Micros~1? ClippyZilla? BSOD Bob? There can be only one winner. Or maybe two The Register needed a Regism for our favourite blue screen merchant and we were heartened by the response. But as Connor MacLeod might say: "There can be only one." Such was the volume of entries that we had to apply some totally arbitrary rules to our decision-making process. Anything that substituted the S for a $ was deemed …
Just Clippy would do, surely? But I voted "The Ribbon Factory".
Picking on "Bob" reminds me of comedians The Two Ronnies telling us that Cliff Richard wanted people to stop asking about his sex life - "It was no more than an isolated incident which took place more than twenty years ago."
It's not usually pronounced. It's been a print-only visual jargon pun for just over 25 years.
(I first saw it on Usenet back when Win95 was still in Beta. Sadly, I can't remember who came up with it, and sadly the gookids have buggered up the irreplaceable DejaNews archive, so whoever it was has probably been lost to history. It is possible that it was a collective "ah-hah!" moment invented by several people nearly simultaneously.)
"flashbacks to a bygone era "
lol, rofl etc. Now try to get to grips with punchcards as programming. A lace doily is not just something your grandmother puts on the table to avoid your tea cup spoiling the varnish on her mahogany in a decorative way. You still spill and fuck up anyway.
... anyway a lacie is also a punch card, fully punched. It can bring a punch card operated system to its knees. lol, rofl etc
Not really.
"Lace cards" or "lacies" refers to punched cards that had had too many holes punched in them. This made the card mechanically weak, and liable to jam the punch-card reader. Malfunctions like this kept the nice man from <hardware supplier> in beer money.
Along with punched tape, punched provided a means of off-line storage for data over your sysadmins' generous quota of ~ 32 kilobytes.
They're hardly out of the gate and already it looks like we have a winner here, Dave. Surely this one's Micros~1's to lose?
That's right, Jim, but Micros-1 has form for snatching defeat from the jaws of victory with new projects. This could well go all the way to the line.
O dear, I missed out on that one... Not in the habit of calling names, even when it comes to the Evil Emipre from Redmond, I usualy refer to screw-ups (like last fall when I was back in France since 13 years, about to show my work to the indigenous people from Nullepart, and then found out that upon arrival my Win10 had to finish its update, (wait... wait...), before I found out the update had borked my cursor, turning me into one...) as microflop. ... And that's it, mostly. ... It's not Apple, or Linux. So. Or else, just Satan. But then I refer to myself as Satan as well, so that's not much of a help either. So, nothing. ... Mind you, I have tried over the years, but that's all I have to show for 20-odd years of wasted time & sleep. Hey, I even have used drugs - still nothing. ... Maybe it's some sort of Stockholm syndrome - it keeps on slapping me in the face and giving nightmares & bruises on the soul, and I still keep hoping it will get better, one day. Maybe 'Nightmare' comes close. Micromare? Microsad? Micro de Sade? ... Microsof (a sof being a failure (in Jiddish, now I check it (always good for great words telling what's it all about, like armageddon being another ... evergreen))).
As a "Superman" fan, I rather like the idea of "General BSOD" (after "General Zod") which also hearkens back to the old "General Protection Fault" messages we used to see.
However, given El Reg's predilection to "zilla" suffixes, I think "BSODzilla" is the way to go.
Another consideration is that given Windows' propensity towards crashes, or "bingles", "Binglezilla" also works!
Unfortunately, due to work getting in the way, I never got around to submitting these options.
I think Scott hit the nail on the head. Many of the choices in the survey or discussed here have some merit but - apart from 'Micros~1' (which has other drawbacks) - they lack oomph and do not offer the immediate recognition and egg-on-face-ishness that we are looking for here. Some come close - like 'BSOD Bob' - but are quite cryptic.
Of the choices offered in the survey, only 'House of Bob' has the right combination of epicness and egg-on-face. However, its drawback is that you have to be mighty old to recognise the 'Bob' meme. How many Reg readers were even born in the Age of Bob (1995), let alone steeped in computer lore?
So I'd go with Scott's BSOD meme as universal indicator for the dogfood flogger, of which 'House of BSOD' and 'BSODzilla' are two excellent incarnations.
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