What is the funniest error message?

11/18/2006

Last week at TechEd Europe someone asked me what the funniest computer message I had ever encountered was. I have to say it was a tie between these two.

Over the years I have changed how I name my various computers. I used to name them after ancient Roman emperors. Later I used planets. I found that there were not enough planets or emperors so now I use names of Larry King's ex-wives. That allows for quite a few unique machine names.

What Caesar did

Many years ago I had a machine named Caesar. At the time I was using Oracle, and the instance name was also Caesar. Oracle crashed and caused the machine to halt. The message that Oracle displayed read something like "CAESAR has taken exclusive control of your machine".

What happened on Earth

Later I had a laptop named Earth. On Windows when infrared devices find each other the message reads something like "xxx has come into view". At this time infrared was a common thing on laptops and in the office one day another laptop near mine popped up the dialog "Earth has come into view".

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