Cable TV Displays "Illegal Operation" Error Message

[Bob Russell]

This can best be described as "Oops!" Atlantic broadband has been displaying (actually, is currently displaying) a familiar error message to Windows users. The infamous "This program has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down." I suppose that their local bulletin board channel feed is generated by a Windows PC with video out!

Reminds me of a tech conference with Scott McNealy of Sun Microsystems in its best days, when there was a lot of teasing back and forth between Microsoft and Sun. McNealy showed a video of a scuba diver with a wrist control unit. Suddenly, at the bottom of the ocean, the diver can't breathe anymore. He looks at the wrest watch controller (running Windows, of course) and sees an error message something like the following... "WinSock Error. Fatal exception!"

But, gee, I'm just glad not to see any more of the old blue screens of death, or the dasterdly "Dr Watson"!

BTW, for those of you with eagle eyes, the screenshot is not from a video capture, so don't bother trying to deduce anything from the title bar of the error message window.