This is a poll of sorts, so IMHO seems appropriate.
List the stupidest (either due to situation or due to message, or both) computer errors you’ve ever encountered.
I was just reminded of one that I just had from a program that transfer data from my cell phone to my computer. It’s certainly not the dumbest I’ve ever seen, but it’s the only dumb one I can recall at the moment, and it made me want to start this thread.
“An unexpected error has occured.”
Oh, well fucking whew. I was so worried that an expected error had occured. Thanks for the specific info.
Well, this isn’t really an error, per se, but back when I was 18 I was registering with Selective Service online. The form had an option to select your gender, which was defaulted to Male. Just out of curiosity, I clicked it to female. Immediately, a box pops up telling me that females cannot register for selective service. It then automatically re-selected Male for me.
What’s the point of having the option there if it’s not being used and cannot be used?
I think most terrible errors fall into one of two categories:
Too vague
“An Error Has Occured!” Often followed by completely useless information, such as, “Something may not be working correctly” or “Try again”. Or, “Error #412231”. No information on what the number means, where it can be looked up, or what to do to address the problem.
Just Plain Confusing
“An Illegal Operation Has Occured” (Illegal?! Good lord! I swear the site said she was 18!) Is an “Illegal Operation” what normal people would call an “Error”? Then call it an Error, please.
The “careers” page on the NASA site has a similar feature. IIRC it asks you whether you’re a US citizen, and if you click “no,” it says “sorry, you’re not eligible.” But then again, the “I am 18 or older: yes no” on porn sites is equally silly.
• “An error has occured”. [this programmer declined to assay whether or not I was expecting it, I guess]
• “”. [No dialog whatsoever, just an “OK” button]
Then there are the geekspeak error messages, clearly written by the programmer for the programmer’s own elucidation during testing and never replaced with consumer-level language:
• “Error — Couldn’t get the NextPtrSticky!”
• “The variable «srcEpsion.nib» has no value. 0”
And the ones where the problem the error message is trying to refer to has repercussions in the world of text and font handling:
Way back on my first computer (Macintosh 2 SE) when something went sideways I’d get a cute little pop up window with a picture of a bomb that said “An error has occurred!”. I guess the bomb indicated the implied ending to that message “…so, your computer might explode! Stay back!”
• “An error has occured”. [this programmer declined to assay whether or not I was expecting it, I guess]
• “”. [No dialog whatsoever, just an “OK” button]
Then there are the geekspeak error messages, clearly written by the programmer for the programmer’s own elucidation during testing and never replaced with consumer-level language:
• “Error — Couldn’t get the NextPtrSticky!”
• “The variable «srcEpsion.nib» has no value. 0”
And the ones where the problem the error message is trying to refer to has repercussions in the world of text and font handling:
The stupies error message I ever got was on an XBox that had been modded. We were using it to try and access someone’s computer on the LAN because he had pictures of a recetn event and we were all in the living room and wanted to see them on the large TV. Well, we browse to his computer, try to enter it, but get the following error:
We’ve got a home-grown script that’s used to backup people’s Outlook files. Someone in a regional office wrote it and it’s generally useful. When it’s done, it says “The files have successfully been copied” Problem is that it ALWAYS hands out that message. We’ve learned that if it says “success” in a tenth of a second, it’s lying.
So, like that modded Xbox, success is an error.
The ones I really love are when an application or server is misconfigured and instead of saying “I can’t do this right now” or even “uh-oh” it responds with PARAGRAPHS of code:
Error Type:
Microsoft OLE DB Provider for ODBC Drivers (0x80040E14)
[Microsoft][ODBC SQL Server Driver][SQL Server]Syntax error occurred near ‘long’. Expected ‘’’’’ in search condition ‘"“unholy long error message”"’.
Cool! Now that I know what the system is, I know how to try and hack it!
Nope. When the problem originated, you couldn’t hot-plug a keyboard. This is still up there as my all-time favorite error message, along with the classic “abort-retry-fail” MS-DOS file error, which would do the same action no matter which choice you tried.
Here’s some Unix command errors:
Note that the ‘%’ prompt indicates that the command should be issued from
the C shell, and the ‘$’
prompt indicates the Bourne shell.
% ar m God
ar: God does not exist
% "How would you rate Reagan’s incompetence?
Unmatched ".
% [Where is Jimmy Hoffa?
Missing ].
% ^How did the sex change^ operation go?
Modifier failed.
% If I had a ( for every $ Congress spent, what would I have?
Too many ('s.
% make love
Make: Don’t know how to make love. Stop.
% sleep with me
bad character
% got a light?
No match.
% man: why did you get a divorce?
man:: Too many arguments.
% ^What is saccharine?
Bad substitute.
% %blow
%blow: No such job.
% (-
(-: Command not found.
% sh
$ PATH=pretending! /usr/ucb/which sense
no sense in pretending!
$ drink < bottle; opener
bottle: cannot open
opener: not found
I don’t remember what app I was running but I once got an error message pop up that had no message at all - just a message box with Error in the title bar.
Another classic is forget a { or a } somewhere at random in your C source. You will get an error but it will point to a source line nowhere near the omitted { or }. I actually wrote a utility that read C sources and matched {}.
Those are good ones. The “unexpected error” message I suspect means an error happened in a weird place. Expected ones probably get useful messages.
You people wouldn’t be so snotty if you ever had to write error detection code. No matter how many cases you think of, it comes up with others. Not core dumping is a win in my book.
As for Perl, Perl 5, which I use, is pretty good. Few enough errors to be reasonable, and I never got pages of messages. As opposed to our old homebrew Pascal compiler which would issue exactly one error message and then stop.
I’ve run into several of these myself. One of my favorites though is an application I support whose main error message seems to be: “an unnamed file could not be found”
Okay then.
(usually it means it has crapped itself and lost all info about it’s temp files. result: reboot)