[LegendaryPinkOx]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - - 

Om nom nom.

Your signature gives me cravings.

[klb5090]

Originally Posted by Laminar 

There will be a thread.

for me to say "Excited" about a ford wearing a SVT badge is a stretch but mark me down for intrigued...

[L'enfanTerrible]

Mine was inspired while listening to Bill Hicks.

[indigoimac]

I'm old fashioned and probably in violation of something that has changed since 2003 or whenever it was I joined

[phantomdragonz]

Originally Posted by Demonhood 

i am? and i thought i had already posted in this thread.

LOL that is an AWESOME smiley...

Sorry deamonhood... I dont usually pay attention to the people who post, just the content of the posts...

I used your sigs for quite awhile, effgee was the one who made this one, as far as i remember...

-Zach

[boy8cookie]

I forget what mine is... posting to see then I'll try n explain it.

must've did it up when I was heavy into guitar-ing.

[brassplayersrock²]

since i changed mine from earlier. i'll post to explain it.

it's a big smilie face that just ate cheese that says "choose cheese!"

[CharlesS]

If you don't know what mine means, you weren't a Mac user in the 90s.

[Face Ache]

I made mine in 2002, which makes it older than some of you young whippersnappers.

We only had black and white internets back then.

[mattyb]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

If you don't know what mine means, you weren't a Mac user in the 90s.

I am a very recent switcher, Feb 2007, so no, I don't know what it means.

[Oisín]

Originally Posted by mattyb 

I am a very recent switcher, Feb 2007, so no, I don't know what it means.

I’m a 2005 switcher, so I’ve never actually experienced it first-hand; but I do know what it’s referring to:


(That image was surprisingly hard to find!)

[rickey939]

No comment.

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

I’m a 2005 switcher, so I’ve never actually experienced it first-hand; but I do know what it’s referring to:


(That image was surprisingly hard to find!)

That image is fake, too. The "Restart" button was on the left, and there was usually some kind of ID number or other explanation of exactly what type of error caused the OS to crash.

For those who never used an OS 9-era Mac, I made an app a few years ago called "OS9Experience" to show what it was like, and it's still available here. I posted a thread called "Do you miss OS 9?" with a link to this app. Unfortunately, some people didn't get the joke and the thread turned into an actual argument about whether OS 9 was better than OS X or not.

[AKcrab]

This one was whipped up when  announced they were switching to intel. This place went crazy!

"I'll never buy another Mac!"
"Looks like I'll be using this G5 forever!!"

I didn't get the hubbub. I don't give a hoot what chips are in my computer; for me it's about the OS.

[rickey939]

That app is hysterical CharlesS, cannot believe I missed this before. Thank you!

[paul w]

^Ditto! I'm totally installing this on all the office computers.

[aberdeenwriter]

Consider these posts as my way of introducing you to yourself.

Back when I was a PL regular I felt many of the exchanges I shared with other posters helped reveal as much about them as they did me. Later, I realized that we all expose ourselves to some degree or another when we open ourselves to learning from others and loving them. This is always true of everyone, not just me.

Proud "SMACKDOWN!!" and "Golden Troll" Award Winner.

During that same time period (2004 & 2005) Spliffdaddy created an award for trollish posts using the image of a troll doll. At the time I was anti-Bush and he awarded me that ignominious award. I named it the Golden Troll Award.

Later, I experienced a political epiphany and came to be a staunch Bush supporter and some of my posts attracted positive recognition by Spliffdaddy, earning me several "SMACKDOWN!!" Awards, signified by an icon with big red letters.

Not only have the awards ceased to be awarded at all, but it was highly unlikely that any poster would ever again be cited by Spliffdaddy both for trolling AND for posting excellence.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

That image is fake, too. The "Restart" button was on the left, and there was usually some kind of ID number or other explanation of exactly what type of error caused the OS to crash.

Nope. That's exactly the message I got on system 7 when the system went down (blue/grey screen of death style). The only time I saw numbers was when applications crashed. I.e. the "Error 11" system messages commonly caused by Netscape.

