Best error message ever

[andygates]

Our Blackberry server just gave out the following piece of sheer genius:

Transaction Complete: SUCCESS_ERROR_FAIL

The very apex of gibberish.

[Charlotte]

[Woofage]

I used to like "Please insert the floppy disk labelled Windows 95 CDROM"

But the best one was on a work laptop brought home by Mrs Woofage. After an application crash the message told the used to contact the software vendor for support. The application? Micro$oft Office. Anything else installed on the machine? No!

[pcolbeck]

What about the famous "keyboard error: press any key to continue" fantastic one that when the keyboard error was the fact that the keyboard was not plugged in.

[Valiant]

^^^ Is my fave

[redshift]

My favourite: "You don't exist. Go away."  If the UID doesn't have a valid user, say if /etc/passwd gets corrupted, *nix sometimes throws this up in the console.

[andygates]

Trust *NIX to just be plain rude to people!

[Chris S]

 

[Thor]

From distant mainframe days...

Fatal error.  Operator killed.

Which suggests that some unfortunate tape loading drone in the computer room got  whacked 'cos you pressed the wrong key.

[Greenbank]

What about the famous "keyboard error: press any key to continue" fantastic one that when the keyboard error was the fact that the keyboard was not plugged in.

Lots of people just don't get that one. It would have been far less interesting if the BIOS authors had made the message:

"No keyboard detected. Connect keyboard and Press F1 to continue."

I'm surprised they didn't do something similar for "Video Card Not Present", which is another odd one to see.

[Woofage]

I'm surprised they didn't do something similar for "Video Card Not Present", which is another odd one to see.

The system beep tells you the message in Morse code?

[TimO]

I was always amused by the term "Broken Arrow".

It has two meanings which I'm aware of (there are probably a lot of others as well).

1. When there are various errors relating to the connection of an IBM 3270 terminal, the symbol which appears on the screen is called a Broken Arrow.

2. The US military refers to an accident involving a nuclear weapon as a Broken Arrow.

The earlier name is reckoned to have been chosen knowing the second definition!

(OK, strictly speaking a nuclear weapon accident is only a Broken Arrow if the accident doesn't involve the risk of a nuclear war).

[Greenbank]

I'm surprised they didn't do something similar for "Video Card Not Present", which is another odd one to see.

The system beep tells you the message in Morse code?

BIOS redirection to serial port. The blades in my blade server have no video card so they shunt this out during POST. The CMOS got wiped on one and it wouldn't boot up because the default CMOS setting is to halt on any POST errors.

[Greenbank]

Trust *NIX to just be plain rude to people!

http://www.feep.net/~roth/geek-humor/unix/unix.shell.jokes

Code: [Select]

  $ cat "food in tin cans"
  cat: cannot open food in tin cans


[chris]

Not exactly an error message, but many years ago a colleague ported a Fortran application from a PDP 11 to a Whitechapel Workstation (an obscure Unix box). He failed to work out that the default integer was a different number of bits to the integer on the PDP11 and the customer phoned up saying that a progress message on the application was reporting many thousand percent done and that the estimated completion time was many hours before the application started!

[chris]

One of the releases of the Progress RDBMS used to report something along the lines of -

ERROR - This error does not exist.

[alexb]

The boot sequence on one of our SEMs includes the lines "Error BIOS not detected" followed by a line a few seconds later "No Operating System installed" then a longish wait (about 1.5 secs actually) and then Windows XP loads.
I always find that pretty funny.

The IT guys are forbidden to touch the computer, even though I know they're itching to try and find out why it does it.

[Greenbank]

The boot sequence on one of our SEMs includes the lines "Error BIOS not detected" followed by a line a few seconds later "No Operating System installed" then a longish wait (about 1.5 secs actually) and then Windows XP loads.
I always find that pretty funny.

(click to show/hide)

Sounds suspiciously like a LILO/grub bootloader configured to output those two messages instead of the usual prompts.

Some geek having fun somewhere.

[Martin]

I can't remember which of our old DOS based blood analyer pc's it was but was always confused by the message "Bad Mismatch" 

[tiermat]

One of the releases of the Progress RDBMS used to report something along the lines of -

ERROR - This error does not exist.

My favourite is similar to that, in older versions of Lotus Notes (V4 IIRC) it actually used to come up with an error box with the message:

"Error: There is no Error"

If you clicked on ok you could carry on working as before....

[TheLurker]

BeOS had a nice approach to error messages.
A sample : NetPositive error messages

[CAMRAMan]

One of our applications had a very Hungarian approach to English:

"You have been idle for too long and you have been disconnected"

SLACKER!!!

[Woofage]

http://www.feep.net/~roth/geek-humor/unix/unix.shell.jokes

I liked this one:

Code: [Select]

  % gotta light?
  No match.

[Chris S]

My favourite:

% man: why did you get a divorce?
  man:: Too many arguments.