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Public BSOD Sightings?
Sanksa Wott asks: "My travels over the weekend brought me to a very popular fast food restaurant, where, in the drive-through I was greeted with, what else... a blue screen! Since BSOD's can show up almost anywhere, I thought I would ask: 'What has your funniest/most interesting/noteworthy/etc. encounter with public displays of the BSOD been like?' Note: This isn't meant to be a troll, so lets be nice ;)"
Not particularly funny, but the PATH station at 14th and 6th in the city has all these flat panel displays that are supposed to give you updates on the trains and such and news so that you're not bored standing there waiting for your train. It is FOREVER BSODed!
Quod scripsi, scripsi.
My personal favorite BSOD is the one where Bill Gates was doing a keynote showing off the new features of Windows 98 and it crashed on a massive screen in front of hundreds of people.
:-)
Priceless
I would expect such blatant racism on Fark, but on Slashdot? Mods please ban this asshole.
Something like this?
My favorite so far has been one of the local tv stations that users windows to schedule programming, and when it crashed, their channel showed a bsod for 3 hours..... :)
Personally its not God I dislike, its his fan club I cant stand (bash.org)
This one time, at band camp...
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
Where I'm from, you can go to jail for that stuff.
Cloud City Digital: DVD Production at its cheapest/finest
Over an entire weekend once the Local Access TV station programming was stopped by Norton AntiVirus' Update Definitions message.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
I hadn't seen a BSOD for THREE YEARS until I started college. The first thing I saw when I came home after the first day of classes was a BSOD on my roommate's computer. That was my first moment of real doubt that I'd find anyone else at my little community college who knew anything about Linux. The blue glow of the BSOD has become a common thing in my dorm these days from the opposite end of my side of the room.
I suppose this isn't really a public sighting, but there's very little privacy in a dorm room. Since I'm the only Linux user a the entire school, BSOD sightings are pretty common.
You're right, I wouldn't steal a car. But if it were possible, I sure as hell would download one!
Not a BSOD, but I discovered that the Warner Village Cinema automated ticket machines run NT4 when the application crashed and I was left with a desktop. Could even browse the Internet (had IE installed) before we got 'noticed' and told to use another terminal.
At least some of the airport travel monitors at O'Hare run Windows. You know, the little things with a list of arrival and departure times? Once in a while you'll walk past and see either one (sometimes an entire bank) with blue screens.
I still have more fans than freaks. WTF is wrong with you people?
At my local airport I've seen the BSOD on both the 'arriving flights' screen AND the the 'departing flights' screen.
I have seen a GPF error message on a bank ATM. Luckily the last time I saw the same bank's ATM booting, it was some other operating system.
Oh, and one of my favourites was a mouse cursor over TV station's screen. Moving randomly, doing its own business on some unseen screen.
The computer model was human high-school female type, and the human assistant was a manager.
C:\>
I made sure to snap a pic of it to remember my trip home from Hawaii.
#1. The Day of a VC visit the front plasma display at the receptionist was runing on nt 4.0 machine. BSOD....that instill trust.
#2. Buying some groceries at the local food market...scan..scan...scan....bang! MY FOOD IS FREE!!!
#3. While on vacation in Hawaii at a access kiosk. Aloha never ment so much to me, I missed home so much less at that moment.
#4. At a change counter you dump you loose change in and get green backs, ironic that it was at the same places as the above scanner. Free money, free food, I LIKE IT!
Neck_of_the_Woods
#/usr/local/surf/glassy/overhead
My coworkers and I were talking about this over lunch a few weeks ago...
One guy saw BSOD's on gate information displays at Heathrow.
Another guy saw the BSOD, and then subsequent rebooting and attempts to fix the system being displayed on a "jumbotron" type display on the Las Vegas Strip which lasted a few minutes until the tech apparently realized he should disconnect the big display...
Lets see...
I've seen a BSOD on the local access cable channel.
I've seen a BSOD on the ATM at defcon (sorta. Wasn't really blue, but it was a major crash)
The best, though by far was when I went to Target and they had 3 consoles set up side by side. X-Box on the left, PS2 in the center, and GameCube on the right. The PS2 and GameCube were working just fine, demoing Tony Hawk and StarFox I think. The X-Box on the other hand was sitting there at a Black-Screen-Of-Death that was the same as a BSOD only black. (wow! great upgrade, Microsoft! No more Blue Screen of Death!) That really says a lot about the comparative reliability of those three systems. I'm glad Target was kind enough to provide the public with this demonstration: comparison shopping it its best!
