page when it's only got A4 in it.
So PC LOAD LETTER and variants (our 4SIs would say UC LOAD LETTER and LC LOAD LETTER - upper and lower cartridge) are what we see the most frequently, but we'd still get UC LOAD A4 when it was genuinely out of paper.
Advanced users are users too!
From the ORIGINAL version of ZORK in fortran (when the game data files can't be opened):
980 FORMAT(' Suddenly a sinister, wraithlike figure appears before
1 you'/' seeming to float in the air. In a low, sorrowful voice
2 he says,'/' "Alas, the very nature of the world has changed,
3 and the dungeon'/' cannot be found. All must now pass away."
4 Raising his oaken staff'/' in farewell, he fades into the
5 spreading darkness. In his place'/' appears a tastefully
6 lettered sign reading:'//23X,'INITIALIZATION FAILURE'//
7' The darkness becomes all encompassing, and your vision fails.')
C
http://www.ibiblio.org/pub/academic/computer-science/history/pdp-11/rt/misc/dunsrc/dinit.ftn
-- Programming with boost is like building a house with lego. It's a cool but I wouldn't want to live in it
Got this error message recently in a Websphere log file:
"Syndiation error occured during reponse."
Three misspellings in the space of five words. That has to be a record.
I object to that article, and to the next reply.
|[Yes] [No]|
Can't remember the context. Wish I'd got a screen shot.
Notepad++ gave me the most strange error message i've ever seen: http://img143.imageshack.us/img143/9797/notepaddocapetavw7.jpg
Actually, substitute the ?s for loud beeps and strange letters flooding the screen, and you've got vi.
"vi has two modes -- the one that beeps, and the one that doesn't" -- Unknown
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Having obnoxious sound clips attached to every event you can think of was the epitome of the early 90s.
So true. It had its drawbacks, though (aside from the obvious drawback of being totally fscking annoying):
1. I was once on a tech support call when suddenly my PC yelled out -- "Help! Help! I'm being repressed!". From the phone, there was a long pause, and then the guy on the other end went "Ohhhhkay." Obviously not a Python fan.
2. I had the Windows "critical error" sound set to a noise that consisted of something like a Star Wars laser-blaster battle, followed by a massive explosion. It was... loud and abrupt. I had been hacking on some code for several hours, and it was well into the early morning. Everything had been silent four hours. Suddenly a critical error occurred. I nearly jumped out of my skin. Remembering what it felt like still gives me the twitches.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Actually, I've had "ERROR: No error" before.
I've seen the following in the Windows "Event Viewer" logs. (Reproduced from memory, so it's not verbatim, but it's pretty close.)
The following problem occurred during installation of Microsoft Office 2003:
Success
(Apparently, when installing via GPO, MSI sometimes reports an error despite everything being okay. So the message gets logged. It can happen with any package. I just liked the double entendre from when it happened to Office.)
(BTW, the subject line comes from this essay. If you haven't read it, you should. What's worse than failure? Success. HHOS.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I recall using a JOVIAL compiler in the 1980s. My favorite message was:
COMPILE COMPLETE: NONE OF THE ERRORS WERE DETECTED.
I once heard tell of a Pascal compiler that could produce the error message:
You lied to me when you told me this was a program.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
To be fair, it should had said "Error: keyboard not found. Connect a keyboard and press F1 to continue." But then, each byte of ROM was expensive once.
That error message dates back to the early days of the IBM-PC (possibly the first model, although I couldn't swear to that). Every expected possible failure during POST (Power On Self Test) had a corresponding error code and message. They all used the same output routine, which displayed the error code, the error message, and prompted the operator to press [F1] to continue. They simply didn't create a special case for keyboard errors -- it displayed the same way all the others did. There were other errors which left the system effectively inoperable, but still prompted to press F1. The keyboard error was just the most commonly encountered, of course.
It was error code 301, by the way. :)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
the error pre-dates PS/2 keyboards, and the older keyboards with the larger connectors were hot-swappable
The IBM-PC and PS/2 keyboard interfaces were not designed to be hot-swappable. However, it tended to work anyway, provided POST completed initialization of the i8042 first. On occasion, though, a cheap clone would have a mobo that fried the keyboard controller if you tried to hot-swap it. Back in those days, new motherboards were *expensive*...
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
When I bought my first laptop, it had PS/2 connectors. The people I bought it off went to great lengths to tell me NOT to hot swap as it *could* blow up the mother board. They alleged they had had multiple experiences of this happening.
