Microsoft Robots to Watch Kids

Archangel Michael writes "Microsoft announced today that is testing a new toy / robot to watch over kids. My question is, if the toy BSOD does it take the kid with it? Now we are letting inanimate objects raise our kids! When will it end?"

Re:BSOD

[igorthefiend]

Yes, I see it on a regular basis because my piece of shit Audigy 2 card has the "screech of death" problem which results in bluescreen goodness even under XP. Oh, deep joy.

Re:BSOD

[patches]

Actually I have. Both 2000 and XP, both of which were the Pro version. I have to say that I believe the problem was that I had hardware problems on my motherboard, but I have seen both OSes BSOD on a regular basis...

Patrick

Re:BSOD

[tyresyas]

Why the jokes? Because people get them. All the time. I find it odd as a developer that you've never made an error where OS didn't eventually just go, "Oh, for f***'s sake." If you've ever had a driver that wasn't written just perfect, you have definitely seen the dreaded BSoD

Re:BSOD

[Anonymous Coward]

Windows 2000 was easier to get to BSOD than even the first Windows 95, or (shudder) Win32s.

C:\> ping localhost [enter] [F7] [enter] [f7] [enter] [f7] [enter]

STOP CONDITION...

Not fixed until SP4 (or was it 6?)...

But yeah, I haven't seen XP BSOD without turning off "immidiately reboot on crash" either :-)

Re:BSOD

[fizze]

Windows-XP has a "feature" (???) with which it is possible to manually crash a system by simply holding the right CTRL key and pressing the "Scroll Lock" key twice. This feature can be turned on by the following steps:

1. Start regedit. (If you are unfamiliar with regedit, please refer to this FAQ)
2. Navigate to:
HKEY_LOCAL_MACHINE\SYSTEM\CurrentControlSet\S ervic es\i8042prt\Parameters
3. Create a new DWORD value and name it CrashOnCtrlScroll
4. Right-click on this newly created value and click on Modify
5. Enter 1 in the Value data field and click on OK.
6. Close regedit and reboot your system.
7. Now you can blue screen (crash) your system by holding the right CTRL key and pressing "Scroll Lock" twice.

Note:

Your system may reboot or show a blue screen whenever this crash is initiated. If your system reboots after initiating the crash, and you want to see the blue screen, follow these steps:

1. Go to Control Panel > System
2. Click on the Advanced tab
3. Under Startup and Recovery, click the Settings button.
4. Under System failure, uncheck the option Automatically restart.

Happy crashing...

cudos to http://www.tweakxp.com/article140073.aspx [tweakxp.com]

Re:BSOD

[BladeMelbourne]

You sir, are an idiot. I got a Toshiba Satellite A70 yesterday. It came with WinXP home. I promptly installed Win2k3 Server. After installing the ATI graphical drivers I got BSODs several times (before the Ctrl-Alt-Del box would appear).

I'm a Linux user, and I have had blue screens on every Win OS between 95 and Win2k3 Server. Win 3 used to just freeze or drop back to DOS.

Re:BSOD

[Turn-X Alphonse]

XPs default action is a blue screen is to reboot or so I've heard. I don't use XP so I don't know for sure but several people have said.

Re:BSOD

[DrXym]

Well then you're in a small minority. While it is true that W2K / XP do not crash anywhere near as much as 95/98, they do crash and much more frequently than OS X or Linux.

I'd say on average I get one or two BSODs in a month. Mostly this is driver related (e.g. Nvidia + HL2), but I have instances where the machine has blue screened for no apparant reason whatsoever. The machine was under some kind of load, e.g. a compiler + some apps and then *poof* it blue screened with some kind of NTOSKRNL exception. Considering that I reboot my machine everyday so that it never runs for more than 16 hours, I'd say this is pretty poor. And yes my box is service packed, drivers are up to date etc. etc.

OS X isn't perfect either, but in the two years and several iterations of 10.x, I've only seen two panics. Panics on Linux have been rarer than hens teeth. The only time I've seen that crash at all was when I've been screwing around with the kernel source and forgotten to do important something such as mkinitrd or whatever.

Re:BSOD

[blahplusplus]

BSOD's still exist on XP, in particular in some nasty offending drivers or combination of software that conspires against your drivers. I've had BSOD's happen to me on brand new XP machines and we still get machines that have BSOD issues in XP, especially when its related to cheap hardware and poorly developed software and/or drivers for the cheap hardware (scanner, printer, whatever) in question.

If you think XP is all that you are dreaming. I've seen XP machines so infested with spyware and whatnot that BSOD's are a common occurance.

Re:BSOD

[bairy]

In line with my sig I would normally ignore an AC comment, but this one should be corrected.

You may notice that the original poster said I know it's physically capable of a BSOD, but really, has anyone ever seen XP or 2000 SP3 actually BSOD on a regular basis. My experience is that XP itself is incredibly stable. Infinitely more so than 95 or 98.

Note he said XP/2000 don't regularly bluescreen, he did not say they never bluescreen. Please learn to read more carefully.

MS Support Tells You How-to:

[hot_Karls_bad_cavern]

From the maker of Windows itself: How to use the CtrlScroll to crash Windows. [microsoft.com]

i imagine this is very, very helpful to some developers who work with data protection and need to test-crash junk all the time.

Re:BSOD

[shadwwulf]

It would seem that XP's slip is showing in the form of a feature sticking around from the code that MS ripped off from their involvement in the early development of OS/2. That feature was in every version of OS/2 that had a presentation manager.

MTW

Re:BSOD

[igorthefiend]

That's because it's seemingly random. Apparently to do with interrupt sharing issues in some machines, but Creative have only vaguely acknowledged the problem and haven't provided a fix.

Re:Look, he made a BSOD joke! He's funny AND origi

[fanblade]

Talk about misleading articles. The summary implies the thing watches your kids, gets up and shouts, "ur kid has been pwned!!" and continues to carry him off somewhere.

Then I RTFA and see it's a baby monitoring device. Everyone can simma down nah.

Re:agh

[sootman]

Dead horse? This is a Microsoft thread, not a BSD one. :-)

Besides, this isn't just old news [cnn.com]. It still happens [themacobserver.com].

Re:BSOD

[HD Webdev]

Yes, I see it on a regular basis because my piece of shit Audigy 2 card has the "screech of death" problem which results in bluescreen goodness even under XP. Oh, deep joy.

Ahh, yes, the joys of having a $300 audio card that BSOD's because Windows doesn't deal with the drivers well. I had a very similar problem

Remove all drivers in Safe Mode. Make sure nothing is in the 'Recycle (preserve viruses) Folder. Delete all temporary files. Reboot, and install up-to-date drivers.