[Brien]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

If you don't know what mine means, you weren't a Mac user in the 90s.

I used to get that a lot before putting MacsBug on, although more often then not I just got to the console before having to reboot.

...

I miss System 7. For all it's prettiness, the nostalgia factor can't be beat. I might have to fire up the Color Classic and play some TaskMaker.

As for my sig: It's just a link. I haven't had an actual signature image for quite awhile, I think the last one I made was back in '05 or '06. It's probably floating around the intarwebs somewhere...

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - - 

Nope. That's exactly the message I got on system 7 when the system went down (blue/grey screen of death style). The only time I saw numbers was when applications crashed. I.e. the "Error 11" system messages commonly caused by Netscape.

I don't think so - I seem to remember always either having an error number (such as "error type 11") or a description of some sort ("bus error" being a common one). Of course, anytime a Mac OS bomb box of any sort appeared, the system would go down, BSOD style.

[rickey939]

Actually, I need an updated sig now that I think about it....Hall of Fame style!

[Atheist]

My sig is a sunset I took in Grenada. Clicking on the pic takes you to a google map image of the area where I currently reside in St. Maarten. The link below the pic is my lame attempt at drawing attention to the unfair and antiquated immigration policy of the USA.

[ghporter]

My sig used to be a shill for Tour de Cure, a fund raiser for the American Diabetes Association, and before that an appeal for supporting the American Red Cross. At the moment I don't have time to train for TdC, nor time to play with my ARC links either. So it's just me, right now.

[imitchellg5]

Mine is a pic of the driver's side dashboard and part of the steering wheel of my Accord. Obviously.

Edit: I'm working on a new one though.

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

I don't think so - I seem to remember always either having an error number (such as "error type 11") or a description of some sort ("bus error" being a common one). Of course, anytime a Mac OS bomb box of any sort appeared, the system would go down, BSOD style.

The general system error (BSOD style) was just that box up there. If you had MacsBugs installed you could get a (mostly useless) Resume button as well.

Originally Posted by Wikipedia the all-knowing

The Bomb icon is a symbol designed by Susan Kare that was displayed inside the System Error alert box when the "classic" Macintosh operating system (pre-Mac OS X) had a crash in which the system decided it was unrecoverable. It was similar to a dialog box in Windows 9x that said "This program has performed an illegal operation and will now be shut down". But, since the "classic" Mac OS offered little memory protection, an application crash would sometimes take down the entire system.

The bomb symbol first appeared on the original Macintosh in 1984. Often, a reason for the crash including the error code was displayed in the dialog. If a person was lucky, a "Resume" button would be an option, which could be used to dismiss the dialog and force the offending program to quit, but most often the computer would have to be restarted. Originally, the resume button was unavailable unless the running program had provided the OS with code to allow recovery by passing a resume procedure to InitDialogs. With the advent of System 7, if the OS thought it could handle recovery, a normal error dialog box was displayed, and the application was forced to quit. That was helped by the classic Mac OS providing a little bit of protection against heap corruption using heap zones, if the application was to crash and the application's heap was corrupt, it could be thrown away.

The debugger program MacsBug was sometimes used even by end users to provide basic (though not always reliable) error recovery, and could be used for troubleshooting purposes much as the output of a Unix kernel panic or a Windows NT Blue Screen of Death could be. Mac OS Classic bomb boxes were often ridiculed for providing little or no useful information about the error; this was a conscious decision by the Macintosh team to eliminate any information that the end user could not make sense of.

In Mac OS X, the system architecture is vastly different from that in the classic Mac OS, and an application crash cannot bring down the entire system. A kernel panic screen (either text overwritten on the screen in older versions, or simplified to a reboot message in more recent versions) replaces the bomb symbol but appears less often due to the radically different system architecture. The bomb symbol is no longer used.

