Windows 10 installation shows shopping centre its sad face – the natural response to finding out you're in Peterborough It is tech mirroring life in today's edition of Bork as the text-based BSOD of yore is replaced by… the Sad Face of 2020. Microsoft has committed many sins over the years. We understand* that the entire team responsible for the Windows 10 October 2018 Update were made to use the software for a week until they said they were …
The first time I saw it I didn't even realise it was an official Windows error screen, I genuinely thought I had fallen victim to some kind of ransomware attack.
Then I read it and realised that Microsoft were just trying to be 'quirky'. Which is what you want from your business IT equipment, obviously.
The first time I saw "hi we're getting everything ready for you" I started wondering what the hell Microsoft throught they were playing at.
A simple list of what it was doing along with a precentage bar to completion would surely have been more welcome to almost everybody.
Those who make photo slideshow panels might disagree.
At the risk of repeating an oft-told tale, I informed the owners of our small company that leaving a laptop running a slideshow in the reception area was not a good idea, and that photo displays were both cheaper and more reliable. Which had no effect until the cheapskates remembered they got a free panel from a local business booster org, and used that. It was all of 10 cm across.
Had some MS "marketing" stuff through a couple of years ago. You opened this thick cardboard folder, and there was a video playing on a video screen.
Ripped it apart to get to the electronics and found a USB port inside - video is now changed to McAfee's NSFW how to uninstall antivirus.
There was a plan to mount it at the entrance of IT for displaying info to visitors, but it seems to have gone missing.......
In one case it's because that's what the developer knows. A firm I worked for developed a Linux based slab like the one in the picture, based on Xine for >large advertising company< and to be similarly deployed. We did it on Linux because that's what we knew - sure, we trotted out familiar arguments about it being superior when talking to investors, but the truth is we couldn't have done it on another platform.
Just as it was being delivered, the company split and this project went to the non-Linuxy splitting-off (PFJ) part of the business and I was tasked with handing all the engineering over to their top techie, who was a .NET developer. We didn't really like each other, but while he was a patent arsehole, he was a *competent* arsehole and accepted that he'd have to look after it. He'd never used make, never written any X software, never used Linux, but took it on, fair play to him. We gave him a monkey-see-monkey-do manual for building the entire thing from parts to product and it's still running, more than ten years later (I saw one in Leeds this year).
His work in the JPF part of the business was developing a similar .NET-based player and I always wondered how I'd have fared if our positions had been reversed and I'd inherited that. Shivers down my spine.
Ah that takes me back. I was part of the team responsible for those units. The company in question went bust around 4 years ago, and I've moved on from designing digital-out-of-door screen systems.
It originally shipped with a PC running a cut-down Linux distro (desktop stripped out, etc) for the big screens. Later versions ditched PCs altogether and ran custom playout software on a Raspberri Pi. One of the reasons for that decision was to avoid this scenario. The other was cost.
Then there was the ill-judged Windows Millennium Edition (not to be confused with the Millennial Edition and its avocado toast screensaver and desktop that is rented by the second from an avaricious landlord).
I propose a new measure of prose worthiness based on the likelihood that Dabbsy himself would have been chuffed to have written it. The above quote must be at least an 8.75.
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