Which of them is your favourite?
(and I may be getting ahead of myself, but I think I can see a foregone conclusion)
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Which of them is your favourite?
(and I may be getting ahead of myself, but I think I can see a foregone conclusion)
Guru Meditation (Commodore Amiga) !!!! favorite !!!
The only that i can smile....
the one i hate the most... all over the years: The Blue Screen of Death ....
Well I hated the Guru Meditation quite a lot, did make me punch my Amiga sometimes.
The poll shouldn't be titled, "your favorite", but "you hate most".
Favourite is objective. It could be the most amusing to you, as in the most cryptic and meaningless... such as "An error has been encountered and the system needs to shut down" giving no reasons or indication of why. Macs still like to do that type of cryptic message. Or equally the most annoying, or the most useful. At least the Guru messages did give codes that hinted at the issues, as well as the colour of the error screen. And even Windows BSOD often indicated what had caused the error and some memory address codes to help start searching for solutions, so not all bad.
You missed the most classic error of them all. "No keyboard detected, press any key to continue." ;)
Even today we still don't have a proper logical error catching system which is quite mad. Windows is much better because if it crashes you can look in the system logs and normally find the ! errors logged with quite well described reasons for the issues, but it still isn't that user friendly for anyone not too clued up on computers.
I posted a reply to this topic last night. Where did it go?
The one I still think of as the most annoying would be LOAD ERROR on the C64. I was always stuck with a tape deck for it back then, and remember watching that counter tick away slowly for several minutes while dreading that error. It would come up often as well, and in a stroke of sadism it wouldn't stop loading and tell you if it occurred say, halfway through. Oh no, it would always complete the loading cycle regardless and only let you know if it was successful or not when it was done. Which kept happening more and more as the tapes got worn. Rage-inducing to say the least.
I want to call Red Ring of Death my favourite, as I don't own a 360 myself. ;)
But really, it has to be the Guru. I'm not just being patriotic here, I mean when you got that error as if to say "Something went wrong, the Guru has to meditate on it.", how beautifully random is that? I know the story behind it now of course, but back then it was just so stupidly far out that you couldn't help but love it. And then Commodore had them change it to the boring Software Failure from OS 2.0 and onwards because they just didn't get it. Which was Commodore in a nutshell I suppose.
One reason I loved my Amstrad CPC464 was the built in tape deck that never had loading errors. I knew so many Spectrum and Electron users who has no end of tape loading issues, especially the Spectrum with the volume level needing to be just right on the tape desk, and if you so much as blew on the Kempston joystick interface or any ram expansions it crashed... whereas my CPC just loaded the games from tape with a smile on its face and no issues. I actually can't remember a game ever failing to load, even copied games using an Amstrad dual tape deck hifi. Those were the days. :)
I also agree with you about the RRoD on the 360. I also don't own one so it is an amusing error... instead we just keep on enjoying our PS3s. ;)
But like you I picked the Guru because it was so cool at the time, and every other system was so serious about their error messages that were clearly generated by someone with a computer science brain and no creativity in their hearts. The reasons the Amiga will always remain so loved.
Right, I've remembered what I wrote last night.
Like everyone, I like the Guru Meditation. But I chose Abort, Retry, Fail? as my favorite. Why? Because it is nice and simple and gives several ways of getting out of it.
I also like lp0 on fire, but as I have never had a burning printer attached to a Unix system, I have never been on the receiving end of that error, so don't really want to vote for it.
With "Abort, Retry, Fail?" have you ever managed to cancel the error? It isn't really an error I even encounter these days, as I don't use an OS that throws it up. In the days of Win9x I used to see it a lot with read errors on floppy disks or CD-Rs, or if a disk had been removed when still needed. In sure instances it could never be cancelled and would just re show the same message each time any option was clicked, often crashing with that great screen redraw crash effect where you could drag the window around the screen to repeat draw the window all over the screen until you finally got bored and hit the reset button. The Mac used to have that same repeating window crash issue too.
I refer to the error in DOS.
I seem to recall having the error in Windows and it can be difficult to get rid of it, but that applies to a lot of Windows errors.
In DOS I usually find that Abort will get rid of it (like it is supposed to do). Fail and Retry can be useful though.
Oddly, on my HP 100LX a least, when accessing a PCMCIA memory card which it can't read, pressing Abort keeps repeating the error, whereas Fail cancels it and just switches to 'Current drive is no longer valid>'.