TOS-based systems, such as the Atari ST, also used bombs as the indication for an error. When a system error occurred, a row of bombs, variable in number, would show up on the screen and then disappear. A complete system crash resulted in the screen filled with bombs, which could not be removed without a hard reboot.

In the original Mac OS, the operating system call to display a "bomb box" was named DSError, and the corresponding alert table information was stored in resources of type 'DSAT'. "DS" stood for "Deep ****", as in the "Deep **** Manager." For documentation purposes, this was renamed the 'System Error Manager.'[1]

[- - e r i k - -]

Here's another:

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - - 

The general system error (BSOD style) was just that box up there. If you had MacsBugs installed you could get a (mostly useless) Resume button as well.

The Resume button showed up whether Macsbug was installed or not, but most of the time it was greyed out, and when it wasn't, chances were it still wouldn't do anything. I think the Resume button finally got removed at some point, but I'm not sure when that was.

Actually, I might be wrong here, but IIRC if you had Macsbug installed when the computer crashed, you'd get dumped straight into Macsbug without seeing the bomb box at all.

[dustrho]

Mine is a Star Wars collecting website I run.

[CharlesS]

Okay, I just caused a crash on System 6.0.5 (running in Mini vMac) and System 7.5.3 (running in Basilisk II) and took some screenshots. Here's an authentic System 6-style crash:



And here's a System 7.5.3 crash:



I guess I was wrong about the buttons being on the left - it looks like that must have changed somewhere in between System 6 and 7.5.3. However, I'm pretty sure there was always some kind of explanation of the type of crash such as "error type 11", "unimplemented trap", or "bus error", even though it was almost always useless.

edit: I found the explanation of what the "Resume" button was supposed to do!

http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTA...l#HEADING29-23

Apparently each application has the option to write their own resume procedure. If the application doesn't provide such a procedure, the button is greyed (System 6 and earlier) or omitted entirely (System 7 and up). In System 7 and above, the Resume button was apparently renamed "Continue", but was hardly ever seen, since it was not recommended to write a resume procedure for software targeting System 7 and above. According to the article, most resume procedures simply used goto to jump to the beginning of the event loop and hope everything would be okay, which explains why it so seldom worked!

[auto_immune]

From a lecture delivered by the late Michael Crichton at the California Institute of Technology on Jan. 17, 2003:

Cast your minds back to 1960. John F. Kennedy is president, commercial jet airplanes are just appearing, the biggest university mainframes have 12K of memory. And in Green Bank, West Virginia at the new National Radio Astronomy Observatory, a young astrophysicist named Frank Drake runs a two-week project called Ozma, to search for extraterrestrial signals. A signal is received, to great excitement. It turns out to be false, but the excitement remains. In 1960, Drake organizes the first SETI conference, and came up with the now-famous Drake equation:

N=N*fp ne fl fi fc fL

Where N is the number of stars in the Milky Way galaxy; fp is the fraction with planets; ne is the number of planets per star capable of supporting life; fl is the fraction of planets where life evolves; fi is the fraction where intelligent life evolves; and fc is the fraction that communicates; and fL is the fraction of the planet's life during which the communicating civilizations live.

This serious-looking equation gave SETI a serious footing as a legitimate intellectual inquiry. The problem, of course, is that none of the terms can be known, and most cannot even be estimated. The only way to work the equation is to fill in with guesses. And guesses -- just so we're clear -- are merely expressions of prejudice. Nor can there be "informed guesses." If you need to state how many planets with life choose to communicate, there is simply no way to make an informed guess. It's simply prejudice.

