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Ouch

marc.info

199 pointsthaumaturgy32 comments

I also like that nethack will tell you "core dumped" if you eat an apple or a pear.

That one gets me every time. And they say Eternal Darkness was the first game to mess with the player.

Hello HN! Yep, I'm the person who posted that message to the misc@openbsd list. I've been a very avid silent reader (non-member) of HN over the last year or so... until today. Wow. I made the front page of HN. Hopefully next time it will be for my technical acumen rather than my vivid sense of humor.

Some day, fortune really is going segfault, and nobody will look into it because they think "Segmentation fault (core dumped)" is one of the clever fortunes.

A fortune in and of itself.

This reminds me of one time in one of our school's labs we somehow rebooted all of the SUN machines and some weird things happened and the log-in screen's wallpaper picture was of a young lady on a beach in a bikini. My first thought, as well as the other sysprogs was that we had been hacked and we ran around for a good hour trying to get to the bottom of things.

The machines ship like that as it turns out as a default wallpaper.

Was it this?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lenna

? I don't get it. Could somebody explain it to more human terms, please.

$ man fortune

Seems like there is a program called "fortune" that prints a random "fortune" on boot.

And some joker took it upon themselves to add a somewhat distressing boot message into the default list.

(man fortune: http://linux.die.net/man/6/fortune)

He has fortune setup to display a 'fortune' when he logs in. Apparently one of the fortunes is a fake kernel panic message. So he logged in and saw this message thinking it was a real kernel panic before he realized it was just the output of fortune.

"fortune" is a Unix/BSD/Linux command that prints a random quote to your screen (as in "fortune cookie"). Some Unix-like operating systems have fortune set up to run once automatically every time you log in to your account.

Someone with a great sense of humor set one of the random quotes to mimic a very serious operating system error message.

This poor guy finished upgrading his operating system, logged in, and got that error message as his fortune.

It's also a nice touch that the very serious error message is reported as (ignored), which would be impossible if such an error had really occurred.

Why? What does the error mean?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kernel_panic

In an effort to make HN more like reddit jokes are being upvoted to the top position.

If it makes you feel any better, I never could have guessed this would get so many votes. I've just had a hellacious week so far, came across this in my email, and thought a couple of other folks might enjoy it too.

but on HN you actually have to get *nix to get the joke.

In an effort to make HN more like reddit, its users are complaining about the old news aggregation site they used to go to before they found this one.

I still think this is funniest 'fortune' based story: https://bugzilla.redhat.com/show_bug.cgi?id=79993

This also doubles as one of my favorite (publicly tracked) bugs

That's just EVIL. And hilarious.

All of my systems use fortune, but it is displayed using different picture files; just another way to keep things interesting. :)

To see what I mean: http://pastebin.org/86456

I used to have a boot-up message on my cell phone that said "This phone is stolen". And even though it was me who set it, it still got me every time I saw it.

For those not on *nix: http://linux.die.net/man/6/fortune

...

I am actually saddened I now know that. I kind of wish I could have had that same experience.

Maybe you should just take up http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/BASE_jumping instead

There are some things that we shouldn't joke about.</scarred long-time windows user>

http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/sysinternals/bb897558.asp... :)

This is fantastic! I haven't seen a BSOD in years (no Vista for me), but what's funny is that it's actually microsoft that's distributing it.

Along the same lines: you take a screenshot of your desktop environment with the terminal open in the middle of the screen. Then use that as your bootsplash image. When friends and enemies ask how you did that you just tell them "I reversed the boot process: first I load KDE, then the kernel. It's a lot faster this way."

I used to have that as my screensaver. It's been around for quite a while; I think there were several different implementations.

It really fooled a lot of folks at the office who would approach me in the morning with serious expressions and say something like "something happened to your machine overnight... it keeps rebooting and blue-screening.

As a teenager I learned to program in Win 98 days. I wrote a program that faked the "this program has performed an illegal operation" dialog every few fours and put it on my dad's computer. His programs never crashed but he thought there was something very wrong with his computer. Drove him nuts for a few days. :)

% file deletion complete.

This may be the funniest thing I've read on HN. Will take a lot to top this one.

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