Seems like the modern Microsoft is willing to inject a surprising amount of humanity into their projects. Wether you agree with the new direction or not, you do have to applaud how bold they've been recently. (You could argue they have to be bold considering the computing world seems to be trending away from the business desktop towards personal devices, but it's still impressive to see these bolder moves actually emerge from a large company. The thing about Microsoft is that when they need to shift strategy, they usually can. That's why you can never rule them out.)

After just watching tech reviewers have to retry swipe gestures three, four, five times and also miss too-small touch zones (in that Win8 tablet video Gruber recently posted) I think it's safe to continue ruling them out, "modern Microsoft" or no.

They still just fundamentally don't get it.

I'm a Linux user the vast majority of the time, and dislike Microsoft's tactics as much as the next guy, but going from "[a few touchscreen bugs]" to "just fundamentally don't get it" is quite the logical leap. Fundamental attribution error comes to mind.

It's pre-beta.

"Put your best foot forward."

If they've been working on that nonstop since the iPad launched, and that's the best thing they have to show to the press in September 2011, my point stands.

I don't think so. Buggy gestures or minor UI issues such as tiny touch zones are not the consequence of poor product design or direction; they're the consequence of having significantly large software in a very early stage of development.

I imagine that people who think bugs in a preview release are somehow a reflection of a company's overall vision or understanding of how their users interact with their computer probably are not going to be very accepting of anything Microsoft does regardless of its merits.

"If they've been working on that nonstop since the iPad launched..."

Sounds like you've got it figured out.

I think the "emoticon" is unprofessional.

I'm not sure it's the software. It seems perfectly ok on my Sony VPCJ1 which is a proper piece of kit with a decent touchscreen.

A frowny is a defacto (Western) Internet standard indicating sadness or disappointment. In Japan you could possibly write ;_;

You could also look upon it as a relation to Apple's "Sad Mac" that's been around for probably more than 20 years.

Personally I think having a bit of personality takes the edge away from the harshness of a BSOD.

Of course in the days of the Sad Mac, that was only upon a failed boot. When it crashed it showed a cartoony round bomb with a lit fuse on the end. Made people mad!

I've always liked Neal Stephenson's description of the little bomb icon:

"When a Macintosh got into trouble it presented you with a cartoon of a bomb, which was funny the first time you saw it."[1]

1: http://www.cryptonomicon.com/beginning.html

The Sad Mac is no longer used, actually -- I believe it was removed from the ROM in NewWorld PPC machines (iMac G3 and newer). Current machines just display a circle/slash symbol on POST failure.

I liked it when they had the STOP code and the memory dump. There was something... useful? about it.

This removes that information and replaces it with a 72 point emoticon.

How many people in your inner circle were able to make _any_ use of that information?

I'm not sure what to think about the emoticon (don't like those too much), but I don't think something valuable to the general public was lost here..

I get what you are saying, but now no one has any information about what the problem might be and how to fix it, as opposed to people savvy enough to Google the STOP code (and I think you are underestimating the current population and certainly ignoring people's ability to learn to Google error messages).

Sure, there was something psychologically jarring about the old BSOD, but without giving us any clue as to what went wrong with the computer, how is anyone supposed to be able to fix it? Is it impossible to display a STOP code in a friendly manner?

Yes, they do. People knowledgeable in Windows analyze the dump files a BSOD creates. These file have all the information needed for debugging. In addition, it's dumped in the event logs.

People on HN seem pretty quick to jump on this pre-beta release, and Windows in general, without proper situational awareness.

- You can still google the code Windows provides.

- If you're really savvy you know how to use WinDBG and load up a memory dump.

The STOP code is still there. It's small in that screenshot, but the bottom line reads "You can search for the error online: HAL INITIALIZATION FAILED".

Seems people are rushing to use Virtual Machine software to test drive. However most of them don't have the correct hal.dll support...

Are you supposed to write that down so you can search for it when the machine is done rebooting?

yes. or i assume that 8 will have the same feature 7 does, in that on next boot it will give you a "windows has recovered from a serious error, would you like to go online to search for a solution" dialog.

