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Windows Operating Systems Software

Longhorn: Fewer BSODs, More RSODs 573

Posted by timothy from the more-colors-still-available dept.
Jan Theofel writes "Windows Loghorn will present you less BSOD. Joi Ito reports that Windows Longorn will get additional ROSD (red screen of death) for 'really bad errors.' So you will get less BSOD but some new RSOD. You can find a ROSD screenshot in a virtual machine in his weblog entry."
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Longhorn: Fewer BSODs, More RSODs More

Longhorn: Fewer BSODs, More RSODs

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  • New Feature (Score:5, Funny)

    by guaigean ( 867316 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:33PM (#12471752)
    It's always nice to see Microsoft adding new "features". Now they can tout Longhorn's decreased BSOD occurrences. Although I'd think they'd wanna avoid red screens as they are angry colors.

  • Orange and Yellow? (Score:5, Funny)

    by sgeye ( 757198 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:34PM (#12471757)
    So where are the yellow and orange? Looks like MS has been taking advice from Tom Ridge.
    • Rimmer: Step up to red alert!
      Kryten: Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb.

      Next thing you know they will have a mauve screen of death.

  • Look! now it's RED!! (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Let that be a leeson for the losers that keep claiming that Microsoft never
    innovates!

  • BSOD (Score:3, Informative)

    by Dante Shamest ( 813622 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:35PM (#12471769)
    I've not seen one of those in a long, long time.
    • Over three years since I got my XP box and I've yet to see one.

      • Re:BSOD (Score:5, Funny)

        by Geek of Tech ( 678002 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:59PM (#12472017) Homepage Journal
        Don't worry sir, I expect you'll finally get your computer plugged in any day now.

        In all seriousness though, XP isn't nearly as prone to BSODs ( or any other color :P ) , as 9x was. I'd still prefer my Debian or Gentoo though.

    • The BSOD, download the screensaver [sysinternals.com] from sysinternals [sysinternals.com] it'll bring back that sick to the pit of your stomach feeling.

    • Re:BSOD (Score:3, Informative)

      by Artega VH ( 739847 )
      You can actually set it so that when your computer BSOD's it will simply reset. Discovered this when my graphics card was continually causing the kernel (with the graphics card driver) to memory dump.

      Perhaps someone can help out with the setting..

      • Re:BSOD (Score:3, Informative)

        by NetNifty ( 796376 )
        To change "reset instead of BSOD", right-click "My Computer", hit properties, advanced tab, startup and recovery, and set automatically restart.

    • Re:BSOD (Score:5, Funny)

      by myowntrueself ( 607117 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @08:08PM (#12472072)
      I remember reading about the press conference where the Xbox was being hyped up.

      The MS guy said "There will be no blue screen of death on the xbox"

      I wish I'd been there, I'd have stuck my hand up and asked "What color will it be instead?"

      • Re:BSOD (Score:3, Informative)

        by Sparr0 ( 451780 )
        It is green. Everyone with an xbox knows that.

      • Re:BSOD (Score:3, Funny)

        by SirTalon42 ( 751509 )
        MS guy: "There will be no blue screen of death on the xbox"

        myowntrueself: "What color will it be instead"

        *MS Security advances on myowntrueself*

        *fight between myowntrueself and ms security*

        *ms security tasers myowntrueself and procedes to beat him till the audience forgets the question*

        MS guy: "Any other questions?"

  • Spelling (Score:2, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Does ROSD=RSOD or is it some twisted lack of spellchecking?

  • in other news (Score:3, Funny)

    by Coneasfast ( 690509 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:35PM (#12471774)
    Parents all over America are concerned that these new 'Red' screens of death are very stressful for their children and are pushing for microsoft to change this color immediately.

    Microsoft was unavailable for comment at this time.
  • Am I the only one not getting the joke?

  • Thank goodness. (Score:4, Funny)

    by ebuck ( 585470 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:35PM (#12471784)
    I guess they've FINALLY fixed the last issue that casues a blue screen of death with Longhorn. :)
    • Well, now that I see that it's not a BSOD replacement, I appreciate some variety of *SOD colors.

      How long until the Green Screen of Death, the Orange Screen of Death, and the fearsome Black Screen of Death?

      Seriously, if it turns out to be a good debugging tool, then I'm happy; however, far, far too many products ship from MS with the debugging tools tightly integrated into the product. Ctrl-Alt-Delete, BSOD, regedit, etc. And now some of that behavior is required for correct product operation (see the h

  • wtf is a really bad error? (Score:5, Funny)

    by aendeuryu ( 844048 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:36PM (#12471785)
    What exactly is a really bad error? I mean, a bad error versus a really bad error? That warrants a color change, anyways?

