back to article What's the difference between Windows 7 and a bin lorry? One is full of garbage, and the other… oh dear

Welcome to another in our uplifting series of incidents where someone else's IT misdemeanours are flashed at an unsuspecting world. Behold the bork. Today's example was spotted on the side of a recycling collection lorry pulling out of Queen's Crescent in Kentish Town, Camden. The venerable market street has a rich history, …

  1. IGotOut Silver badge

    More to the point.

    Why do you need a bloody great digital signage on the side of a bin lorry?

    Still nice to see someone else's council tax being wasted for a change.

    1. Pascal Monett Silver badge

      Indeed. Wouldn't a normal poster have been enough ?

      For the price of that screen and the equipment behind it, I'm pretty sure you'd have a year of posters changing every day.

      And you wouldn't change them every day.

      1. Cynic_999

        And a stone chip, careless bin worker or parking mishap will not do £1000's of damage to a poster.

      2. EVP

        Yes indeed. And how about paying the drivers a bit more instead of wasting money on useless garbage? They are a pretty important piece of society’s machinery, after all.

        Still, that windoze screen was be placed where it deserves to be, on its way where it belongs to.

    2. Chris G

      Re: More to the point.

      This is Camden, a council that likes to share with the people.

      Considering the part of the original screen still visible from behing the borkage, where the words 'recycle' and a part of 'corona virus' is on show I dread to think what the whole message is, but Monty Python comes to mind.

      1. Ryan 7

        Re: More to the point.

        Errr... no there isn't. That's just the Windows 7 desktop.

      2. Jimmy2Cows Silver badge

        Re: More to the point.

        string NovaLT( "NovaLT" );

        assert( NovaLT.IsAnyPartOf( "corona virus" ) );

        ---

        Assertion failed.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: More to the point.

          string NovaLT( "NovaLC" );

          assert( NovaLT.IsAnyPartOf( "NovelCoronaVirus" ) );

          ---

          Assertion nearly passed.

      3. foo_bar_baz

        Re: More to the point.

        Time for new glasses? Also, the photo was taken some time before January 14th according to the article ("the shot was taken before support breathed its last").

    3. Paradroid

      Re: More to the point.

      Exactly what I thought. Maybe the truck is being driven by replicants too.

    4. SVV

      Re: More to the point.

      Maybe it shows adverts too to recoup the cost, like a lot of these screens. However their prepondency towards borkage is also doing a sterling public service of advertising that yes, Windows really is this flaky and unreliable everywhere. Somebody in Microsoft will have to come up with the idea of the negative software licence soon, where they pay companies not to use Windows on computers used for public displays.

      And having it on the side of a bin lorry driving round grotty places like Camden doesn't really conjure the idea of a futuristic Blade Runner style tech metropolis that the ad agencies who must have conceived this idea in their trendy offices thought it would.

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: a futuristic Blade Runner style tech metropolis

        It's been a while since I last saw it, but wasn't quite a lot of Blade Runner in somewhat grotty environs?

        1. DiViDeD

          Re: a futuristic Blade Runner style tech metropolis

          wasn't quite a lot of Blade Runner in somewhat grotty environs?

          You wouldn't believe how much Ridley Scott saved in set dressing just by filming in Camden. The opening scenes of Terminator were, of course, filmed in Stoke Newington.

          1. John Brown (no body) Silver badge

            Re: a futuristic Blade Runner style tech metropolis

            "The opening scenes of Terminator were, of course, filmed in Stoke Newington."

            ...and they spent millions to tidy it up to make it look that good!

      2. Dave 15

        Re: More to the point.

        A customer of mine was trying to do something involving windows and a public terminal, as expected it occasionally failed so I wrote a program that hooked the crash and restarted the whole system... wasnt that difficult so why are people still paying for half witted software which doesnt do the basics right?

        Bet they bought it from a French consultancy that had it programmed in Bangalore and charged them a total fortune as well... not a few thousand but probably a few million

    5. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: More to the point.

      A digital sign with Windows too!!!

    6. bombastic bob Silver badge
      Devil

      Re: More to the point.

      "Why do you need a bloody great digital signage on the side of a bin lorry?"

      because people will be [insert tragedy here] if they don't find out about unpopular city services, and/or the trash collection services needs the ad revenue. so they can [profiteer, retire early on a fat pension, pay people way too much money to pick up trash ...]

      yeah ti'll get justified somehow. Actually I wouldn't mind seeing that around here, as long as ad rates were cheap and I could make use of 'em - perhaps a pic of my naked posterior?

      1. First Light

        Re: More to the point.

        No such thing as too much money to pick up the trash. I suspect it's not going to the trash picker-uppers.

  2. Kubla Cant

    we're not entirely clear what rem StartCOM10Check.bat is intended to do

    I'd guess the batch file has its name in a comment at the top so you can tell what's running. But the path under which the batch is invoked in the previous line seems to start with an underscore, so that isn't actually its name.

