Contradiction in terms?

[ffutures]

Okay, I know that Apple users are going to tell me that there's no such animal, but what's the nearest Mac equivalent to the Blue Screen of Death?

Comments

[sbisson.livejournal.com]

The spinning beachball of doom.

[ramtops.livejournal.com]

that doesn't normally take down a Mac, though.

whereas a kernel panic will.

[drplokta]

A kernel panic. The SPOD (spinning pizza of death) is more equivalent to the Windows hourglass.

There's an image halfway down this page: http://developer.apple.com/technotes/tn2002/tn2063.html

[cdybedahl.livejournal.com]

It may also be worth noting that the most common cause of kernel panics "In the wild" is dodgy hardware.

[drplokta]

Dodgy hardware drivers, specifically. I only ever got kernel panics on my PowerBook when using the Alcatel Speedtouch ("frog"/"manta ray") USB ADSL modem provided by BT, before I bought a real ADSL modem with an Ethernet port.

[ffutures.livejournal.com]

Thanks everyone - Kernel panic sounds about right (not to be confused with Colonel Mustard, of course...) for Willow's computer getting hacked by someone even better at it than she is, if I ever write the story.

[autopope.livejournal.com]

I should add, kernel panics are relatively rare -- the kernel itself is pushing twenty years by now, and most of the bugs have been tracked down and slaughtered (although dodgy hardware will do it every time).

More commonly, you might run into an application freeze. This is particularly troublesome with games that are using OpenGL to write to the whole screen -- it's sometimes possible to log in from a remote machine and kill -9 the offending process, but not always. More frequently, applications go "spinning beachball of doom" -- the beachball is the "I'm busy" cursor, and sometimes applications get locked into race conditions during which they do nothing but spin the beachball. The usual solution to this is a four-finger salute (control-alt-option-escape, then pick the offending app from a list of running programs in a pop-up window and hit the "terminate" button). However, SBODs don't affect the rest of the system -- only one app is affected and once it's dead everything gets back to normal.

[robertprior.livejournal.com]

Screen goes dim with a grey box in the middle telling you you need to restart your computer by holding down the power button for a few seconds.