I wouldn't be worried about a BSOD there, pal.
Not when you've got a HMOD** to deal with.
** Happy Meal Of Death
Look out honey, 'cause I'm using technology; Ain't got time to make no apology
Running on Windows means commodity hardware - cheaper up front, cheaper to replace, and easier to find people to service. Same with programming it in Windows. Sure, Windows costs more than Linux, but you can throw VB or something up quick and dirty. The underlying design can be total shit because your commodity hardware has power to burn.
Many of these things could probably benefit from more carefully designed systems that don't suffer from Desktop OS issues, but unless everyone starts doing it all at once, it's more expensive and they simply aren't critical systems. Yet.
That what was all this school was for... to teach us how to solve our own problems. -- janeowit
My favorite one was pumping gas at an Amoco/BP station with the fancy new web enabled pumps. Imagine my suprise when I select my gas type, and have a big java backtrace dump all over the screen. The good news was that the pump had already recognized my selection and I was able to pump my gas. When I was done and "hung up" the handle, the screen reset itself.
7 November 2006: The day Americans realized corruption and incompetence weren't addressing 11 September 2001
I saw one of those at Pottery Barn, on their registry computers, which is like your Amazon wishlist, but just for sheets and pillows, stuff that your woman is into.
At the top-10 American university I go to, there's a big plasma screen behind the main information desk that shows a slideshow of school events.
Imagine my surprise when, one day, the screen informs me that I can get a
U.N.I.V.E.R.S.I.T.Y D.I.P.L.O.M.A
from home, courtesy of Windows Messenger!
One of the most mind boggling was a recent M$ ad campaign where they provided a "cut out" BSOD that you could tape on your monitor "in case you missed them". I could not believe the gall that would be required for M$ to taunt is own users for being so stupid as to have used a previous version of their OS.
...but an empty Amiga screen (the one that appeared when Workbench couldn't load properly in at least 1.3) being aired on a local (Oppna kanalen, Gothenburg, Sweden) TV channel. I guess this was related to the fact that they used to play old Amiga modules (as in the music files - .mod) during downtime...
May we live long and die out
I was staying at a nice brand new hotel, part of a popular chain. [Names omitted to protect the other guilty parties.] The in-room video system box had a noisy fan, so I unplugged it so I could sleep. The next day I plugged it in and saw the NT 4 boot screen on the TV. So I took a closer look at the box. It had an RJ-45 connector plugged into the wall.
So of course, I plugged my notebook into that wall jack to see what I could find. I got a DHCP address -- nice! So I looked at my default route and telnetted to it. A prompt. Some sort of IOS knock-off. Hmm, what would the password be? It took me about 3 tries -- it was the name of the company that sold the video system, which was written on the remote control. I didn't know enough about routers back then to know what to look for beyond that. I don't know if I might have been able to somehow connect to the Internet, or download their movies, or get into their reservation system. I really didn't want to get into that much trouble anyway. But just the fact that their router password was that obvious blew my mind.
Software sucks. Open Source sucks less.
...almost every time I travel I notice one on some of the screens... doesn't really reassure me when I'm about to get in a flying tin can controlled by the same people.
This isn't a BSOD, but I've watched in fascination as someone muddled with PowerPoint on the local cable access TV channel, trying to update the announcements -- to country music, nonethelessd.
One of the pay internet terminals at the airport in the twin cities. The incredibly buggy embedded microsoft OS driven internet TV dealio in the hotel room at the ritz carlton in vegas. But I've been traveling a lot lately. About 6 months ago I had an ATM bluescreen on me while it was halfway through printing my receipt. I did get my card back though.
For every annoying gentoo user, are three even more annoying anti-gentoo crybabies. Take Yosh from #Gimp for example.
Many of the pumps at Texaco stations have 4 or 5 inch lcd screen that is used for the display for such things as "Pay at the pump". After processing customer's credit information and gas grade selections the pumps displayed a looped video advertising various what not. In the midst of the loop was a BSOD that was displayed for some 30 seconds before the loop continued on.
The funniest part was that the pump itself was not blue screening. The BSOD was actually part of the looped video clip. The loop was displayed on all of Texaco's pumps with display screens, across the entire US for several months.
Lisbon built this fancy new subway/bus/train station for the Expo there about 5 years ago. I was there for a month studying, and lived near the station. They had spared no expense, it was really an impressive facility. They had these screens up all over that were really nice at the time. LCD, widscreen, and pretty large. I saw one of them working once and the rest of the time they all showed the BSOD every time I saw them.