I didn't really believe them, as I had (as most of us have) swapped out *lots* of keyboards with no problems.
Anyway, one day I had done something dumb on my headless / keyboardless server and locked myself out of ssh (note to self: don't run /etc/init.d/network stop when your only access is via the network, use /etc/init.d/network restart instead)
To fix the problem, I plugged in a monitor and keyboard. When I plugged in the keyboard it "let the magic smoke out" of the motherboard. A couple of surface mounted devices in the keyboard plugin area had blown (including scorch marks).
Now I believe them. The odds are pretty small though.
Ever stop to think
"A system call that should never fail has failed."
I have been told that some versions of SunOS had a kernel panic message that read:
Shannon and Bill say this can't happen.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
PC LOAD LETTER... what the FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?!?!
Paper cartridge -- Load letter sized paper.
"I know you don't care, I'm just trying to annoy you."
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
How is this original research? The computer is a publication, is it not?
Exactly. Information on Wikipedia must be verifiable. Everything else stems from that. Original research -- research that someone has done for the first time, and that no-one else has done -- is not permitted, because it cannot be verified. The behavior of the first Mac computers is easily verified.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
One day I got a call from engineering that told me they where getting a error in a vb application.
Where I work, we used to have an in-house, custom program for test automation, written by a guy named Bob. (In a language called Rocky Mountain Basic, no less.) Bob was fired a long time ago. On occasion, the program would pop up the error message box:
Call Bob!
Man am I glad that program was finally retired.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I seem to remember a few times getting all four: Abort, Retry, Ignore, Fail. Ah, DOS.
Yah. ARF came from the DOS "critical error" handler. Problems that required operator intervention were termed "critical errors", since the system could not proceed without help. When a BIOS or DOS system routine encountered such a problem, they invoked a software interrupt. The theory was that a good program could hook the interrupt and put in a more useful error handler. Obviously, not many programs did so.
Abort killed the running program or command, and returned you to the DOS prompt. Retry had DOS try again, without returning control to the caller. Ignore meant control was returned to the calling routine, as if nothing had gone wrong. Fail meant control was returned to the running routine, with an error status indication.
"Fail" might seem like a good idea, but it turns out that a lot of code didn't check the error status, leading to erratic behavior and/or just calling the same routine again.
There was some rhyme or reason to when which choices were displayed when, but I've long since forgotten it. Some of it might have had something to do with some commands being internal to COMMAND.COM and some being external programs, but the service routines all invoking the same "critical error" software interrupt.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I remember in a version of SpySweeper about a year ago, I installed it, and got the error message before my start menu was up "Spy Sweeper encountered an error. Something Bad Happened." That was it... Possibly the best error message of all time!!
The Hurd-specific error code -EIEIO: "Computer bought the farm"
The Raytheon RDS 500's of the 1970's sometimes gave the following compiler error:
Eror
That was it. Nothing else. Couldn't even bother to spell the word properly. It meant that somewhere in your 10,000 cards(!) of Fortran there was an error.
You had error messages? ;-)
Our local LUG was once privileged to have Doug McIlroy speak at one of our meetings. (For those who don't recognize the name and don't want to RTFA, he was there during the invention of most of what we consider computers. He was helped test the first FORTRAN compiler (and thus the first compiler). He was Ken and Dennis's boss when they were creating Unix and C. He's credited with the concept of modular software (i.e., not every program has to be written from the ground up to do everything). In short, he's a computer demigod. And a real nice guy. But I digress...)
Anyway, he described the behavior of the early FORTRAN compiler when it encountered an error: It would stop (halt) the machine. The operator would then look at the program counter to find the instruction address it halted at. That address told them where in the FORTRAN compiler itself the machine was running when the problem was detected. They had a big binder, called the "stop book", that listed addresses and what a halt at that address usually meant. He described one of the messages as, "Duplicate identifier, or some other problem".
And I thought Microsoft Outlook's diagnostic messages were bad. :)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
My favourite error message is when the Linux kernel encounters an NMI error
Other good kernel error messages (not source comments) include:
Aieeee! Killing interrupt handler!
and
Open inodes after filesystem unmount. Self-destuct in 5... 4...
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
...was very similar. "None of your errors have been found."
"This may be for a number of reasons"
OK
That's it. That's the error message. So now, Windows guru, you have to work out from the number of reasons it could be, what caused the problem.
