Never Knowingly Underborked: Double trouble at Southampton's John Lewis Double the advertising space can sometimes equal double the potential for borkage, as this freshest example of the breed demonstrates. Spied by an eagle-eyed Register reader last weekend in Southampton's West Quay shopping centre, the dual screens designed to lure punters into the John Lewis department store are instead …
This is a clear sign that companies bring in outside competence to set up the displays and ensure the content, and then let it rot because nobody on-site has a clue how it works.
When working in a retail store that has an electronics department, that is particularly credibility-destroying.
A few decades ago my local Sainsbury's store had all of its ATMs ripped out to replace them with newer models. When installed the new ATMs were shown to be running Windows 95, as they were in BSOD for months. I was so tempted to try to find the route to their IPs.
That was only surpassed in horror when I saw video from the cockpit of a Hercules during the Iraq War (IIRC). The footage showed a crew member demonstrating the chaff system, which was running on Win95. Screw that! "Incoming! Deploy chaff!" - "Erm, I can't boss, BSOD..." where the 'D' would not be limited to the OS.
I'm trawling YouTube to try to find the footage or something similar.
It was an RAF Herc, on the ground and I think it was a BBC report. The system was not integrated into the flight deck's usual array of instrumentation - it seemed almost standalone with a LCD screen, so perhaps it was a "live trial" or ancillary system, although that's not how the crew member was chatting about it IIRC.
I'll continue to search, but I've not seen anything remotely similar so far.
I'd like to think I was dreaming it, but I distinctly remember my jaw dropping so far it dislocated! (Slight hyperbole there lol.)
Weary and trying to get back from a week-long business trip. The last leg of my return flight was cancelled. Working with the airline, managed to get onto a flight to Detroit Metro, about 6 hours later than originally planned. Upon landing near midnight, the fire alarms were going off while an automated voice gently urged people to proceed to the nearest exits, calmly. Which was being completely ignored by everyone in the airport. Using the moving tramway, I saw an information screen with a Core Dump, which looked like a hard drive failure. I couldn't identify at a glance which flavor of Linux was having as good a day as the rest of us, but was somewhat impressed that they were using it for airport displays instead of Windows. Of course no OS is immune from a hardware failure.
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