Lasers Controlled Games!
They might sue Microsoft for damaging the reputation of McDonald's computer systems of which SCO is a major part.
people like you should be locked up!!!
I seem to recall seeing a BSOD on a local public-access cable channels that normally displays informational slides with elevator music for your viewing pleasure.
Even worse, is is now more frequently back on the Windows desktop showing a Windows Messenger spam, where it stays until someone in control happens to check the system or gets a complaint. Stupid viagra spammers are getting free airtime.
I suppose it wouldn't be completely ethical to send it one saying "Firewall your f*cking system!"
...because the damn thing kept popping up windows at random times, complaining that it hadn't been able to connect to the internet to get its updates.
Except that every place I could find a choice, I had told it to /not/ do automatic updating, to let me handle it manually. Because the machine in question was a laptop, rarely connected to anything, and when it is, I typically need /all/ the bandwidth.
I even walked through the registry by hand. I could not find whatever setting it was using to ignore me and keep trying to go out on the net, resulting in these fucking popups right when I'm trying to demonstrate some code or read a tech document.
Fuck it, I said, and uninstalled the whole damn thing. I don't care how important a piece of software /thinks/ it is, it does what I fucking tell it to do or it goes.
You cannot apply a technological solution to a sociological problem. (Edwards' Law)
Kinda reminds me of my (brief) wardialing days in the mid '80s. Managed to connect my TRS-80 Model III to a computer at a local Humpty Dumpty grocery store.
The password prompt:
Humpty 2033
enter password:
1st try: humpty -> failed
2nd try: humpty 2033 ->failed
3rd try: 2033 ->success!
A
my bank's ATMs greet me with a BSOD at least once a month. generally, the w2k machines are at least smart enough to reboot themselves in, say, five to ten minutes; but at least once (with me) it registered a transaction it had /not/ completed physically. bad, bad, bad...
It's better to be the foot on the boot than the face on the pavement. ~~ tkx Kadin2048
The famous Bill Gates crash video (1.63 MB)
-metric
-matt
At a T-Mobile wireless store in Denver last summer, one of the flatscreens which normally showed their animated demo/whatever was blank, except for the monitor's screensaver bouncing slowly around the display - yes, you guessed it: "NO SIGNAL"...
Perfectly Normal Industries
At a "future of technology" display at Epcot Center: the future is blue
In the San Diego airport: your flight is now... cancelled
In an interesting correlation, both of these pictures were taken on trips for the ACM World Programming Contest (different years), which made them even more relevant, since it leads me to think about good problem solving techniques.
Our Cable TV Station 15 years ago ( e-gad ) would show guru meditation #'s quite often...
2. Ordered tickets to the movies over the net, went to the kiosk at the cinema, put my CC card in the machine, BOOM, PC rebooted, looks like it's based on OS/2 though not NT.
09F91102 no, 455FE104 nope, F190A1E8 uh-uh, 7A5F8A09 that's not it, C87294CE no. Ah! 452F6E403CDF10714E41DFAA257D313F.
(Was postedin a prevoius article, but it still applys! :)
Re:Windows ATMs (Score:5, Interesting) [ Windows ATMs by 2005 ]
by @madeus on 2003-09-19 10:56:00 7003951
Yeah we've had them for 6+ years (surprised this is news to others). I've seen them BSOD, ask for a login, and the one round the corner from me had a DHCP expiry/conflit alert on it for 3 months. You'd think SOMEONE would be arsed to fix it!
(Still worked though, but it put other people off using it, meaning I didn't have to queue to use it).
Lots of them are color and have shockwave flash type intro's.
The underground here in London (well, really DLR, the Docklands Light Railway) has ticket machines that run OS/2, apparently in French or German though (definately not English!). They often die at early hours of the morning (~6) until rebooted remotely.
end post
gotta love them bsods !
FIRST Robotics uses a VB app for the scoring updates during the competitions. Seeing one with a VB runtime DLL error of some sort wasn't uncommon back when I participated in them.
X(7): A program for managing terminal windows. See also screen(1).
I've seen an Amiga crash screen (guru meditation) on my parents' cable TV service.
Hail Eris, full of mischief...
E pluribus sanguinem
Ok, it wasn't a BSOD, but the other day I was coming home from work and one of the fancy new BART ticket machines had a Windows desktop (with icons for IE, Outlook, Recycle Bin etc.) instead of the ticket issuing application and an error dialog saying something about being unable to start a service.
