Gnarly Error Messages 1315
Veeru writes "In my career, I have run across some whopper error messages, but a call from the mainframe sysop one night beat them all: 'We are experiencing MVS processor spin loops, the programs are running while holding a disabled CPU. This is causing XCF communication delays to the point where we are losing VTAM RTP routing, are suffering OSPF adjacency failures on TCP/IP dynamic routing and MIM VCF failures. Whatever this code is, it should NOT be propagated to production or we run the risk of losing the development plex if XCF signaling is adversely impacted by processor disabled spin loops'. My friend once got an error message 'Error 2 while trying to report error 2'. I would be curious to hear from the Slashdot community on encounters with other bizarre error messages."
Illegal Operation (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not getting any better (Score:3, Interesting)
Yeah, that's a helpful one. *Anything* would have been more useful than that.
Apple's MPW C compiler famous for its error msgs (Score:5, Interesting)
Apple once put out a C compiler famous for its error messages. Who else would make a compiler that states "This label is the target of a goto from outside of the block containing this label AND this block has an automatic variable with an initializer AND your window wasn't wide enough to read this whole error message"?
Searching for Apple compiler error messages on Google [google.com] picks up dozens of sites with the error messages from this compiler, as well as spreads out the slashdot effect.
Doing a search for Eudora humor error messages on Google [google.com] shows Eudora to have a similar sense of humor as well ("Memory is tight-Live Dangerously").
How to totally screw up Win2k in less than 1 min. (Score:4, Interesting)
You gotta love MS's monolithic integration...
SGI message - has anybody else had this? (Score:5, Interesting)
First time my boss went away and left me in charge of everything, our baby, the SGI Indigo2 ( this was a few years ago) decided to die big style. I am not a full blooded geek so scuse me if I don't describe this right, but...
...screen filled with text, went up the screen rapidly filling the whole thing, I think it was like when you start up and all the boot stuff goes past. Finally the screen flashes then does a sort of blue screen of death and the only text on the screen in the top left is DON'T PANIC.
I swear I saw this, if I hadn't seen this with my own eyes, I wouldn't believe it, but there I am, the boss is away for the first time on holiday and the computer is saying 'DON'T PANIC' . I knew things were very, very bad.
Can somebody tell me about this error message, how SGI got to put it on their machines, and why?
(end note is boss was cool as ever and the engineers fixed it and we got our data back, but boy, was I afraid to touch that machine again...)
Errors covering errors (Score:5, Interesting)
"Something is wrong here..."
"What?" I ask.
"The program works...".
"Well it should doesn't it?".
"No, it shouldn't, no one can write Assembler in such volume and avoid errors..."
"But does the program give the right result?"
"Yes, but that's impossible! I nearly guessed how to do it. How can it work?.."
So he starts checking the program. Finds nothing. Debugs it, all seems to work. Then he starts to doubt that the results are correct. So he makes two three checks by hand. Then he writes a small segment of the program and things go nuts.He gets back to the whole program and starts debugging it, step by step. In the end, and after taking four times more what took him to create the program, he approaches me with some clear relief.
"There were errors..."
"So the result was wrong..."
"No, the result was absolutely right!"
"!?!"
"Well, the fact is that I did one offset wrong but in other section of the program, another error in made returned the values to normal. That's why the program worked fine..."
How many such programs exist?
Re:Printer on fire (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Amiga Error (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:How to totally screw up Win2k in less than 1 mi (Score:2, Interesting)
haikus (Score:2, Interesting)
The page that you seek
No longer exists
But many others remain.
Anybody remember any others?
Values of beta will give rise to dom! (Score:5, Interesting)
From personal experience, one that sticks out in my mind is from Microsoft's Flight Simulator. If you auger into the ground, it says "Crash". If you bellyflop into Lake Michigan it says "Splash". But if you make a perfect landing, forgetting the minor detail of putting down your landing gear, it'd say "Crash! Lower your gear next time!" This message dates all the way back to MFS 1.0.
Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters... (Score:3, Interesting)
Error Message: Your Password Must Be at Least 18770 Characters and Cannot Repeat Any of Your Previous 30689 Passwords
http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb
Re:Turn the computer off (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Amiga Error (Score:5, Interesting)
Everyone likes to malign the Amiga system crash dialog, simply because it bore the term 'Guru Meditation'. "Ha ha," they joke, "see how primitive and useless the error message was."
You have to understand that this was a massive advance forward. Prior to that, the major systems were first-generation Macs (which displayed a certain number of bomb icons and nothing else); and Apple ]['s, Commodore-64s, and MS-DOS-running PC clones -- all of which displayed nothing; it just (if you were lucky) silently locked up.
