Great Messages in Software

[Renegade]

Everyone's seem some of those fun 404 messages, so when I got a password change email from StackExchange, I figured I'd pass it on for others to get a laugh:

The password to your Stack Exchange account has been changed.
(If you didn't do this, you should be worried.)

[IainB]

True-life story from the days of computer teletype consoles:
A client was being shown around the computer-room (DEC PDP 15/30 mini) of a computer bureau one nightshift, when his job was being loaded into the computer.
The computer operator was a bit tired when he typed in the "Run" command for the job, as the client looked over his shoulder.
Teletype console: "Job too large to fit in memory."

The computer operator typed in the "Run" command for the job again.
Teletype console: "Job still too large to fit in memory."

The computer operator typed in the "Run" command for the job again.
Teletype console: "This job is just too big to fit in memory."

The computer operator typed in the "Run" command for the job again.
Teletype console: "It's too F***ing big! - as the actress said to the bishop."

[Renegade]

^^ @Iain - BWAHAHAHAHAAHAAA~! That was hysterical~! Love it!

[Tuxman]

Back in the Nineties, there was some "copy machine" application around on Windows systems. It basically simulated a copy machine's interface and used the attached scanners and printers to perform the job.

It had one weird toolbar button.
When you pressed it, a message window popped up: "This is a Not-Function". (In German, though: "Dies ist eine Nichtfunktion".)

[Tinman57]

It had one weird toolbar button.
When you pressed it, a message window popped up: "This is a Not-Function". (In German, though: "Dies ist eine Nichtfunktion".)

 I've got an app that has a button with a strange symbol on it, and when pressed a window pops up that says "This don't do anything.....YET!"

[Tuxman]

There was no "yet" in that application... that's what makes me wonder. It never got a real function there.

[Tinman57]

There was no "yet" in that application... that's what makes me wonder. It never got a real function there.

  Even after two updates, the button still didn't do anything, so that kind of makes me wonder..  Hmmmm....

[Edvard]

My favorite was an app I don't remember what it did, but tended to crash every once in a while with a dialog that said
"Bad thing happen!!!"  

[mwb1100]

Here's a "message" that I'm sure some programmer thought was quite clever and/or helpful.  Instead it drove people nuts trying to figure out what was going on when it happened (like me when it happened to my Dad's computer way back when):

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

Although these symptoms may appear to be virus-like, they are the result of an electronic hardware monitoring component of the motherboard and BIOS. You may want to have your computer checked or serviced.

[app103]

Here's a "message" that I'm sure some programmer thought was quite clever and/or helpful.  Instead it drove people nuts trying to figure out what was going on when it happened (like me when it happened to my Dad's computer way back when):

During normal operation or in Safe mode, your computer may play "Fur Elise" or "It's a Small, Small World" seemingly at random. This is an indication sent to the PC speaker from the computer's BIOS that the CPU fan is failing or has failed, or that the power supply voltages have drifted out of tolerance. This is a design feature of a detection circuit and system BIOSes developed by Award/Unicore from 1997 on.

Although these symptoms may appear to be virus-like, they are the result of an electronic hardware monitoring component of the motherboard and BIOS. You may want to have your computer checked or serviced.

I had the displeasure of being witness to my father attempting to repair one of my dead computers about 10 years ago. The goal was to take components from my computer that didn't work, insert them into his identical computer that also didn't work, and somehow end up with one that did work from a combination of the parts. He did something that ended up frying his motherboard and a stick of my ram. The sounds that came out of his computer, when he started it up, didn't sound like any of the songs mentioned above. It sounded like the siren on a toy fire engine. The puff of smoke that went along with it was enough to let us know we were screwed and I wasn't going to have a working computer that day.

To this day, he blames it partly on cobwebs that were inside his case, along with being cursed with Negative Electrostatic Charisma (NEC), but I still think that he forced in the stick of ram, upside-down.

