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.
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, …
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.
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.
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
"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?
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.
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 ---------------------------------------->)
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!"
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....
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.
"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.
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.