The other great error messages I've seen all involve drivers from non-english-speaking manufacturers. Like from a Marvell Lan B5.1110.1 driver:
Worry
Sorry!! We don't support this ID.
Your ID are't Correctly!!
OK
Or this brilliant entry from Microsoft:
Data Execution Prevention - Microsoft Windows
To help protect your computer, Windows has closed this program.
Name: Windows Explorer
Publisher: Microsoft Corporation
Close Message
You moved your mouse. Please restart Windows for changes to take effect.
When I spotted a bug in the output I typed...
list 1000-4000
and my program responded...
Really? Why?
Totally derailed my train of thought.
Obama and Biden have totally gone back on their word and betrayed the tech community, and this is the story that makes it to slashdigg?
"[...] the BSoD is a sort of persistent, universal reminder of the fallibility of computers windows [...]"
Fixed, free of charge.
vi beeps? I've only seen it flash.
vi is emitting a beep character (ASCII 7 BEL). Your terminal is flashing the window when it gets that character, rather than making a noise. It's called "visual bell". In a room full of terminals (or even with just one), all the beeping can get quite annoying, so visual bell is the default on many systems.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
Just because no one ever has, doesn't mean that no one ever can.
You misunderstand. It isn't about verifying the results of the research, like one would verify a reported scientific experiment. This is about verifying the fact that it occurred at all, not that the research is right or wrong or true or false. So you cannot describe original research -- research you have done yourself, and no-one else has. Once the research has been reported in a secondary source, it can be included in Wikipedia. The standard for inclusion is verifiability, not truth.
For more information, see: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Verifiability
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
hax0r:$ su
Password:
Sorry.
Well, there goes my hacking career. . .
"Floppy can't be acceded. Check another application don't use it" and the wonderful... ""... no error message, just a picture of an exclamation point.
Excel used to have an error that read "Error: Not Enough" and the dialog box had only an "Ok" button.
I always preferred old-school X programs, which tended to label the button in error dialogs "Dismiss". As in, dismiss the error message. Clicking "OK" in response to an error just seems so... wrong. Back in 1995, I was playing around with the then-new Windows 95. I monkeyed with the SHELL setting, and the following error message appeared on restart:
Could not start Explorer. You must reinstall Windows.
[ OK ]
I refused to click the OK button. That was not okay. (I instead hit the RESET hardware switch. The bad SHELL setting was easily fixed by editing WIN.INI from DOS mode.)
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
File exists, or file not found.
I've never understood this message. It is telling you that either the file exists, or it doesn't.
WTF?
This is an ex-parrot!
"Windows is installing. . ."
It's printed after an error message as a prompt. As in,
The first line is the error message.
A catch-all error message I saw once on a Solaris box (7 I think) read:
"Something is broken - Fix something"
It was well and truly borked - only time in my Unix admin career that I resorted to a re-install!
I still like the random error message produced by Powerquest's Drivecopy product. Every now and then an error would produce a dialog box with the informative text "something happened". That was it. Just an OK dialog box that said "something happened". Awesome...
yvan eht nioj
ERROR: Not enough memory to display the error mes
Table-ized A.I.
PC LOAD LETTER
What the fuck does that mean?
Load letter-format sized paper ...
Outlook versions 98, 2000, XP, and 2003 Probably in 97 and 2007 too.
The most helpful: "The operation failed" message.
Work done by an officer's doppelganger in a parallel universe cannot be claimed as overtime.
Back in the day, I threw together a basic memory corruption checker while working on some message passing software. The thing would write some magic numbers into the areas immediately before and after an allocated block. Come free-time, the checker would make sure the magic numbers were kosher. As one does, I referred to the low and high ends of the buffers in question as bottom and top. If I found a busted magic number in, say, the top magic number I could dump out a diagnostic to say that the top magic number was corrupt (hey - we couldn't afford Purify back then). I'm sure you can guess where this is going... yes, in production code we (I) generated errors of the form:
Illegal Bottom Magic Number....
Of course, no-one saw the word number. Illegal Bottom Magic. It's like some kind of homosexual harry potter I guess.
Happy days.
p.s. shut her down clancy - she's pumping mud
p.p.s. Hamish, Billy, Gordon - you there?
I can't believe they completely missed the haiku error messages from BeOS's browser Netpositive.
The memory could not be "read".
What are the quotes for?