Upstairs on the "techy" floor. I think it's the future stuff or something. There's quite a few random exhibits. And two BSODs and one POST failure (Press F1 to continue).
The Imperial War Museum also got a BSOD in the how-dangerous-and-smelly-submarines-are section.
A few years ago, a friend arrived to leave from DEN (Denver International Airport, sometimes referred to as "DIA" - they call it "International" because it's in Canada, or so it seems after the drive). On arrival at the concourse, he went to check his flight status, and saw that every monitor, as far as the eye could see, was BSOD. Quite the upgrade advertisement, eh?
The info system for the Danish rail-system runs windows. One of the screens shows the arrival times, and one day it also noted a print job, that was stalled, because the ink jet printer had run out of paper.
...
I saw this around 2 pm, and the warning was from 9 am. The day before
We do not live in the 21st century. We live in the 20 second century.
Just this past weekend, my group of engineer friends and I were walking from bar to bar, passed an ATM, and we all laughed our butts off that it was BSOD'd. I have also seen the same thing at the Fleet bank ATM at 6th and Washington in Hoboken also. Must be something about the town...
I saw a passport photo machine here in gothenburg at the railway station which had a display on the outside. It showed a single xterm window with (root logged in) over the familiar grey fishbone pattern that you get when you run X without a window manager. Too bad that it didnt have any keyboard it could have been interesting to kill a few minutes there.
I worked at a very large financial institution in Boston. In the early morning hours, I would walk by the area where the Wizard Kings of the NT server ops group sat. They had a 30" TV bolted to the wall / ceiling that displayed their server monitoring status (openView I believe) for everyone to see at glance. At least 2 times a week it was hanging on a BSOD. After it was pointed out to them, they fixed it by scheduling a nightly reboot.
"Hatred is the coward's revenge for being intimidated"
To this day, I'm afraid to pull out $200. I get $180 or $220.
fool.
>man woman
>segfault (core dumped)
On the freeway near my house one of those Ditech bill boards that have a giant computer display was showing the BSOD. I was tempted to break into the bill board and install linux or reboot it and run quake on it..
"Those who make peaceful revolution impossible, make violent revolution inevitable" - JFK
I went to get some money out the ATM machine and it had a BSOD! It made me feel real confident with my banks monetary system. I now use B of A. :-)
-David
(Yes, I switched to B of A for unrelated reasons, but it makes the story better).
There. Now go play some cool javascript games!
the really huge multi-panel display outside of toys 'r us in times square.
I vacationed in Madrid this summer, and one of the metro lines had LCD screens in the metro cars to show news and advertisements. Imagine my amusement when I walked in the car and saw that all the screens had BSODs. Too funny.
Recently I was staying in a fairly nice hotel and was contemplating watching one of those video on demand movies in my room. I selected one, and when it should have gone to play it a BSOD appeared for a split second and then the system rebooted. I decided to go to bed instead feeling plenty entertained for the evening. Luckily they didn't charge me for the entertainment.
I think it was running NT or 2K. For some reason I don't remember. It was a late night after a long day at a conference. The reboot seemed different then normal, so it was customized and not out of the box.
"Anything is possible with enough programmers, time and pizza." (Substitute caffeine for time as needed.)
The nice expensive new ticket machines at the Millbrae station do that all the time.
It really sucks when you're trying to catch a train, too. Stupid Windows NT boxes.
All the money they spent, and they got stuck with Windows NT. heh.
When taking BART, also note the "elevator status" screens in the agent's booth. Quite often you'll see an ODBC:Ping Timeout error scroll across instead of the correct information.
Looking at the BSOD again I was wondering if that is Win9x or an NT platform. It looks like Win9x to me, but I could be wrong. It would seem a very poor business idea to run a system like that on Win9x. NT is bad enough, but Win9x is worse.
There was that computerized car a while back that was going to run Windows 98 (or was it ME?). I thought that was a very bad idea too. Unfortunately I don't remember any of the details on that one.
"Anything is possible with enough programmers, time and pizza." (Substitute caffeine for time as needed.)
Not a BSOD, but still funny. After the power flickers on and off at my school, we have entire computer labs all simultaneously running scandisk. If you sit at the back, you can see which ones finish first, and which ones finish last. You take the ones that finish last, and check them for software installed by students, and defrag.