Carl Sassenrath [sassenrath.com], designer and author of the Amiga's 'kernel', thought this state of affairs sucked, so he did something about it. Amiga's Guru Meditations, cryptic though they were, told the programmer which task was responsible for the crash (first hex number), and what exception it generated (second hex number). You could then hit the right mouse button to drop into a very primitive serial debugger to get more information. While these numbers were useless to 95% of the users out there, it was information the user could give to the vendor, helping them track down the problem more easily -- information they never had before.
Meanwhile, everyone just happily tolerated Windoze BSODs, even though they were, and still are, no more informative than Amiga Guru Meditations.
Schwab
The Mac OS wins this one hands down (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Turn the computer off (Score:1, Interesting)
All manufacturers have skimped in certain designs. Still, with moused/gpm on *NIX, and direct support for hot-plugging (polling? interrupting?) in QNX6's mouse drivers, it's about time we pretended we *had* to take the downtime, and instead start holding the boardmakers responsible if it blows.
My personal favorite (Score:2, Interesting)
Not enough memory to eject disk
Guru List (Score:1, Interesting)
Here're some Secret Guru Decoder Rings, for the curious: amiga.emugaming.com's version [emugaming.com], or the AmigaDOS Online Reference Manual's [nethkin.com].
The latter site [nethkin.com] features a few more errors to chew on, like the colored POST codes and filesystem error numbers; do keep in mind that the 'News Flash' on the site is from 1999(?), and is now only a historical document itself. Check the comments of the recent MorphOS article here if you wonder what everyone's up to now.
Re:How to totally screw up Win2k in less than 1 mi (Score:3, Interesting)
Eudora programmers (Score:3, Interesting)
Eudora was also very good at actually *describing* what an option did (unlike MS software, which usually says something like "The website could not be contacted", which does the end user no good and gives the troubleshooter headaches. Error messages also contained relevant information, and the whole piece of software was fast and stable.
Definitely one of the better written apps I've ever used, and one where it seems that the engineer/techie types had more leeway.
Re:the ultimate Amiga error message was great... (Score:3, Interesting)
I met RJ Mical once, the man who wrote Exec, which was the Amiga's multitasking engine. (I think it would be called the scheduler/dispatcher now.) Exec was responsible for the extremely, extremely efficient context switches that made the Amiga so fast and responsive. Motorola used to use his code as an example of 'how to do multitasking on a 68000'. I have a vague memory that Exec did a context switch in something like 11 instructions.
I am rarely speechless, but I was there... what do you aay to a demigod? (well, other than 'thank you', which I think I did manage.
Anyway, thanks for the correction. Duh.
I have had a few oddball messages too. (Score:2, Interesting)
engrish error message.. (Score:2, Interesting)
"This program no work under this version Windows!!!"
Re: translation... (Score:2, Interesting)
Sorta like Unix... (Score:3, Interesting)
Usage:
until I happened to program something that produced an error like it. Guess what? perror(3) really requires an actual OS error to occur if you want to use it. Otherwise, it will complain about whatever happens to be in errno, which in some incarnations of libc happens to be the check to see if stdin is attached to a terminal. And to confuse matters more, the explanation for ENOTTY used to be (well, probably is to this day): Not a typewriter.
Another old Unix joke:
% light my cigarette, please?
light: No match.
Re: translation... (Score:3, Interesting)
Amiga DOS 2 and 3 were considerably more stable, but when the system locked typically it would reset - you'd get a red flashing box about a unrecoverable software error push left mouse button to continue. Sometimes when it was recoverable (pretty rare) you'd get a yellow flashing box - and when you pushed the mouse button you'd go back to the workbench.
It was never really all that annoying because most every amiga I had rebooted pretty quickly (maybe 8-25 seconds)
Probably the strangest error I ever saw was when I was working along in Tru64 (compaq/digital's unix for axp) I got a kernel panic and something about please wait while the system resets - where it promptly bopped me back to the desktop leaving me where I was. This happened frequently on system errors. Admitedly I don't know as much as I probably should about tru64 - because I really don't know how to explain it.
Re:Mac Bomb (Score:3, Interesting)
Mac System 7 used to have a file copying progress dialog bug. You'd be happily waiting, the progress bar would reach 2 pixels from the end, then 1....then -1, then -10....huh?
Basically the progress bar would march right off the end of the dialog and continue drawing itself across the desktop. It would evenutally march its way right off the screen...
Cheers,
Ian
Re:How to totally screw up any windoze machine (Score:3, Interesting)
arp -d [your mac addy]
Note to idiots willing to try this:
You will have to completely re-install windows after doing this. You will lose all the data on your hard drives. You will not be able to restore your machine in any other way.
I haven't yet tried this on XP, but I've done demos on 95, 98, nt4 and 2000, and in each time the MCSEs could never recover the system afterwards.
the AC
silly (Score:4, Interesting)
The BBC micro's response to trying to renumber a BASIC source with steps of 0:
Silly.