The unusual messages
February 5, 2007 at 5:24 pmHooray, no spam here!
GMail message in Spam folder upon finding no entries in there
That message just flickered on my screen while I was cleaning up my GMail account, filtering and labeling everything I had bunched up in my inbox, so now it is neatly ordered. Anyway most “professional” programs just use the standard yes/no/cancel dialogs and all the stuff standard libraries give you. But I was always a digger for the unusual (error) messages, like the great game Civilization III, where the dialog to quit the game wasn’t prompted with yes/no but “Get me the hell out of here!” and “No I’d rather stay.” respectivily.
Another funny - while probably not intendet that way - message will be output by most BIOS’s when there is no keyboard connected to the PC:
Keyboard not found. Hit F1 to continue
Yeah right. I’ hit the imaginary F1 button on my imaginary keyboard that I connected to the imaginary USB port over there.
But as usual, the best stuff comes from linux/unix systems. If your user entry cannot be found in /etc/passwd on some systems, you might get
You don’t exist. Go away.as your kind response. Especially when it comes to wrong login information messages, *nix systems are very creative. Here are a few examples from sudo (superuser do) if you provide it with the wrong password, most of them are more or less obvious references and direct quotes from memorable “geeky” movies:
- Just what do you think you’re doing Dave?
- That’s something I cannot allow to happen.
- This mission is too important for me to allow you to jeopardize it.
If only there would be more Windows programs that would abandon the standard dialog boxes and use their own individual messages, life@windows would be much more fun…
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