Mod "Overrated" instead of replying "I disagree with you," you coward.
On my way through the Minneapolis / Saint Paul International airport I saw the blue screen of death on two different occasions. Hope Windows 2000 isnt installed on any of the planes.
Dave
Needless to say, I didn't try to insert my card. :-)
I saw a BSOD on one of those do-it-yourself checkout machines at a local supermarket. Because they need to have someone monitoring each group of checkout stations in order to prevent shoplifting, they noticed it pretty quickly.
Once upon a time, a friend ask me to pick her at the airport, here in Costa Rica there is one large Airport in Alajuela (Near the capitol, San Jose), and there, all the TVs that show the arrivals and departures has a BSOD on them...
:S
The plane take about a half an hour to arrive, and the BSOD was there before I came, and after I leave...
"Life is wasted on the Living" is something Rimmer said on Red Dwarf, not something out of the late, great Douglas Adams.
Would be fitting now, though...
Someone took a picture of one of the hotels, I believe it was the MGM Grand, and it had bluescreened on it's big marquee. Also, I've seen them at the onscreen arrival/departure screens in DFW Airport on numerous occasions.
I used to think Peter Shipley was cool. Then I aged past 16.
One of my friends and I got talking about this the other day. The best one we came up with was one of his teachers was driving down the Vagas strip and one of the large billbords BSOD'd. He almost got in an accident he was laughing so hard.
Another story, though not a true BSOD. Our cable tv guide station here at Michigan Tech desplayed and error and asked to be rebooted for about a week before anything was done about it. So no one knew what was on and had to look at windows errors for a week.
The "Push buttons to select the car battery for you" terminal in the local Wal-Mart once spent a few days displaying a Win98-esque dialog box reporting some error. Being an embedded app, there was no mouse, and none of the keys were Enter, so it was effectively wedged. My dad and I found it highly amusing.
__CmdrTHAC0__
In Soviet Russia, Spanish Inquisition doesn't expect YOU!!
My cable company's guide channel used to crash a LOT with the Amiga guru meditation message (I never had an Amiga myself and so my biggest expossure to the machine was its error message, long after they had fallen out of comercial favour)
:)
since then they've been bought by cablevision (years back now) and I've switched to satellite
You, sir, truly deserve a +1 Funny or three.
GENERAL PROTECTION FAULT
I really got frightened when I last time went to a bank terminal and I saw a Windows error message. I couldn't figure out how to reset the thing, no matter how hard I tried... It was really scary. I couldn't get a single cent and had to wait a lot of time until I got some money to "drink up". :-)
I was at the AUS airport waiting one night, and apparently the luggage carosel and incoming flight time monitors they have down in baggage claim were on win2k boxes that were blue screening.
I remember looking up at them and pointing out to my friend, "Look, that one just crashed" and then watching many very alarmed looking people who were waiting for passengers try to figure out which flight I was pointing at . . .
Is a Linux bootup screen considered blue? Maybe a dark shade.
Anyway, I was at a bar, and saw one of those bar-top-touch-screen game things lock up and reboot. It was Linux. I didn't get to see much, the messages scrolled by really quickly before the display program kicked in.
One month's holiday, four airports, about a dozen train stations...
3 14_img
Verona train station: BSOD on a ticket info machine.
http://ajft.org/photos/2003_09_15/203-0
Heathrow airport: stuck at the BIOS and "Press F1 to continue" on a PC in customs and imigration - no photo, cameras forbidden!
Heathrow airport: Windows pop-up on *every* screen above the imigration counters, "Free something!!!"
Softdrink vending machine, london: "Error writing COM1: "
When my wife and I went to Vegas, one of the casinos had a chicken you could play tic-tac-toe against. Basically, the chicken had been trained to peck whatever spot on the wall of its cage was lit up, so you were really playing the computer. Anyway, if you beat the chicken, you won like $50,000.
:-)
When I played, the game blew up on a runtime error. The chicken's assistant had to restart the game from Windows. It wasn't a BSOD, but it made me feel better after losing to a chicken.
human://billy.j.mabray/
"Every good system has a backup." -- Dale Hanchey
went to visit my gran there and while strolling down the corridor every tv screen i passed was no longer displaying useful hospital information, but had a lovely BSOD to help everyone who walked by.
heh!
"if i'd known it was harmless, i'd have killed it myself"
[Someone who's frustrated with Linux boxes hanging all the time.]
Sure I could add the "I've seen the BSOD on airport flight notice boards", but instead I thought I'd share my favorite linux crash story.