[NobleMatt]

Originally Posted by MacinTommy 

I heart Lambos.

i get to drive a LP640 + others round a race track this summer

[- - e r i k - -]

Originally Posted by CharlesS 

Okay, I just caused a crash on System 6.0.5 (running in Mini vMac) and System 7.5.3 (running in Basilisk II) and took some screenshots. Here's an authentic System 6-style crash:



And here's a System 7.5.3 crash:



I guess I was wrong about the buttons being on the left - it looks like that must have changed somewhere in between System 6 and 7.5.3. However, I'm pretty sure there was always some kind of explanation of the type of crash such as "error type 11", "unimplemented trap", or "bus error", even though it was almost always useless.

edit: I found the explanation of what the "Resume" button was supposed to do!

http://developer.apple.com/DOCUMENTA...l#HEADING29-23

Apparently each application has the option to write their own resume procedure. If the application doesn't provide such a procedure, the button is greyed (System 6 and earlier) or omitted entirely (System 7 and up). In System 7 and above, the Resume button was apparently renamed "Continue", but was hardly ever seen, since it was not recommended to write a resume procedure for software targeting System 7 and above. According to the article, most resume procedures simply used goto to jump to the beginning of the event loop and hope everything would be okay, which explains why it so seldom worked!

Fantastic!

I guess we all learnt something today

(I used system 6 so briefly, I barely remember the crash dialogues, so no wonder I didn't remember the Error: -10 numbers).

[- - e r i k - -]

I also muddled up MacsBug and the Resume button, forgetting that MacsBug actually dropped you into a command line style interface when the crashes occured:

Originally Posted by Applelinks

MacsBug can provide you with a comprehensive explanation of the problem, such as illegal instruction" or "unimplemented trap" or somesuch at some address in some data space with other details you don't care about. That's usually not very helpful unless you understand programming code.

What is helpful is that you can type "es" (which stands for "ExitToShell") into an entry field, press return or enter, and quite often be transported back to the Finder where you will still be able to do stuff -- if only save your work. The prudent user will then quit all running programs and restart, which is still a lot better than losing unsaved work in other programs in a force restart. The unprudent user like me will keep right on computing and wait until the memory heap gets so corrupted that even MacsBug won't get me out of it. However, no harm done, usually. Believe me, it is sometimes a life saver.

If typing "es" doesn't work, you're no worse off, and will usually end up back in the MacsBug window. I usually try "es" two or three times, and if that does not produce the desired result, I resign myself to the dreary task of restarting, which can also be done from the MacsBug window by typing "rs" (which stands for guess what?) and pressing return or enter. You can also (almost always) bring up the MacsBug window at any time by pressing Command and PowerKey, even if things have frozen but MacsBug has not appeared of its own accord. Why would you want to do this?

The mixup comes from both strategies being equally useless in 99% of the cases

[Stogieman]

Originally Posted by Oisín 

Actually, yours is one of the ones I don’t understand at all. Or rather, I understand that it’s a bunch of references to various online things you participate in, but I have no idea what the stars or the C-IV or the G2641 or the little icons (?) refer to.

The sig is snapshot of his xbox live gamer card. S7arman is the gamertag he uses to log into xbox live. 2641 is his achievement score, The big CIV on the on the left is his gamer pic, I believe it refers to the game Civilization IV. The little icons at the bottom represent the games he owns or has played. From that list I can only make out Halo 3, Frogger & Call of Duty 4.

[Stogieman]

My sig should be self explanatory to anyone who grew up in the 80's. It's from this scene in the move "The Goonies."

[Jawbone54]

Originally Posted by Stogieman 

My sig should be self explanatory to anyone who grew up in the 80's. It's from this scene in the move "The Goonies."

"Hey, you GUUUU-UUUUUYS..."

[CharlesS]

Originally Posted by - - e r i k - - 

I also muddled up MacsBug and the Resume button, forgetting that MacsBug actually dropped you into a command line style interface when the crashes occured:



The mixup comes from both strategies being equally useless in 99% of the cases

Yeah, and then there was Norton CrashGuard, which was supposed to do essentially the same thing, but actually ended up causing more crashes than it solved, earning it the nickname Norton CrashMaker...

[goMac]

Originally Posted by imitchellg5 

Mine is a pic of the driver's side dashboard and part of the steering wheel of my Accord. Obviously.

Edit: I'm working on a new one though.

What year/model?

I love my 2004 Accord V6 Coupe...