Some utility (FILCOM?), when presented with a particularly difficult input, died with a completely undocumented message in Spanish. Anybody remember this? Another one of that vintage: "You have entered the incorrect password.". Talk about bad luck!
7pm Friday, August 22nd
Your Server was exploring the dungeon and preparing to battle the mighty dragon when it encountered a horde of good-looking, expert Tiny Adventures players.
Your Server made a server load check with a difficulty of 3700 . . . and rolled 1
Your Server was dominated by the excited players and its CPU was trampled. Your Server headed back to the shop to purchase a huge upgrade for itself and will be back tomorrow. The horde of players was thanked again for their enthusiasm and patience.
Update:
The skill challenge before our wizards requires more successes than we initially believed. While we will continue to make acrane skill checks through out the evening, we do not expect our ritual to complete before Friday midnite (Friday, August 22nd).
Thank you for your patience. We will update you if this changes.
Quoth the Dungeons & Dragons Facebook app, Tiny Adventures.
"Catastrophic Error-Program Lost-Sorry"
..at least it apologized...
Mission: To provide products that consume time and energy as entertainingly as permitted by the laws of thermodynamics.
Who's writing a custom web browser.
I'm currently testing it out, to help him with bugs, but I don't see how I can help, when the only error message I get from it is "ERROR: Fuck you."
Yeah, just one question: how do you qualify an error message as being "great" or "not great?"
OK, I'm dating (and placing) myself with this one... But I honestly think that no list of error messages should omit the scourge of ZX Spectrum users. Ah, the joys of fiddling with volume, treble and head alignment.
What about 'good old':
"R Tape Loading error"
Press Enter to exit Press a key to continue or any other key to exit
But still the original error message was not uncommon in A4 countries...
In Europe, "PC Load Letter" is (or used to be) a fairly common error message. It means that the printer is still full of A4 paper, but someone has forgotten to switch their printer driver to A4.
WWTTD?
The one which used to cause the most wailing and gnashing of teeth in our household when we were growing up was that sodding "R Tape loading error, 0:1". Time to rewind the tape, carefully hold the mic and ear cables in the correct position, stare at screeching, psychedilic patterns, and above all - don't breath. AGAIN!
"An error has occurred in unknown" So how does it know about the unknown yet alone the status!
My favorite was always Netcomm's web browser that would fail with an "Oops! You're screwed" dialog with just an OK button.
"Emergency. Emergency. There's an emergency going on." Holly, from Red Dwarf.
You should've practiced basic security precautions and repainted the tilde key red. (Why tilde? Because it looks mysterious and powerful but is actually harmless. Sort of like Opus Dei, whose unofficial motto should be "By Grace Of God, Keeping Bad Fiction Authors Employed The World Over".)
Help poke pirates in the eyepatch, arr.
I still remember a Dreamweaver messagebox I used to get in 2004 while working as a web developer.
It had the big red X, "An error has occurred" as window title and the main text was "The operation has completed successfully".
I can't believe no one referenced the IRQ conflict. I used to love LOLing at PCs over those. The notion that a keyboard and sound card could conflict was laughable to me as a Mac user.
"Welcome to Windows Vista."
The summary reminded me that back in 1991, I got from mail-order a piece of shareware called Jazzbench that was designed to be a cooler alternative to the official Amiga Workbench. The first time I ran the software was at night, in my basement, and my speakers were turned up loud. When I attempted to do something stupid (probably about 10 seconds in), the software blared out its standard error message: a sample of "I'm sorry, Dave - I'm afraid I can't do that" from Kubrick's 2001. My name is Dave, and as this was before I had even heard about the film, let alone seen it, it scared the **** out of me. So it gets my vote for the greatest error message of all time...
Back in my consulting days, I worked with a couple of whizkid programmers at Tandy Business Systems. They had created a number of interesting/entertaining custom error messages in the Xenix OS they were using. One of my favorites was:
"Beam me up, Scotty! She's sucking mud!"
Ignorance is curable, stupid is forever.
Back in the days of the ZX Spectrum and Vic-20 there were lots of other small microcomputers on the market. I got my hands on one (from some Korean company, I think) which was small, neat, beige, with a small built-in LCD display. You could program it directly with BASIC, but the problem it had was it appeared to have only one error message:
ERROR
No line numbers, no error code number, no description or other indication what the problem was. At all. Syntax error? File not found? Divide by zero? Out of memory? Tough luck, "ERROR" is all you get to diagnose the problem with.
