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.
