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Helen Keller mode
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Helen Keller mode /n./ 1. State of a hardware or software
system that is deaf, dumb, and blind, i.e., accepting no input and
generating no output, usually due to an infinite loop or some other
excursion into deep space. (Unfair to the real Helen Keller,
whose success at learning speech was triumphant.) See also go
flatline, catatonic. 2. On IBM PCs under DOS, refers to a
specific failure mode in which a screen saver has kicked in over an
ill-behaved application which bypasses the very interrupts the
screen saver watches for activity. Your choices are to try to get
from the program's current state through a successful save-and-exit
without being able to see what you're doing, or to re-boot the
machine. This isn't (strictly speaking) a crash.
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