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The famous Windows BSOD (Blue Screen of Death) may not be with us much longer: http://www.mikeslist.com/2005/06/microsofts-longhorn-eliminates-blue.html says it will be the Red Screen of Death when Longhorn finally takes over. Is Microsoft trying to tell us something about its political affiliations, or is it just tired of the BSOD barbs and thinks it can recover lost ground with this cosmetic makeover? Other sources say the Red Screen will be used for "more critical" errors - sounds like saying that dying in a plane crash is worse than dying in an automobile pileup? I can't imagine what they mean by that.
Whether Blue or Red, the Screen of Death is the Microsoft equivalent of a Unix panic. You can look up the meaning, though in most cases it hardly matters: you know its either an application error, a bad driver, or bad hardware, and your chances of finding out enough information to actually fix it are slim. That's not necessarily any different on Unix, of course. Even if you have source code, actually understanding it may be well beyond your abilities, or may require deep technical knowledge of hardware. So you reboot, and hope it doesn't repeat.
Windows also has a Black Screen of Death and so did OS/2.
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Fri Jun 10 10:17:32 2005: Subject: bruceg2004
I miss OS/2. I really liked it, before I switched to Linux. I installed the new EComstation on an old laptop I have -- the screen does not work, so I need to connect the laptop to a regular monitor to work with it -- When it was first released, Windows 3.1 was still out, and OS/2 was light years ahead of it. Even when Windows 95 was released, OS/2 was still much better. IBM just did not market it properly, and Bill was smart to have every PC distributed with Windows, and now OS/2 is all but dead. It still runs on ATM's, and our local Stop and Shop has it at the checkout registers.
It was very, very stable compared to anything Microsoft had. Heck, if it is still used today by banks, and my local Stop and Shop has it, it still has a niche. My Stop and Shop just recently put it in, too.
When I was using it during the WFW 3 era, I just could not understand why people would use Windows over it. It also ran Windows 3.1 programs. The multitasking it could do was so much better than DOS or Windows at the time. It was light years ahead of even Windows 95, but few saw the technical value, and IBM did very little to promote it, and get computer vendors to distribute it with new PC's.
I was in college at the time, and did a speach for my "Capstone Marketing Course", on how IBM should have marketed OS/2. Maybe I should have sent my speach to IBM, since one of the things I emphasized was getting it preloaded on PC's, to increase market share. That never happened. Windows NT even included code from OS/2, back when it was more of a joint project with IBM and Microsoft.
So, here we are today, still with Blue Screens of death, and heading towards the Red Screen of Death. Windows *still* even with XP, has some small issues that logic just does not explain, and only a reboot will take care of it. I wonder when they will finally make most system/blue screen of death errors hardware related only, and the OS itself is rock solid, like *nix. I just don't ever have to reboot a *nix machine because something stopped working. Never. Not once. If something stops working on *nix, it is usually a user misconfiguration , or hardware related. I have never had anything happen in *nix, where I said, "well it is time to reboot to fix this problem".
I really wonder if IBM did a better job of marketing OS/2 where we would be today. I used to run OS/2 apps, along side of Windows 3.1 apps, with like 16 or 32MB of memory, and things hummed along pretty well. I wonder how well things work with OS/2 on today's hardware.
The hard thing for any OS these days, is that Windows is so entrenched, that there is only some things that will run on Windows. For example, our manufacturing machines have PC interfaces, but only to Windows programs. On some of our automated equipment, it runs Windows only. I hate this fact. I will always need Windows to be able to make changes to these machines. Sure, the operators hate it, because it always "crashes". I hope people start using Linux more and more for this stuff, since I am tired of being paged to a building to look at a Blue Screen of death, and determine that it is not a Hardware issue, but a Microsoft programming issue.
- Bruce
Fri Jun 10 14:21:04 2005: Subject: BigDumbDinosaur
The famous Windows BSOD...
Not so sure that it is "famous." More likely, infamous. <Grin>
Now we will get to experience an RSOD -- alphabet soup at its finest!
Sat Jun 11 05:59:32 2005: Subject: drag
One funny thing is that one of the reasons many people have experianced better stability with Windows XP is that many of the errors that caused BSOD in Windows 2000 would simply cause Windows XP to reboot.
So this RSOD isn't the first time that MS has tried to give BSOD a prettier face.
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