    Frankly, I think customers ought to get rsod's for actually buying the damn product. That seems like a really bad error to me.
    • I would think that anything that corrupts data or is indicative of a hardware fault would be a "really bad error", a simple crash would be a "bad error".

    • Re:wtf is a really bad error? (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Spoing ( 152917 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:47PM (#12471911) Homepage
      What exactly is a really bad error?

      Well, if they follow IEEE, US Military, SEI CMM, and other related standards 'really bad' is a 'critical'/'show stopper' roughly defined as 'System can not perform a necessary function or data loss occurs'. One step below that is 'high' meaning basically 'problem can be avoided, though it's a PITA'.

      Critical errors can be categorized from 'system or application crashes before it can be used completely but no data loss occurs' (bad) to 'system silently corrupts data' (nasty).

      If you want better definitions, check the specs for any of the above and look for a rating system called "Severity levels". (Note: not the same as priority levels.) Typically there are 4 levels of severity.

      • Sure, but how is that different from a BSOD? They're both fatal errors. If you were working on something at that time, it's gone.

        Frankly the only times I'd expect to see a RSOD would be for about 2 seconds before the smell of charred components reached my nose and the screen snow crashed.
      • So essentially, they're taking any BSOD's that are already happening and divide them into two categories?

        I like this idea. It would be nice to tell at a glance if my goddamn video card has frozen the computer again or if it's actually something serious.
    • Maybe the motherboards of the future will have smoke detectors and a really bad error is your computer is on fire? Seriously though, I'm thinking it would probably be a hardware error when running a diagnostic ("I just chucked 111 in RAM location x and it came back as 222, wtf?") or maybe the filesystem is corrupt or something along those lines.

    • Just an educated guess... (Score:5, Interesting)

      by pVoid ( 607584 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @09:13PM (#12472559)
      Triggering a BSOD from kernel mode is quite easy actually. The most common BSOD I personally have seen is the IRQL_NOT_LESS_OR_EQUAL one. This is actually akin to an assertion failure, because if you call a function which requires IRQL_PASSIVE at anything but the passive level IRQ level, you will get a BSOD, even if the call would not have resulted in a page fault or anything.

      So there's actually a lot of BSODs that are 'preventative' in nature. That is, the kernel says "uh oh, that call should never have been made, the system *might* become unstable, shut it *all* down before any real damage is done".

      Then there's "Boot disk not found", or "Boot disk failure", which are in fact real serious, because it's the end of the line for the machine.

      Maybe they've broken down errors that are likely Kernel driver programming mistakes, and errors that indicate the system is severely damaged.

  • Great (Score:4, Insightful)

    by Spetiam ( 671180 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:36PM (#12471786) Journal
    Now people will have heart attacks instead of just saying, "What the heck?" and getting frustrated.

    Blues (and greens) are generally more soothing/comforting (which is why blue or green are most frequently favorite colors), whereas reds are more jarring (which is why it's used for stop signs, warning labels, etc.).
    • Please note, this is hyperbole.

    • Mod parent INSIGHTFUL ! (Score:5, Insightful)

      by lazy_arabica ( 750133 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @08:10PM (#12472086) Homepage
      Red screens are just too agressive. An error message already is very irritating, why the hell do we need it to be red ? I'd almost hate the Sarge installer because of that...
      • Yes, I think Microsoft is making a big mistake doing this. You do not want to present an error in red - even if it is really bad - to a user as an explanation of why he just lost a few hours of work.

        The basic psychology of colors tells you why. The user is going to get more angry and is more likely to do something radical - like changing to another operating system. A more soothing color like blue or green would be better.

        But then, this is just another Micro$oft mistake that is going to help us Linux (

  • Yeah, right. (Score:3, Funny)

    by dotslashconfig ( 784719 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:36PM (#12471794)
    You can find a ROSD screenshot in a virtual machine in his weblog entry.

    Not anymore, heheheh....

  • Alternate View (Score:3, Informative)

    by guaigean ( 867316 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:38PM (#12471814)
    Well, here's a link to the pic... til I get slashdotted... http://209.193.18.52/RedScreen.jpg [209.193.18.52]

  • Give me my any-color-but-blue SOD! (Score:3, Funny)

    by __aaclcg7560 ( 824291 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:38PM (#12471817)
    If Microsoft is really smart (*cough* did I say somthing bad *cough*), they would allow admins to change the color of the Screen Of Death anyway they like. Personally, I like amber text on a black background. It reminds of the days when I had an amber monochrome monitor for my Commodore 64 when I was a little lad.

