Waterloo! Windows defeated, your sign is screwed. Waterloo! Promise to bork you forevermore You are never far from Windows doing a whoopsie, particularly in a digital-signage heavy hub such as the UK's London Waterloo station. Spotted by Register Michael Wood as 2020 drew to a close, today's entry in the Blue Screen of Death hall of infamy was, we think, snapped on a display to the left of the array of platform …
The station also had its turn in the international limelight and played an initially slightly awkward host to Eurostar trains until the service was handed over to St Pancras in 2007.
"And Mr Longuepée, whose name means "long sword" in English, thinks it insensitive for the station to still bear the name of the old battle at a time when Europe is meant to be fostering closer ties with its neighbours. "
As Cpl Jones would say about "cold steel" - "They don't like it up 'em!"
As for "Europe is meant to be fostering closer ties with its neighbours"
...that was in 1998, before the term "Brexit" had entered the lexicon
The last Euro Star train from Waterloo to Paris was the 18:12. Hmm why is that significant, 1812 was the year Napolean was defeated by the Russians.
Thanks Wikipedia:
The bean counters would love you for reducing the bottom line, the IT folks in charge of maintaining it would love you for reducing the number of anti-migraine pills they have to devour like Cookie Monster, managers would love that the drop in problems running the RPi signs would result in far fewer emergency call out situations that make their department look bad, & the end users would love the stability of a sign system that doesn't go titsup every time some butterfly in Outer Mongolia twitches it's left antennae a bit too far to the right. (The right one causes reboots!)
So why not replace all those Windows overkill machines with something infinitely cheaper, more stable, & more reliable like an RPi?
My, my, at Waterloo Windows did surrender
Windows - linux was defeated, you won the desktop war
Windows - promise to love you for ever more
Windows - couldn't escape if I wanted to
Windows - knowing my fate is to be with you
Windows - finally facing my Waterloo
With apologies and thanks to Bjorn Ulvaeus, Benny Andersson and Stig Anderson for the original
Yeah, many thanks. It was the incessant playing of that appallingly insipid song (and album of the same name) by the BBC that drove this Yank to discover Pirate Radio, and John Peel's Top Gear show on Radio 1 ... To this day I blame my love of Punk music on self defense from the crap pop that Auntie Beeb pumped out during the prime listening hours.
I love me a good LED matrix. Amber is the best for most displays but I like a good tricolor also (each pixel red/yellow/green with combos of orange and chartreuse). Reminiscent of days gone by... eggcrate displays on "Wheel of Fortune"... my high school's roadside sign, 80 x 16 incandescent... and my parent's first printer, the Citizen MSP(?)-10 dot-matrix -- thanks to Broderbund's The Print Shop we gave that printer a full life and an early death.
So many LED full-color / full-video signage panels are cheap affairs that fail before they're even done being installed, and usually Windows is not the culprit. But a bork is still a bork and if your display don't work, you've wasted your capital, not to mention the ongoing cost to keep the thing powered up. (There IS an off switch -- it probably has its own circuit breaker. Don't turn it back on until it's fixed or the repair tech needs power to fix it. Oh, it's not broken but the previous owner/lessee of the building took the proprietary operating software with them when the biz failed, probably due to sinking the money into that sign? Go out, find the make, model, and serial, and call up the manufacturer. Get your own copy -- cheaper than the hardware, surely!)
Blaming this on Windows is like blaming Ford for a car crash. The dodgy ATI driver crashed. Not Windows. That said, changing the Windows settings to auto-restart when an unrecoverable error occurs would probably result in no more than a few minutes down time. (Until the driver crashes again.)
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
