{"id":24413,"date":"2007-11-22T10:00:00","date_gmt":"2007-11-22T10:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.msdn.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/2007\/11\/22\/when-in-doubt-consult-the-online-magic-8-ball\/"},"modified":"2007-11-22T10:00:00","modified_gmt":"2007-11-22T10:00:00","slug":"when-in-doubt-consult-the-online-magic-8-ball","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/20071122-00\/?p=24413","title":{"rendered":"When in doubt, consult the online Magic 8 Ball"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>On our team&#8217;s web site, buried among the other debugging documents, was a page titled simply &#8220;Magic 8 Ball&#8221;&reg;&sup1;. If you visited it, you got a dark blue circle with a lighter-blue triangle, on which appeared white text with a randomly-chosen message. The messages were things like<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Memory corruption. <\/li>\n<li>Try a newer build. <\/li>\n<li>Known bug. <\/li>\n<li>Can&#8217;t connect. <\/li>\n<li>Hardware failure. <\/li>\n<li>Looks like a X bug. (Where &#8220;X&#8221; was a random component.) <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p> It was fun to give the 8-ball a shake, but the real purpose of the 8-ball was to be a link sent out in response to failure reports.\n You see, there was a secret URL for each of the 8-ball&#8217;s responses, so you could respond to a failure report with something like<\/p>\n<blockquote class=\"m\"><p> The Magic 8 ball says&#8230;  http:\/\/internalserver\/magic8.asp?TWVGS <\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p> and when the person clicked on the link, they got an 8-ball that said &#8220;Known bug&#8221; or &#8220;Memory corruption&#8221;.\n Some teams liked the 8-Ball&#8217;s responses so much, they asked us to add new custom messages to the repertoire.\n Anyway, I was reminded of this by <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=6118099\"> the story of Radio8Ball<\/a>.<\/p>\n<p> &sup1;Magic 8-Ball is a registered trademark of Tyco Toys, Inc. When the <a href=\"http:\/\/news.bbc.co.uk\/2\/hi\/business\/2584675.stm\"> Tyco scandal<\/a> hit the airwaves, I always did a double-take before realizing that it was a different company. <\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>Tyco International = scandal-plagued multinational conglomerate,     cursed by shareholders. <\/li>\n<li>Tyco Toys = a division of Mattel, maker of the Magic 8 Ball,     beloved by soothsayers. <\/li>\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>On our team&#8217;s web site, buried among the other debugging documents, was a page titled simply &#8220;Magic 8 Ball&#8221;&reg;&sup1;. If you visited it, you got a dark blue circle with a lighter-blue triangle, on which appeared white text with a randomly-chosen message. The messages were things like Memory corruption. Try a newer build. Known bug. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1069,"featured_media":111744,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[26],"class_list":["post-24413","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-oldnewthing","tag-other"],"acf":[],"blog_post_summary":"<p>On our team&#8217;s web site, buried among the other debugging documents, was a page titled simply &#8220;Magic 8 Ball&#8221;&reg;&sup1;. If you visited it, you got a dark blue circle with a lighter-blue triangle, on which appeared white text with a randomly-chosen message. The messages were things like Memory corruption. Try a newer build. Known bug. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24413","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1069"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=24413"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/24413\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/111744"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=24413"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=24413"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/devblogs.microsoft.com\/oldnewthing\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=24413"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}