  • Red-shifting (Score:5, Funny)

    by coma_bug ( 830669 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:40PM (#12471834)
    Longhorn is red-shifting... the release date must be receeding!

    • Re:Red-shifting (Score:5, Funny)

      by dj245 ( 732906 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:57PM (#12472004) Homepage
      After the launch of Longhorn, Microsoft will announce their new color coding system of screens of death, including:

      Red: For extreme specific errors. An error has in fact already happened.
      Orange: For nonspecific systemwide errors, signifying imminent error.
      Yellow: An elevated error status, it is suspected that an error could occurr at any time
      Blue: The standard error message for vague and undescriptive errors of no substance
      Green: No error at this time, but remain on watch for errors.

  • Not difficult to recreate... (Score:3, Interesting)

    by Qwell ( 684661 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:40PM (#12471839)
    Since last night, I get this gem.
    My own RSOD [69.57.142.53]
  • I went to a panel featuring Joi Ito, Larry Lessig, and an Australian poet Martin Harrison talking about the future of the arts. Ito was tapping away at his laptop before the presentation - probably submitting this story to Slashdot...

    Ito and Lessig basically gave their stump speeches (Lessig about the need to reform copyright laws for balance, Ito about the fact that there's plenty of opportunity for artists and businessmen to make money out of a less-punitive IP landscape), but they're such great stump s

  • Microsoft's new RSOD with Clippy... (Score:4, Funny)

    by rice_burners_suck ( 243660 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:43PM (#12471866)
    Shouldn't Microsoft be working on a way to reduce the number of BSOD/RSOD through better kernel-land code and better handling of userland errors, instead of trying to create a more informative BSOD process? Darn... Wait a while, and Clippy the talking paperclip will show up during the BSOD to explain what all the gibberish in hexadecimal means, and why "Windows is busy waiting" or whatever the BSOD says nowadays.

    Speaking of reliability, I was just thinking how Microsoft could reduce the complexity of the next version of Windows, Longtooth, due in 2009.

    Longtooth will include a tremendous amount of new features implemented in completely new code. Many, but not all, existing features would be reimplemented in VisualBasic.NET just for the heck of it, even if mature versions are already implemented in C or C++. Programmers making the new VisualBasic.NET code would not be allowed to look at the code that already exists, so that new ideas might be better implemented. The features will be chosen by random for reimplementation.

    All Microsoft code would assume that any Microsoft code (the OS and any Microsoft applications) is secure. This code will always execute with no checks to make it run faster. All other code will be subject to Longtooth's new security system, dubbed Microsoft Longtooth Security Center 2003. This feature will give users more control over processes that execute in their computers. I will explain some of its features here:

    To maximize security, Microsoft Longtooth Security Center 2003 will make certain assumptions about the user. For example, users who use Microsoft products are assumed to know what they are doing. However, users of 3rd party applications not made by Microsoft are always assumed to be complete idiots. Therefore, all user interface events occurring outside of Microsoft applications will trigger a safety mechanism.

    For example, each time the user moves the mouse in an area not controlled by a Microsoft application, the user will see crosshairs moving across the screen to indicate where the mouse will be located. When the user stops moving the mouse, an authentication window will appear and state: "The user has requested that the mouse be moved to the location on the screen indicated by the crosshairs. This area of the screen is controlled by untrusted code that may cause damage to your computer, your documents, or your network. Do you wish to allow the mouse to move to this location?" Buttons for "yes", "no", "details", and "help" will be displayed.

    Selecting "no" will cause the mouse cursor to remain at its previous location. Selecting "yes" will bring up another window, requesting the user's password to authenticate the movement of the mouse. If the user enters the correct password, the mouse cursor movement will be authenticated to that user and the cursor will be placed at the new location. Selecting "details" will display the X and Y coordinates of the new position, followed by warnings against using untrusted rogue code such as Linux.

    For additional protection, clicks, keys pressed on the keyboard, items selected in a menu, or other input events will trigger similar security mechanisms. Since Microsoft code is considered secure, these checks will not occur in windows owned by Microsoft code. Also, the mouse may be used to click on the above buttons and fields during mouse movement authentication. If any such movement of the mouse takes place during the authentication process, the mouse will still be moved to the location indicated by the crosshairs, but a bug in Windows will cause the cursor to immediately "bounce" back to the location where it was last used during authentication. Microsoft will refuse to fix the bug unless Linux is outlawed in all countries, even those countries that have no computers.