I've never actually received a response of any kind from that dialog. Weird.

When I get such an error I photograph it with my phone.

I'm sure all the relevant data is recorded in the event log, which is how it should be done. In fact, I do believe that's what the error message says in smaller font.

Where is it recorded when the OS kernel loses access to persistent storage?

> Where is it recorded when the OS kernel loses access to persistent storage?

When your drive/chipset dies and you reboot, you'll get an error saying that no bootable drive is found. It'll be pretty obvious what happened at that point.

The disk subsystem can fail in software, just just hardware.

KeBugCheckEx(), the method that displays a blue screen, dumps memory to the paging file (which is contiguous and fixed, so it doesn't need the FS driver). When a dump is about to be made, it hashes all of the pieces of the pager and the disk driver necessary to do the dump, and ensures that they aren't corrupted, then dumps. On reboot, the boot manager notices that the system died messily, and copies the paging file to a crash dump.

Now you know more than you ever wanted to about blue screens. :)

This is because the vast majority of Windows users have no clue about any of the information presented.

And the people who CAN use that information analyze the .dmp files on the filesystem. The .dmp files have the same info plus more.

I'm pretty sure they're still going to have the memory dump.

If you don't want to/can't login to Facebook: http://i.imgur.com/72rry.jpg

Thanks! I'm on HN from China and facebook is completely blocked (There are vpn/proxy options, but not worth setting up for a short stay).

I didn't have to login to see it, maybe the permissions on the picture changed?

Perhaps! I had to login on my iPad and it was kinda annoying, thought I'd help the masses. :)

I was about to start a flame for the same reason. It seems login is mandatory on mobile

Thanks, I have completely blocked *.facebook.com in my main browser due to privacy concerns.

A lot of people are seeing this as useless- one commenter called it "function follows form."

I actually think this one's better- with "You can search for the error online: SOME_ERROR_CODE_HERE" it will overwhelm less people and get more people to a place they can find help.

Insofar as the dump file still gets stored somewhere, I don't see why this is bad either. Most of the time, in modern versions, BSODs are hardware/driver related and require somebody half-competent to diagnose it.

Problem with that is that it would lead to a SEO battle of "pay to remove your viruses from your rams and boost your registries" sites.

There's ton of crap in search results for STOP codes already.

That's Google's problem. If Microsoft can give people exactly enough information about the problem that, for example, their knowledge base site can give them some options, I don't see why that's a bad thing.

It is Microsoft's problem if Noober McGreenerson searches for that error code and downloads the "fix" that ends up infesting their computer. Most people are more than happy to blame Michaelsoft for their computer shitting the bed after they've installed crapware on it.

No, it's Noober McGreenerson's fault for downloading crap from a suspicious site without doing any research. It doesn't matter who Noober is happy to blame, it's still his fault.

Yes, it's nice when end users don't have to think, but no, it's not realistic. Microsoft has no direct control over Google- why should they be responsible for what people find there?

Should they just leave every piece of useful information off the blue screen so nobody will search? That's what would really be "function follows form."

Less imposing than the earlier versions for a non-techie user, but I'd suggest a rewording. "your PC..." will imply a physical hardware fault to a lot of people and that'll not help tech support when it is actually a driver issue (some people can be very difficult to deal with when they've got a mis-diagnosis stuck in their heads).

Looks like an improvement. Though I think it should also say something to the effect of "If you've seen this screen more than twice today, you should have a professional examine your computer for problems."

Show that one to a doctor or lawyer.

Microsoft could very well have made this screen some other color (like yellow or red). Would it have been caught out as the new "screen of death" from MS then or would it have been ignored as the software was still a developer preview?

The tendency to tie things in Microsoft's new OSes (Windows Phone 7, Windows 8) to aspects of earlier versions (Windows Mobile, Win XP, Vista) could be one of the things to dog MS as long as it is unwilling to abandon the "Windows" brand (despite being significantly different).