:-(
I was on an American Airlines flight from Boston to London a couple of years ago. The plane was an Airbus 330 and each seat (even in cattle class) was equipped with a personal entertainment system with dozens of films, TV channels, games, etc. Given that you could choose to watch any movie/tv channel you wanted and pause, ffw, and so on, I became suspicious that the thing seemed a lot like a TiVO. Sure enough, my entertainment system became unresponsive and, after a minute or two, rebooted itself. There, on the 5" LCD in the seatback in front of me, was our favorite Penguin! Unfortunately, it rebooted too quickly for me to catch any of the specs.
Sadly, the Boston to London route now uses Boeing 777s and it's back to the film loops. So much for progress...
Surfing the net at a kiosk or a movie theatre sometimes I have seen them at libraries for book lookup.
I was checking out one day after doing a little shopping and the POS unit crashed. It was a pretty touchy-feely system with each item scanned bringing up a picture of the item.
Then zzpt - win 2k blue screen. Had to wait for the tech to come and reboot the system before i could pay.
This was one of the biggest grocery chains in Australia. Cheers Bill.
Remember, it takes 42 muscles to frown and only 4 to pull the trigger of a sniper rifle.
I went to an ATM from the Rabobank, a Dutch bank, and on the display I saw WinNT4.0 had crashed. Not a safe thought.
No encryption can withstand the power of the Lucky Guess.
no virtual memory
One of them is one of those "Virtual rollercoasters" where they put everyone in a hydraulic-powered set of theatre-seats, in front of a huge IMAX-like screen.
The coaster was neat, but it was running WINDOWS 3.1. It crashed. Biggest BSOD I've ever seen. Filled nearly my whole field of vision. Had to wait for it to reboot. Started over.
Basically we went on the ride twice because of that. Now, I DON'T "DO" ROLLERCOASTERS, and me & the wife wer both sick afterwards. We laid down on the floor of the promenade. Eventually some statues came to life and started battling and we woke up in the front row. It was neat.
I like stories.
-Clio
Karma: Bad (mostly from not giving a fuck)
Blog: http://clintjcl.wordpress.com
What more of a reason do you thick-headed microserfs need to switch to Mac and/or Linux??????
but still rendered the kiosk unusable:
Pic 1
Pic 2
This is a "big blue bus" kiosk in Santa Monica, CA.
At the airport a few months ago (Terminal 2), while waiting to pick up my fiancee's family from a trip, I noticed that the 'Arrivals' ticker was obscured by a giant 'Dr Watson' popup dialog.
While not quite a BSOD, it was up there for over 30 minutes while I watched, annoyed, that I couldn't see whether their flight arrived or not (saw the flight number, but couldn't see its status).
Sadly I didn't bring a camera.
You can accomplish anything you set your mind to. The impossible just takes a little longer.
Anybody knows of a website with public BSODs ?
If not, I'm gonna start one tonight !
The 14th St. PATH station has had a blue screen since at least 1996...at least it's stable. Other BSODs encountered were... Las Vegas (McCarran International) had these gate screens which are supposed to tell you which flights depart from which gates. All BSOD'd.
At my fraternity, we all have jerseys with our letters on them and a name printed on the back. The name is usually something funny relating to your personality or something stupid you've done.
:P
We named one guy BSOD because of the unreliability of his machine.
Yeah, we're geeks. Oh well.
Our local channels use windows systems to display
their content, which is usually framed by text
announcements/ads/etc. A couple years ago it was
not uncommon for the system to BSOD and leave it
on the channel right through the weekend. This is
in NH.
Then about 2 weeks ago, I and all my fellow travellers were treated with a little tidbit of information, namely that the address of the screens above the platform at one of Oslo's underground stations was 34H on one side and 36H on the other, and that both monitors appeared to have been properly aligned, if the test-pattern and circular target-like patterns were to be believed.
Which is all nice and well, but I was really hoping for it to tell me which trains would be approaching....
SIGBUS @ NO-07.308
My towns cable access channel BSOD's every weekend. Not once. Not twice. EVERY weekend.
Not the worst of the BSODs, but bad enough for these sorts of purposes. I am curious, however, why Windows was waiting for the close program dialog box in the first place.
"Never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity." -- Hanlon's Razor
Over at the Las Vegas Hilton, on the Star Trek Experience, there was an interactive touchscreen display with a sign proclaiming, "The Future is Here."
It's a BSOD.
