Macworld:

The error messages you see when something goes wrong with your software or hardware often offer you no help, nor give you any clue as to what is causing the problem.

Error messages on the Mac often appear as Zen kōans; they suggest that you ponder the deeper meaning of the universe in order to understand what they mean.

This has been an eternal frustration for Mac users, more so for those of us who used the OS before OS X when these error messages seemed even more frequent. They’ve always been frustratingly opaque.