I just got a new one:
A null reference pointer was passed to the stub.
What the hell could that mean? Do these Microsoft guys think that that message is helpful to anyone? Days like this I’m suseptible to Apple new advertising campaigns.
Any others you’d like to share?
That error is for the developers, not you. As far as you’re concerned, it says “Please don’t do that.”
In actuality, there was a function which expected to be passed an address to some memory, instead it was passed the null reference (doesn’t point to anything). Since the function didn’t know what to do with it, it threw an error.
There are bad or stupid error messages out there, but that one is fairly informative if you are the intended audience. My favorites are still:
“Keyboard not found: press f1 to continue”
and “lp0 printer on fire”
My favorite?
“An undetectable error has been detected”
I shit you not.
I offer you The Interface Hall of Shame!
That’s nothing - I GOT TO THE END OF THE XP HELP WIZARD!!!
It said something along the lines of ‘This wizard can no longer help, please seek help elsewhere.’ The problem? I didn’t know I had to initialize a new hard drive.
Other than that it’s been ‘A memory error has occured…’ (RAM fell out), and the usual ‘BlahBlah has encountered yadayadayada, please tell Microsoft’.
That’s my point - who did they think was going to see the error? They didn’t foresee someone like me using the computer? “Please don’t do that” would be better, except that all I did was click “save draft” in my email.
I would get much less angry at my computer if the error messages said something like, “I’m so sorry that I have made a mistake. Obviously the people who made me are incompetent idiots. You have every right to be angry at the inconvenience I have caused you.” Instead they always seem to imply it’s my fault. Like when you start up the computer without shutting it down. “To avoid seeing this message in the future, always select shutdown from the start menu.” Well, I would have if the damn computer hadn’t crashed and forced me to turn the power off and lose all my work!
Also, why does it force me to say “OK”? Is this some kind of power trip, forcing me to acquiesce? It’s not OK, dammit!
Thanks for the link, Scarlett