Looks like the future is doomed.
Solomon K. Chang
"I am Drunk of Borg. Resistance is Floor Tile."
"Twice half-assed makes an ass whole." --Solomon K. Chang
All Famous Player FastLane ticket booths use Windows 95. I saw one crashed to the desktop. It didn't have IE or much else installed, but I could still use the desktop.
Frink: Nice try floyd, but you were designed for scrubbing, and scrubbing is what you shall do.
Target's baby shower kiosk runs NT and when the app crashed I had control of the desktop. Of course it was logged in as administrator. So I changed the password and desktop backround to one of the uglier default backrounds and locked the desktop.
I'm not drunk, I just have a speech impediment. And a stomach virus. And an inner ear infection.
I was too curious to just let it be - I punched a couple of keys on the keypad and it wrote the digits I typed, but after 1-2 seconds I guess some watchdog kicked in and the thing blanked and flashed then showed an out-of-service notice.
We Team OS/2 fanatics used to brag about how much more reliable OS/2 was than DOS or Windows. In fact, we bragged, OS/2 was so reliable that most banks ran their ATMs on it.
Then one day, while I was traveling, I tried to get some cash from an ATM, and it crashed, swallowing my ATM card. So there I was, far from home, with no cash and no ATM card, and the OS/2 crash screen added insult to injury.
Then I realized that banks probably used OS/2 in their ATMs because that's what they were offered to connect the ATMs to their IBM mainframes. It was around that time that I switched to Windows 95.
Windows doesn't crash less, but at least its crashes are not unexpected.
The ones at Minneapolis International run Windows 95! Windows 95!!!! They're constantly crashing. I wonder which H-1B suggested that one.
Actually, many of them do, for a variety of reasons.
I used to work installing and managing a FIDS (Flight Information Display System) at Toronto's Pearson International Airport. Several pictures of the FIDS systems I used to manage are in those BSoD picture pages that a couple of other posters have mentioned.
The company that wrote the FIDS had precisely one programmer. He was excellent, but the company was crap, constantly over-extending him and making ridiculous promises to airports and their stuff.
Working with FIDS systems requires a lot of reverse-engineering. Airports don't like to change their technology; they're even more conservative than banks. (Consider the potential real-world implications: two planes colliding in mid-air over a city.)
Consequently, things are old, and usually the people who wrote them didn't document very well, or the documentation can't be found, or the systems are completely proprietary. Then there's the almost weekly cycle of airport amalgamations, airline mergers, fuelling contractor changes, etc. The IT department has to run around patching existing stuff together to try to keep up.
There was one VAX system in the GTAA (Toronto airport administration) headquarters building which, according to legend, hadn't been touched in 6 years because no one knew if it would come back up on its own after a reboot.
You can imagine in this environment that people are loathe to give you a space on a hub to sniff records off an airside server. Cut off one pin and serial is a one-way street; it's pretty hard for an outside contractor's computer systems to screw things up.
The displays around the terminals tended to be ANSI color dumb terminals all driven off serial data. Very reliable, but very hard to upgrade. Data feeds for new FIDS systems typically have to come from several sources, all of different data formats, and be merged.
At Pearson, we had three data streams for three terminals. Two of them came from one source, down a serial line, simultaneously but with completely different data formats. A third was yet another completely different format, provided by an airline which would change the format of the data at a whim.
Our software to read this stuff had to be reading directly off the serial port with direct hardware access (needed to be able to make the weird handshaking requirements on some systems). The programmer who wrote it did so before Windows NT, and certainly before Linux hit it big, and didn't have time to port it.
The other big issue, of course, is the computers themselves. Arrivals, departures and gate monitors frequently receive the same data streams and therefore have to be independenly configured on what to display and what to ignore. Not to mention the internal stuff for fuelling and maintenance companies, baggage throwers, food services, cargo flights, etc. Almost all of these displays are driven by PCs which are usually stuffed into horrible places - ceilings, under desks, janitor closets. Half the runaround of maintaining these things is actually getting four security escorts (even if you have all the security clearances in the world!) to let you into some room somewhere where you THINK there might be a computer where you THINK the power supply fan might be failing because you keep on having vmm.vxd crashes.
You'll note that a vmm.vxd BSoD is usually caused by a hardware failure. In my not inconsequential experience with public display computers, usually caused by overheating because some idiot decided to store his large collection of empty Tim Horton's coffee cups in the little space behind the mysterious computer under his desk. Or because of the massive dustbunnies which accumulate in a suspended ceiling 25 feet above the International Departures concourse.
