The dreaded "beeping death"

Largest Intranet

Eddie — Thu, 17 Nov 2005 01:00:13 GMT

Just a quick touch on the 'largest intranet'. I don't think Microsoft's had the largest intranet ever, really.

I thought the military was the first, and Schlumberger is the second (first in terms of commercial).

http://www.slb.com/content/about/history.asp

It makes sense, Schlumberger is one of the worlds largest oil and gas companies, and their volume of data that they churn through is much more sizeable then any software corporation's (seismic alone.. Oh my!).

Anyhow, just thought I'd throw some trivia. :)

re: The dreaded "beeping death"

Microsoft Knowledge Base — Wed, 16 Nov 2005 04:16:33 GMT

Here's the beeping death:
http://support.microsoft.com/kb/187518/EN-US/

re: The dreaded "beeping death"

Bob Atkinson — Fri, 11 Nov 2005 06:15:05 GMT

Input queue full, indeed.

I've just had to disable beep.sys on my brand new Thinkpad X41 because the darn thing would beep (LOUDLY) pretty much every other time you used the mouse or trackpoint to scroll (which the thing couldn't keep up with). Incredibly, incredibly annoying on what's otherwise a very nice product.

From the posts I've found, there are many Thinkpad users out there with the same problem, though the solution of turning off beep.sys isn't very well known.

re: The dreaded "beeping death"

Mike — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 23:35:01 GMT

Speaking of "error message beeps", NT has AFAIK always emitted beeps (using beep.sys) whenever the input queue gets full. It was especially easy to provoke this in NT4 (after the move of the handler into kmode :-< ) with even a moderately loaded system, if you just moved the mouse around. Mouse messages would queue up, the system would not drain the queue, and from there on every kind of user input would result in "bleep".

You can go "bleep" yourself, Windows box! :-)

re: The dreaded "beeping death"

Michael Dunn_ — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 21:30:20 GMT

When I saw this post's title, I thought it was about the Win 9x scenario, too. Shows how much of a newbie I am. ;)

re: The dreaded "beeping death"

Thomas — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 12:36:17 GMT

There was another kind of "beeping death" in Windows 95/98...
When resources got really low those error messages from the 16 Bit layer started popping up (those with the white background, system font and "Retry", "Ignore" and "Cancel" buttons). On some occasions the system locked up completely and you could hear a clicking noise from the speaker whenever you moved the mouse or pressed a key.

I wonder how you explain this... ;-)

re: The dreaded "beeping death"

Thomas — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 12:34:25 GMT

re: The dreaded "beeping death"

Jonathan — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 11:17:39 GMT

My friend, who is in the PC video playing programming bussiness, uses "debug beeps" all the time. That's how he catches dropped frames, etc.

re: The dreaded "beeping death"

Feroze — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 04:52:57 GMT

I read an interesting article sometime back, in one of the ACM journals, about using sound to debug software. The researchers had taken some real world programs, and inserted routines to emit sound at various places. So, for eg, if you want to know whether a particular code path is hit without doing a bunch of logging, or hooking up the debugger, just insert a routine there to emit (for eg) a beep. If there is an infinite loop there, the beep will sound continuously.

Sounded interesting..

re: The dreaded "beeping death"

Larry Osterman [MSFT] — Thu, 10 Nov 2005 00:12:37 GMT

You may be right, there may be bigger, more complicated networks out there, but there aren't many.

Given your description, I think that Microsoft's network is probably on the same order of magnitude in size as yours is.