[app103]

The old Sam Spade application contained a feature where it would display a Tip of the Day on startup. It was mostly a glossary of acronyms and terms, with a sprinkling of net etiquette rules and geeky quotes, but this one, in fake German, was my favorite:

[Renegade]

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHA~!

Thank for you sharing!

Keep 'em coming people~! This is hilarious~!


I had a piece of freeware along time ago that I didn't have time to write any "Help" for. But, I had a nice little Help menu item. When you clicked it, you got a message:

This is not the help you are looking for. Move along...

Got lambasted in a review for that... Someone didn't take kindly to it, but most likely because they didn't get the reference. Ah well. Win some, lose some.

[tomos]

@ app

I was testing something in Win 8 lately for Pierre of InfoQube. The html pane in IQ wasnt editable in 8. I had to run an ocxdhtml.exe and see if I could edit/add text in it's window.

I dont know anything about the executable, but it seemed to be quite intelligent -
I wrote some gibberish to test if it worked, and clicked close and got this message:

----------------------- This pies of crap has been changed Do you really want to save it? ---------------------

[kfitting]

I've seen a message box (popup) at work that said (paraphrased): "Java Lang Error: {error code stuff} This message should never be put on the stack."

[wraith808]

I had a bad one that I forgot when I first started programming.  It was an app for colleges, which made it that much worse, but I was gone, which made it better.  I did learn from it, however.  It was when I was first learning, less is more and fail fast- a hard thing to get my mind around.  So in one of my pseudo exception handlers (you know- checking for null when it shouldn't ever *be* null, etc., so it won't generate an exception instead of handling the exception- yeah, stupid), I put the code in there while I was testing:

Code: (pascal)

if VarIsStr(Value) and (Length(VarToStr(v)) <> 0) then
begin
  ...
end
else
begin
  // Remove before release
  ShowMessage('I fscked this up');
end;

So, predictably, when something else was changed, it fell into the condition that it should never fall into.  Someone that I knew that still worked there called me about that... it had reached the humorous point by that time, but still, I learned a lesson from that... (and am very happy that I used fsck...)

[kyrathaba]

^ Hilarious, every single one of them...

[app103]

Way back in the day, AOL 5.0 would give you an error message if you tried to join an empty chat room. My daughter captured this one:

[Edvard]

Running the Linux preview of the Spotify client from terminal so I can see the error messages, I found this:

01:19:20.671 E [watchdog.cpp:174                ] Deadlock detected (Thread: network)
01:19:21.141 E [watchdog.cpp:194                ] The deadlock was a lie! (network, 4469)

Spotify deadlocks made out of cake? 

[app103]

Spotify deadlocks made out of cake? 

Sweet! 

[fenixproductions]

This is a great message:
http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/

In certain point of the game your virtual game studio goes bankrupt due to piracy.
BUT this only happens if you have an illegal copy of this game

Some info:
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/04/29/game-dev-tycoon-creator-punishes-pirates-with-in-game-bankruptcy/

[kyrathaba]

BUT this only happens if you have an illegal copy of this game

^Ha! Fantastic!

[app103]

This is a great message:
http://www.greenheartgames.com/app/game-dev-tycoon/

In certain point of the game your virtual game studio goes bankrupt due to piracy.
BUT this only happens if you have an illegal copy of this game

Some info:
http://www.joystiq.com/2013/04/29/game-dev-tycoon-creator-punishes-pirates-with-in-game-bankruptcy/

But is it really an illegal copy if the developer was the one to deliberately "leak" the "cracked" version? Or could it be considered a legal "unofficial" freeware version, intended by the developer, for distribution through torrent trackers, purely for the purpose of gaining a whole lot of free publicity for their game?

And what about including something in their game where you lose a lot of money because another less ethical game company decided to copy your games in order to steal profits away from you? You know, like the developers of this game did when they copied GameDev Story. Oh, I guess they forgot about that, or they just didn't want it to be that amusingly ironic.