I think consistency in error messages is good though. Sure, bsods were a huge annoyance back in the day. You'd practically be guaranteed to hit one every week. Now though, the system itself is pretty damn stable. My uptimes on my windows 7 machines are all measured in months right now. If something does go wrong though, seeing a bsod will at least let me know immediately that it was a catastrophic failure. It's such an immediately recognizable event that removing it might not be in the users' best interest.

I'm a little surprised there's only English on that screen. Perhaps they localize it? That seems potentially flakey to do if the system is in an unstable state.

OSX's Kernel Panic screen has a handful of languages explaining what happened.

EDIT: I suppose they could generate the text/page statically when the OS is installed and every time the locale is changed thereafter. If that is what they do, it's better than what OSX does.

Windows BSOD's have "always" (as long as I can remember) been localised. I would guess your assumption is correct, since it's entirely possible to install Windows without English support (I don't use OSX, but a quick search gave the impression that English is non-removable there).

Is this confirmed to be the screen for the final version, or is this just something the devs quickly put in the dev build?

The kernel panic screen on the Mac really makes users feel cosmopolitan and cool. I feel like I'm riding the monorail to SFO when my Mac crashes:

http://km.support.apple.com/library/APPLE/APPLECARE_ALLGEOS/...

Love how quick people are to assume that Microsoft would just be scrapping the memory dump and error log entirely. Come on folks, you should know that's unintuitive and unnecessary to the average user. Don't get caught up in assuming your skills are anywhere near the norm.

Why does it use an ASCII emoticon instead of an actual graphic that isn't turned on its side?

That is a 'kernel panic' screen. The lighter, the better.

Is the comma really needed after the word handle?

Yes, it comes before a conjunction separating independent clauses.

http://grammar.ccc.commnet.edu/grammar/commas.htm

I think it looks bad when separating only two clauses.

Wonder how long that took to discover. MTTBSOD?

There's a bug in either VMWare Workstation or the Win8 HAL that leads to it crashing on startup, and that's VMWare Workstation in the screenshot, so... not long. :P

Google Chrome already has this feature.

chrome://crash/

minus the helpful error code. I find it infuriating that it doesn't provide any hint about why it has crashed.

I think you mean about:crash

But, yes, it looks like Microsoft took a rather direct cue from Chrome.

...who cribbed it from old-school Apple. The original design for the "Sad Tab"[1] is fairly similar to the Sad Mac[2] errors from the original Macintosh. This sort of error screen isn't a totally original design.

[1] https://skitch.com/constantinexvi/f3ybu/new-tab (Chrome originally used this design everywhere, but now use a mildly different one outside of Mac builds)

[2] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Sad_mac.png

Not anymore it seems.

I get a navy blue screen, with white graphics in the middle:

[Icon of a browser with two tabs open, and a :( rotated 90 degrees clockwise in the middle]

Aw, Snap!

Something went wrong while displaying this web page. To continue, reload or go to another page.

Learn more

and the "Learn more" is a hyperlink to https://www.google.com/support/chrome/bin/answer.py?answer=9...

"Aw, snap" actually seems even less mature than a frowney face.

Oh no's a bug in a pre beta operating system, Windows is obviously a horrible operating system.

microsoft is the new apple.

Although BSD's are never cool but this one is way better then the old one.

Looks like they've finally realised that few people read what's on the BSOD so there's no point in displaying it.

au contraire, they probably realized that people see the text on a BSOD, freak the fuck out, and go crazy wondering what's wrong with their computer.

now at least they expose only the most useful information to the user ("you need to restart", "here's a thing you can search for to find more information") instead of crazy stuff like "beginning physical memory dump" and STOP codes.

That as well

Hahah. Correct

The new era of function follows form.

I hate stuff like this. When you or your product just fucked up the UX, it is not the time to be cutesy.

You do understand what a BSOD is right ?

Couldn't really see it from my phone but is that a comma next to 'handle'? Looks like wrong use of a comma.

Next they'll write "Sorry ... Windows just peed .... Please restart to clean up!!"