The strangest computer bug ever

This might even fall under “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature.”

http://support.microsoft.com/kb/261186

What the hell?

Boy, if I were a hacker, I’d totally come up with an exploit to make Windows machines play “It’s a Small, Small World”. That’d be pretty much the most evil virus ever.

An “easter egg”-like feature put in by a computer engineer with a warped sense of humor.

The BIOS detects a problem that triggers an interrupt. which then starts a routine that uses the built-in sound capabilities of the motherboard to play a song. My guess is that it uses the MIDI generator on the board, which substantially reduces the size of the stored song.

Finding the MIDI code for Fuer Elise or It’s a Small Small world is trivial, and those songs are easily recognizable. Makes them good candidates for an easter egg, and besides, they’re simple so they don’t take up too much memory. In the good ol’ days an engineer couldn’t possibly get away with wasting memory space in a BIOS, but these days I betcha a typical BIOS chipset has tons of memory doing nothing at all.

Some wise-acre guy in Taiwan probably laughs his ass off every time he thinks of this.

User picks up phone.

User: “Is that tech support”

Tech: “Yeh. What’s up”

User: “Well I can hear music coming from my computer, but I don’t have media player on or a CD in or anything.”

Tech: “What’s the music?”

User: "Sounds like ‘Fur Elise’ "

Tech: “Oh that means your CPU is going to get really warm”

User: “Don’t take the piss”

Tech: “I’m not”

LOL Lobsang I totally had that conversation in my head as soon as I read that article.

I think the next time I build a machine for a random family member, I will try to make it a DFI :slight_smile:

Might even fall under “it’s not a bug, it’s a feature?” A feature is exactly what it is.

Creepy, but nothing new.

While maybe not exactly related, try this.
Create a new folder (this probably only works in windows). Name it “con”. How’d that work for you? :smiley:
And also, open up notepad. Enter “Bush hid all the facts” (without the citation marks). save the file, exit notepad, go to where you saved the file, open it. How does it look?
Just something I found on the web.

“Bush hid all the facts” looked like a bunch of little blocks when I opened it back up. I’ve learned to be suspicious that little blocks are probably real symbols from an unsupported font.

Turns out I was right:

畂桳栠摩愠汬琠敨映捡獴

Any Chinese speakers who can work this one out?

Exactly as I typed it in. Maybe this only works in XP/2000? (I have Vista)

And I did some searching, and it seems it works for most phrases that follow the 4 3 3 5 format (as in, number of letters. (work in XP/2000/NT, that is.))

Yes, the phrase “fart pig dog cat fudge” produced the same result.

“CON” is a reserved word (it has special meaning to the operating system), so you can’t use it for object names. You also can’t name a folder things like:
PRN
AUX
NUL
LPT1
COM1

It would have been nice if MS had included an error message to that effect rather than just ignoring the user’s attempt to rename the folder, but alas.

It says a lot about the attitude of whoever designed it that they chose not to generate a useful sound that would actually help the user understand the problem.

Like Beethoven’s Fifth or Maple Leaf Rag?

I was thinking more of a human voice saying 'Overheating problem with the CPU" or something. Sure, the user might not understand English but at least it’s an attempt to be helpful. The music just seem smartass to me and there is simply no logical way to deduce what the problem is from music.

Oh. I thought you were being sarcastic.

Or Yosemite Sam yelling “My biscuits are burnin’!”

Fascinating. I get the others, but from whence “CON”? According to this, it’s used to indicate the display…wha???

I dunno either. Maybe it was originally short for console or something? Or maybe they were just running out of letters.

DOS, which inherited much from CP/M, had the possibility of redirecting data streams. CON meant CONsole, or keyboard/screen, depending on input or output.

The original CP/M had a program that handled copying and routing of data streams, and was called PIP, for Peripheral Interchange Program. When you think about it, sending a data stream to a file on a disk isn’t much different from sending a text data stream to a screen or routing keyboard input to a printer. It was up to the device to decide how to handle the technical details (buffering, etc.).

You take from the input and send to the output.