I just ran across these two links today, and laughed myself silly reading the various error messages that have been collected into those.
Enjoy:
http://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/a- ... essages/1/
http://www.techrepublic.com/pictures/we ... essages/1/
Funny computer error messages
Moderators: Bookworm, starkruzr, MrFireDragon, PrettyPrincess, Wapsi
- lake_wrangler
- Posts: 4300
- Joined: Sun Aug 05, 2012 8:16 am
- Location: Laval, Québec, Canada
Re: Funny computer error messages
My favorite was "Non-acceptable error".
I first encountered this in an IBM manual. A couple years later I actually got it.
What's disconcerting is how it implies that other errors are acceptable.
(But then, even in my Cobol-programming days I was an error-message purist. In Cobol, with the compilers we had, copying a value from a 10-character string variable to a 9-character string variable got a warning message, and we had programs with THOUSANDS of that message - code I wrote had no such warnings. More than once when working on old code I discovered that the problem was that ONE of those warnings actually mattered - and when they didn't matter they made it hard to find the more serious messages that did.)
---
Some of those error messages looked like something a programmer had intended to get back to and finish up, but for some reason never did.
A trick I used often was a very distinctive string - QQQQQ. I'd put it (usually) at the start of a comment, at a point where I intended to come back and finish up some detail, generally along with a brief explanation of what wasn't done. This made the point easy to find; and then when I though I was done with a project I'd do a global search for that string. Also, if I was taken off a project for some reason, I could easily tell the person inheriting my work how to find those spots.
I first encountered this in an IBM manual. A couple years later I actually got it.
What's disconcerting is how it implies that other errors are acceptable.
(But then, even in my Cobol-programming days I was an error-message purist. In Cobol, with the compilers we had, copying a value from a 10-character string variable to a 9-character string variable got a warning message, and we had programs with THOUSANDS of that message - code I wrote had no such warnings. More than once when working on old code I discovered that the problem was that ONE of those warnings actually mattered - and when they didn't matter they made it hard to find the more serious messages that did.)
---
Some of those error messages looked like something a programmer had intended to get back to and finish up, but for some reason never did.
A trick I used often was a very distinctive string - QQQQQ. I'd put it (usually) at the start of a comment, at a point where I intended to come back and finish up some detail, generally along with a brief explanation of what wasn't done. This made the point easy to find; and then when I though I was done with a project I'd do a global search for that string. Also, if I was taken off a project for some reason, I could easily tell the person inheriting my work how to find those spots.
- Opus the Poet
- Posts: 2456
- Joined: Wed Aug 01, 2012 12:24 am
- Location: Surrounded by Hell
- Contact:
Re: Funny computer error messages
my favorite error message was on a Linux beta: "I'm afraid I can't do that, Dave"
I ride my bike to ride my bike, and sometimes it takes me where I need to go.