Marco.org

I’m : a programmer, writer, podcaster, geek, and coffee enthusiast.

Dan:

I did not manipulate this error message in any way. Do Mac users ever get this kind of hilarity? I suspect not.

Nope. And “data execution prevention” is the more modern equivalent of “illegal operation” - the program said something along the lines of “execute starting at address 100” but the stuff in memory at address 100 isn’t supposed to be program code.

You’re the only one of our high-school friends to not switch to Macs yet. I’m impressed by your resolve. But you’ll cave soon. I can feel it.

OS X’s worst error is the kernel panic — the Mac equivalent of the BSOD (more accurately, the blue STOP errors in Windows 2000/XP). The screen gets a 50%-dark translucent overlay with this multilingual notice in the middle (a full photo). It’s actually somewhat pretty, as fatal error messages go.

Like the Windows STOP errors, you’ll usually only see a kernel panic if there’s a serious hardware problem or very low-level crash, like if you have bad RAM.