'I'm sorry, your lift has had a problem and had to shut down' It's not only size that matters: sometimes, the context of a BSOD also makes it fun. Lifts are always a rich vein of Windows worries. As reader Charles told us for the following: BSOD in a lift It's just for advertising, right? It's not actually controlling the lift. Right? Bueller? “Eight years ago I was visiting a …
And you can always tell when a lift door is about to open, from the intolerable air of smugness it suddenly generates.
The ATM at my local Tesco frequently shows a Windows XP log off screen. Haven't seen a blue screen from it yet, no doubt when it gets upgraded that'll be a new feature.
"The elevator will then inquire whether you have considered all the possibilities that down might offer you."
Well, considering this is the bottom floor of a building with no basement, the only place 'down' I would be able to go then is Hell, which is normally accomplished either by handbasket or by bullet train...so no.
The NHS can't afford an in-house IT dept for every hospital. Instead they will contract the work out to a third party which will charge them a grand just to move a monitor. Updating a license on a sign will require a 6-digit payment.
I am genuinely astonished at where Windows is used. Not just where a free alternative would work equally well (or better), but where a full OS is simply not required (see the W2K lift example above).
Anon because 'working'
T'isn't just the NHS, pretty much all gov departments piss money away (not just on IT), paying to decom a PC and then recom it two weeks later because a monthly budget target would have been exceeded and paying for the PC to be removed and reinstalled was from a different budget.
Those 'in House' IT people the various departments used to employ?
They still do, they're now sat in offices with reams of paper and boxes of toner, still paid the same salary, just doing office junior work one or two days a week, the rest of the time they're sat there watching films or reading, all the while the department is paying through the nose for mice, keyboards and other such...
Anon and ranting because work and taxpayer
USS Yorktown: Software glitches leave Navy Smart Ship dead in the water
It had to be towed into port.
This post has been deleted by its author
This Sydney lift wanted a login and was running Windows98 well after it was deprecated
That is always said as if it is an extremely bad thing but for embedded and industrial control systems, not connected to the wider outside world, it's no different to installing anything then leaving it running into the endless future.
Apart from the instances when things do go wrong - and that can happen no matter what is used - it worked yesterday, works today, and will work tomorrow. It is probably more a testament to Windows 98 than detraction from it.
The scrolling matrix signs in the waiting areas outside most of the departments of my local hospital show the current time.
This is exactly an hour out for at least a week following the change to or from BST, or until some IT bod notices (whichever is the longer)
I do hope that the doctors and surgeons do not rely on this time source...
Bet you the computer has an outdated time-shift schedule and doesn't connect to a time server.
But here's something that puzzles me. Given the possibility of these things just plain glitching to cosmic events, why don't these things carry some kind of watchdog in them, or at the least, if they're not operating anything critical, an automatic daily reset, say, at 3AM local time, to minimize glitch behavior?
"This is exactly an hour out for at least a week following the change to or from BST, or until some IT bod notices (whichever is the longer)"
With hospital waiting times being a government target, it's actually a cunning plan by the hospital to make it harder to work out whether or not you've actually been waiting too long.
For the love of all that is holy, please don't have strobing animations in the sidebar like the one used to advertise this.
a) Some readers will be epileptic;
b) for those that aren't (such as me) rapidly flashing stuff is distracting and annoying in exactly the same way as spammy adverts that do that are.
Not only is it always someone else's fault...
Why is it always the customer/user that ends up paying for someone else's poor design choices.
Systems do crash occasionally, although some crash more than others.
If a system builder designs a system to control a lift, a traffic management system, a train management system, whatever, and the overall system fails (e.g. due to inadequate robustness), why is it the lift passengers or the vehicle passengers or the train passengers, whatever, that pays the price for the inadequate design? Surely the pain (and the cost) should be picked up by the overall system builder?
If the system designer never picks up the cost of their design errors, what motivation is there for them to do the job right in the first place?
And if the system designers knew they would have to pay the price of downtime, would this picture change at all?
If the system designer never picks up the cost of their design errors, what motivation is there for them to do the job right in the first place?
I was going to comment on "the market would move on to a better product", but then I realised that human idiocy trumps quality products any time - after all, MS still sells their crapware whereas much better and cheaper products have much lower use.
Perhaps there's still ethics though. I know when I've been working on things I've gone for "this is done properly" over "this works" as much as possible, although sometimes I've done a quick patch and come back some time later to complete the job (sure you know how well that works out though!)
Oh how I wish.
The reality is - I think - that such a move requires work. If there is a choice between (monolithic) Product A where everything happens just by pushing a button, or (granular) Product B where it needs populating carefully with historic data then most will plump for Product A.
The mentality is to delay the problem of how to extract meaningful data out from it down the line and let's go play golf right now. Instant gratification is a term often bandied around.
I prefer to work with products where, having invested the time and effort to get it right to start with, the mere pushing of a button to get your results down the line is easy.
are a great place to spot BSODs, "Windows not activated" messages and pop-ups blocking customer messages. Manchester's baggage carousel screens always seem to be plagued with problems, as do Helsinki's many screens. Actually Manchester Airport's entire computer systems seem to be problematic - I and the rest of the passengers on my flight got locked in a baggage collection room for about an hour as the staff couldn't get us out because they couldn't work out how to override the computerised door controls!
I was once stepped into a lift at BBC TV Centre Spur when it said "8th floor going up". This was worrying in two ways: I wanted to go down since I was already on the top floor, secondly that top floor was numbered 7 so the lift seemed to have been in some alternate reality. Luckily, it took me to the 3rd floor where I wanted to go. However, I was starting to worry that my life had been more blameless than I thought and that the lift had decided to take me on shortcut to heaven by crashing through the basement.
I've never not seen a Windows XP bootsplash on the platform information displays, at Clapham Junction; and I've seen a load of Windows error dialogues on various digital signage, and advertising displays, ATMs (as well as seen one spontaneously reboot, outside of a convenience store, before re-launching the default application, and a load of CLI tools for hardware testing), and kiosks, over the years.
Back in ye olde days (the '80s and early '90s) sometimes we'd tune into the program guide channel on the cable TV and get a big red flashing GURU MEDITATION error. Or sometimes a Workbench screen, occasionally with the mouse pointer moving about as someone restarted the guide.
I have the HTC 8X in California Blue (so saddened I can't get much use from it for it is a beautiful looking handset) and when it still ran WinPho 8 I had a few incidents of it giving me a very familiar BSOD telling me "your computer has encountered a problem and cannot continue" or whatever it says.
Just today I was queuing to use one of the ticket machines for a hospital car park, when the one with the "Cards Only" sign taped to the front flashed this message up on its 15-inch colour LCD screen in giant screen-filling letters:
OUT
OF\r\ORDER
That's right, someone missed the 'n' out of ''\r\n", and nobody noticed before they shipped it...
And I won't even go into how execrably badly designed the user interface is, even when it is working....
"It's been like this for over a week now.
Instead of the usual timetable showing you which train you're about to miss, the display on Platform 0 just has a Windows XP loading screen."
This Platform is no longer supported, so you won't get any updates.
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