  3. Evil Auditor Silver badge

    This is a perfectly appropriate display on a bin lorry.

  4. Warm Braw

    Bork!Bork!Bork!

    I wonder if that's the noise it makes while reversing?

  5. gypsythief
    Terminator

    Damn You, Mr Speed!

    Every time a computer goes wrong these days, I find my self involuntarily chanting "Bork! Bork! Bork!" in the fashion of some demented Dalek on it's last ever extermination.

    I would say that colleagues who have heard me think I'm going loopy, but I suspect they actually just think it's normal.

    (Icon: nearest thing to a Dalek ---------------------------------------->)

  6. Korev Silver badge
    Coat

    ...or a batch file is misbehaving.

    You mean it refused to work...

    1. Korev Silver badge
      Coat

      Sorry, that was rubbish...

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Good one. Do you mind if I recycle that joke later?

  7. Anonymous Coward
    Gimp

    The real borkage ...

    ... is a Reg hack that can't manage a riff on "My old man's a dustman". Perhaps some rhyming slang that would make even the greatest ever Cockney cringe: Dick Van Dyke.

    Come on el Reg or I'll cancel my subscription.

    1. Daedalus

      Re: The real borkage ...

      Of course the Beeb still has Joe Brown and the Bruvvers on continuous rotation.

      Us oldsters just have to face up to the fact that, like the Best of Flanders & Swan and the sayings of Horace, some cultural references don't mean much anymore.

      OTOH "I'm Forever Blowing Bubbles" topped the chart in 1919 and still held its own 50 years later. Maybe there's hope for anything after Sgt. Pepper.

      "Hold very tight please! Ding Ding!"

      1. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Re: The real borkage ...

        King James edition biblical phrases relevant to human behaviour also seem to have lost currency in the general population - and probably Shakespeare play quotes too. H2G2 and Terry Pratchett are probably less quoted outside certain circles. Describing junk food as "rat-on-a-stick" is usually casting pearls before swine.

        As the libraries are closed - a neighbour asked if my collection of 2000 books could supply her pre-teen children's current reading list. A long list of which I recognised a tiny fraction of authors or titles. "The Jungle Book" and "Alice in Wonderland" were all I could match. Several other classics were offered with a trigger warning that they were no longer considered "woke" eg "The Water Babies", "Puck of Pook's Hill". Yet the point of reading stories is to understand things beyond your current comfort zone.

        "Alice" is of course also not "woke" owing to the presumed predilections of the author.The same vociferous groups also want the BBC to remove their iconic Shakespearean themed statue of Ariel because of the sculptor's private life. The clock is striking thirteen....

      2. David 132 Silver badge
        Happy

        Re: The real borkage ...

        Funny you should mention Flanders and Swann. Here at mi casa, Mrs. David132 has decreed that this is the perfect time to have major structural work undertaken on part of the house. And for the last couple of days we've had the plasterers in. Except that in this part of the world they refer to it as "mud".

        Prompted by this new fact, I burst into a spontaneous rendition of "The Hippopotamus" (as in, "Mud, Mud, glorious mud...").

        I got two very puzzled looks. Bunch of bloody uncultured barbarians.

        1. Anonymous Coward
          Anonymous Coward

          Re: The real borkage ...

          "Bunch of bloody uncultured barbarians."

          Do the current younger generations have songs about doing everyday things? The litany of the Flanders & Swann "The gas man cameth" is still a relevant comment on bodge jobs.

          Recently I tried my hand at wallpapering to create a large Xmas decoration brick effect. The ear-worm was "When father papered the parlour". In my youth there were "Right said Fred" and "The hole in the ground" - and the UK version of "Beep, Beep" about car one-up-manship witb a bubble car.

    2. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Re: The real borkage ...

      "[...] a riff on "My old man's a dustman".

      Camden have probably sold off all their council flats. Possibly being advised to promote themselves as the new gateway to the South.

  8. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    Could be an issue with the recycle bin.

  9. Cynic_999

    Reckless council

    The council obviously spent a lot of (taxpayers) money on that huge screen. Which provides just about zero benefit and is unlikely to remain undamaged for long in such an exposed environment.

    1. Daedalus

      Re: Reckless council

      I get the feeling that any public service messages on the screen probably get equal time with commercials, supplied by the same company that provides the screen. Yet another sign that local govt. has to compromise all over the place just to save money to get the job done.

      In fact: https://www.13digital.co.uk/

      Maybe somebody should tell these bright young things that they are fatally behind the times.

  10. Anonymous Coward
    Anonymous Coward

    The only time I've seen them they were just displaying an ad for the 13Digital itself.

    They don't seem to understand auto-dimming, so they are handy to light up the dark streets on winter mornings

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      I'd bet money on them understanding what a pyramid scheme is though.

  11. Mr. Flibble

    Hmm, this wasn't a one-off occurrence - I saw one near Euston late last year, but it was too interlaced for for my crappy phone camera to take a good picture while it was moving :(

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