Cress, cress, lovely lovely cress
Syntax Error counts as an error message right?
Back in the 80's on a Xerox Dandelion (a dedicated Lisp machine, which by the way was an AWESOME development environment), the ethernet connection, which was kind of a new thing, would occasionally go south requiring a restart. The error message was, as above, "Burdock killed the Ether kludge". My favorite.
We used to fight to get to use the two machines that had a whopping 4Mb of memory (the crappy ones only had 1Mb). Ah, those were the days
Raymond and Charlie are in a phone booth with the door closed. Raymond farts then says, "Uh oh fart. Uh oh fart."
How does this enable progress?
I expect it doesn't.
Wikipedia's mission is to be an encyclopedia of verifiable, established facts. Publishing original research is outside the scope of that effort.
Of course, having a comprehensive Free Content encyclopedia available could well enable progress by being a useful resource to people doing original research.
dragonhawk@iname.microsoft.com
I do not like Microsoft. Remove them from my email address.
I've still got an ancient 816 byte DOS program that spits out:
[ Gadzooks... no files in ?...* ]
if there are no files in the current directory. Maybe this program is not too well known because if there was one-and-only-one file in the directory when you ran it, it would crash. Nonetheless, one of my favorite words of exclamation ever since.
[* - lameness didn't like 11 "?" in a row...]
I come here for the love
My pet peeve is having to still wait while looking at "100% complete"...
You may be right. On my part all I want is a candy bar from Hval choclolate factory.
XENIX 3.0
On XENIX 3.0, in a really obscure hardware failure condition (the Z80 got back to the main operation dispatch loop with the stack at a different depth than it was on the previous pass), z80ctl would spit out:
Bugchk: Sckmud
"Shut her down Scotty, she's sucking mud again!"
"Shut her down Scotty..." was somebodys' sig line on USENET back around 1984 and the vision of Captain Kirk yelling this down to Scotty always struck Frank as very funny, so when Frank needed a message for this insanely implausable condition Frank had seen a few times in test, Frank felt you needed a special reward if you managed to get here, so Frank picked that message. The technical support documentation describing this message suggested that rebooting soon would be a good career move. (Frank Durda IV)
Actually, this specific error was most common in A4 countries, since it didn't actually refer to a paper tray being empty, but to a document being set up in paper format and there only being A4 paper in the tray.
Which is one of the many reasons why this error was so damn confusing. You get a document from the US (defaults to 'paper' or sometimes 'legal' size), try to print it in your non-US office, and this shows up.
Coz eternity my friend, is a long *ing time.
Text based Oracle install running the same day Princess Diana died paused the scrolling window of text long enough to tell me, "Package diana no longer exists"
Spooky. How could they know...
that's because you're running bash as root now. and your point was?
"PC LOAD LETTER" Office Space made it famous, but I've hated that damn thing a long time. And Paradox floored me by sending a terse and of course unhelpful message to waste a full sheet of paper, "Nothing to report." Thanks for that information; a blank page would have been as helpful and less wasteful.
That happens in unix when your used is deleted while you're logged on. Last time seen it when an idiot ex-cow-orker removed root on his NAS because "my distribution doesn't need it", despite me telling him that it was actually used to do important things for the OS.
"Panic: Free free'ing free frag" Maybe it was funnier having it hammered out on the console line printer. Can anyone guess to OS? -S
Back when I was school in the 80's, we all used VT-220 serial terminals to connect to the mainframes, rather than each having individual workstations. We were mostly working on VMS boxen. However, one year the department got a brand-spanking new Unix box, and we were assigned one class that used it exclusively. One thing I discovered (the hard way) was that if you accidentally tried to display a binary file on a VT-220 it would lock it hard. So hard that someone ("someone" = a grumpy and hard to find sysadmin) had to go down to the server room and reset the terminal server to get it back.
One of my slower classmates was having trouble with his program, and asked me to come look at the weird message he was getting. It said something along the lines of "SEGMENTATION FAULT. Core dumped". I knew from previous experience this meant the crash state of his program would have gotten dumped to a binary file in his working directory named "core".
Normally I'd be nice, but we used to play pranks on each other in the lab, and this was too good to pass up. So I told him, "Oh! That means your program ran out of memory. You need more. You can fix that by typing "more core""
...that "I am Error" was not on the list.