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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.
missing /etc/passwd, tried to login as root:
"you don't exist. go away."
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.
Error, Water Detected in Drive C:
"Congratulations, your Lotus Notes installation is complete."
+++ 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.
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.
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.
The following story comes from Andy McFadden:
I just got "Keyboard not found, press F1 to continue" today.
Old bios I had said:
Error: Keyboard Is Missing, Press Any Key To Continue.
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
"...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
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.
Some are absolute genius!
You just missed a perfect opportunity to say they were brillant.
I'm so excited I just made water in my pantaloons!
They missed this one:
"Too many pages on the article."
factor 966971: 966971
PC LOAD LETTER
What the fuck does that mean?
More specifically:
No Keyboard Detected. Press F1 to Continue.
Gets my top vote hands down.
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
"Aieee, killing interrupt handler" (Linux kernel)
PS, hey, I still have Excellent karma... why no bonus? Now I'm, like, nobody!
PC LOAD LETTER... what the FUCK DOES THAT MEAN?!?!
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."
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
Customizing the error sounds after boot was a lot of fun on those early Macs. I had this sound clip from Ghostbusters, and my name is Ray, so it kind of took the edge off when I put in an unreadable floppy and the Mac spit it out, exclaiming: "Ray, this looks extraordinarily bad."
PHEM - party like it's 1997-2003!
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.
"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 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
Is this some sort of trap...?
Yep. A Slightly better phrasing I've seen, every time our old Windows Exchange 4.0 box came up"
Warning: An unexpected condition occured:
Exchange started successfully.
As explained, its a race condition calling GetLastError().
Anyone who believes exponential growth can go on forever in a finite world is either a madman or an economist
ERROR: No keyboard found. Hit F1 to continue.
(No, I'm not kidding.)
From IBM's OS/2 tokenring network driver. "Open error during physical insertion phase". Ouch!
I think everyone remembers their first segmentation fault or core dump.
Dude, I can't even remember when I stopped wearing diapers, let alone the first time I took a dump!
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
I dig "403: Page Found" too.
"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.
I recall using a JOVIAL compiler in the 1980s. My favorite message was:
COMPILE COMPLETE: NONE OF THE ERRORS WERE DETECTED.
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
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
Happened to a friend of mine while installing Ubuntu (IIRC):
http://img241.imageshack.us/img241/2758/dsc00035ca8.jpg
I await the greatest battle of all time: TDWTF's MFD vs Slashdot's idle.
My money's on MFD -- at least some of the comments there are worth reading.
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!
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...
Even better, in the linked kb article:
"Note that the number of required characters changes from 17,145 to 18,770 with the installation of SP1."
Specialist Mac support for creative pros, Melbourne
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, 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.
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.
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!
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...