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[[!meta title="EIEIO: 'Computer bought the farm'... Err, what?!"]]

This is the error message for `EIEIO` (pronounce E-I-E-I-O).  This error code is
used for a variety of "hopeless" error conditions.  Most probably you will
encounter it when a translator crashes while you were trying to use a file
that it serves.

You can thus think of it as an equivalent of the "blue screen of the death" or
"Oops"... except that it's just an error!  It doesn't take your whole system
away with it, only the particular operations that was going on.


The term "Buy the farm" is synonymous to "Kick the bucket," meaning "to die". More specifically, "Bought the farm" was used by the US Air Force to denote a *fatal crash*. To say "Computer bought the farm" is simply saying "Your computer crashed".

Sure, we could just say "Crash!", but then again, so could the Air Force.