    Many other authentication checks will be made by Windows. I'll return to this topic in a moment. First, let me mention that Clippy, the talking paperclip, along with other Microsoft characters, will appear during this proces

  • Guru Meditation (Score:4, Interesting)

    by argent ( 18001 ) <peter@slashdot . ... t a r o nga.com> on Sunday May 08, 2005 @07:47PM (#12471912) Homepage Journal
    Red screen reminds me of the infamous Amiga "Guru Meditation" error. I always said the Amiga was ahead of its time.
  • is add a Green Screen of Death. Then they'll be able to add together death colors to get much needed functionality for TrueColor Screens of Death.
  • ...so this is absolutely nothing new! :-)

  • RSOD? (Score:5, Funny)

    by purple_cobra ( 848685 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @08:09PM (#12472078)
    Is it related to this:
    http://www.bbc.co.uk/wales/rsod/ [bbc.co.uk]

  • Oblig. Red Dwarf Quote (Score:3, Funny)

    by bobbis.u ( 703273 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @08:26PM (#12472212)
    Rimmer: Step up to red alert! Kryten: Sir, are you absolutely sure? It does mean changing the bulb.

  • How to get a Red screen of Death even in '95 (Score:5, Informative)

    by Artifakt ( 700173 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @09:08PM (#12472525)
    Edit your system.ini file as follows:

    Under the [386Enh] header, add these two lines:

    MessageTextColor=B
    MessageBackColor=3

    That will give you a bright cyan text on dark cyan background screen of death. Feel free to substitute other colors 0-F as desired. This works in 95, 98, and Me, at least. Red's in there somewhere - don't remember exactly where - just try a pair of values, wait the usual 15 minutes for a SOD, and see if you like the combination. I can honestly say I haven't seen a BSOD on my screen in months.
    • Windows 95/98 is still a DOS base, so it uses the basic VGA color codes...
      0 black
      1 blue
      2 green
      3 cyan
      4 red
      5 magenta
      6 brown
      7 light gray
      8 dark gray
      9 light blue
      A light green
      B light cyan
      C light red
      D light magenta
      E yellow
      F white
      Go nuts customizing your 10 year old OS!! :P

  • Now with new icons! (Score:3, Funny)

    by PhYrE2k2 ( 806396 ) on Sunday May 08, 2005 @09:09PM (#12472534)
    Wow! I'm going to change my applications to have the question icon on yes/no boxes to exclaimation and repackage it- I'll make millions :)

    First off, why is this news? Why is this worthy of Slashdot? Microsoft creates new error message screen *gasp*. Microsoft changes colour of text-only screen *gasp*. Who cares!

    So a list of error codes now has a new colour- yippie.

    -M

  • Red screens indicate(d) ACPI errors (Score:3, Informative)

    by danshapiro ( 529921 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @02:42AM (#12474302) Homepage
    Red screens were introduced in '98 to indicate ACPI errors:

    http://www.computerhope.com/jargon/a/acpi.htm [computerhope.com]

    I believe the redscreen code is turned off in release builds, meaning you are not likely to see one.

  • How much have you gotten BSOD'ed recently. (Score:5, Interesting)

    by AlexMax2742 ( 602517 ) on Monday May 09, 2005 @03:28AM (#12474486)
    I've been seeing a lot less BSOD's in general since using 2K and XP.

    In Windows 98, I would run the comptuer for a few days, and for no reason it would just start being slow and throwing random BSOD's at me.

    Since using 2K and XP, I've seen a few recently, but they're all realated to a piece of faulty hardware that I've been too lazy to replace. Other than that, I can't reacall seeing a single BSOD in years on a computer of my own.

    I'm honestly asking people. Have you run into BSOD's that really truely was 2000's/XP's fault instead of being some sort of hardware fuckup?
    • When I ran Win95, it would BSOD 5+ times a day. Once, it went down 15 times! I counted them! When we switched to NT4, it went down several times a week, instead of several times a day. So far, I haven't seen a BSOD on XP.
    • I'm honestly asking people. Have you run into BSOD's that really truely was 2000's/XP's fault instead of being some sort of hardware fuckup?

      I have used XP for 2 years now (job, not at home) and I have only seen a couple BSODs on it. HOWEVER, I don't think that the OS is that much more stable than 2k. I still get lockups, massive slow-downs, and unresponsiveness. In fact, I think I get them more in XP than in 2k. XP does weirder things. Does it matter that there is not a BSOD if I have to reset the ma

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