If you had the opportunity to do the whole thing over from scratch, of course, you'
Fire and Meat. Yummy.
Teresa Nielsen Hayden, over at Naking Light , reminisces about multiple BSOD's at the subway station under the World Trade Center:
"The first time I felt like normal life was starting to come back again was when they got the N and R running on their old route, but it's meant we've been commuting through (past? under?) a mass gravesite twice a day. (That was another marker: The first time I didn't smell that burnt-plastic reek as soon as the doors opened at Canal Street.)
"At first and for a long time thereafter, the station was full of heavy upright timber supports, spaced closely together, connected to each other by 4x4 cross-ties and heavy hardware fastenings. They looked like the bottom half of a singularly unfortunate grove. On the platforms on both sides of the station, big hand-lettered signs said DON'T STOP HERE, to keep subway conductors who'd driven that route for decades from automatically making the stop.
"After they'd gotten the roof shored up level again--that downward bulge was profoundly disturbing--the spookiest thing was the farecard machines. They stayed on the whole time. As the months went by, their internal computers crashed, one by one, changing their previous displays to the blue screen of [word left out]. A few times when I passed through the overhead lights were dimmed, and the station was lit by the bluish glow of those screens."
Beneath the marble columns and stacks of books, manuscripts, the Gutenburg Bible, the Jefferson Collection, there is a group of Microsoft Window P.C. Kiosks with a sign above it indicating "Information." When we arrived, _all_ of the P.C.s were showing that sky blue screen with white text indicating a fatal exception of some sort.
Priceless! I even have a short video of this and I've written to my Senator with my concern that too much government information was being stored in an undocumented proprietary format.
It had seemedly hung too, so I didn't get to see the other software drag itself up, no fair!
I've seen a BSOD on the local access cable channel.
Our Local Access Channel had a Win95 BSoD left up over the weekend, as if no one would/could come in and just reboot the damn thing.
Story: my Uncle was an TV/Radio Electrical Technician in Upstate NY during the 50's and 60's, highly skilled and sought after for troubleshooting. According to my mom, he was watching a station where he worked, and he noticed something miniscule in the reception. He called up the on-site technician, asked about Obscure Part Whosis-Dash-Whatever That Needed a Full Diagnosis To Test and said that it was starting to fail and needed to be replaced.
Picture cleared up after said part was replaced.
Mod Karma -1: I sed bad wurds. If I cep my mouf shut, I wud be at riyses.
Why go out to find BSOD's when you can already enjoy them from the comfort of your home? ;-)
I'd rather be a conservative nutjob than a liberal with no nuts and no job.
...at the corner of Las Vegas Blvd and Tropicana.
after dark on a friday night during Networld+Interop one year, and the two giant LCDs screens show nothing but the infamous moving hand and "Press Ctrl-Alt-Del to login".
I saw a BSOD on the arriving terminals display at an airport terminal once last year.
Another guy saw the BSOD, and then subsequent rebooting and attempts to fix the system being displayed on a "jumbotron" type display on the Las Vegas Strip
Not quite the scale of a Jumbotron, but there's an outfit in Dallas' (wannabe) "Little Asia" area that has a large LED display, visible from I-35E, that frequently seems a bit messed up. Finally, one day, I found out why. The top right corner of a Windows 95-style error message was displayed... just the top of the exclamation point triangle, plus enough of the other graphic elements to make its origin pretty certain.
I think the outfit is called "EasyComm", but that name doesn't show up at that location at Superpages.com. They sell phones and security systems. Yeah, I'm *sure* to buy a security system from someone who 1) isn't listed in the phone book and 2) can't configure their own hardware.
Stressed? Me? Of course not. Stress is what a rubber band feels before it breaks, silly.
I was working on an ATM at a local Casino and The one next to the one I was fixing it(replacing the modem... I don't work on atms in general) BSOD'd. I punched a key, and it just went to an NT4 desktop, kinda funny on the little like 3.5 inch screen.
Then the guy who had to stand there and watch as I worked on the ATM (you know, working around 40 grand and stuff like that) just opened it up, pulled out the keyboard that was just sitting in it's lower cabinet, and selected the atm software from the start menu... sorta scary when I realize what the money stuff's being run on haha.
"Oh... There it goes... my brain stopped" - Ed from Ed, Edd, and Eddy.
Times square! The display on the Morgan Stanley Bldg on 47th st once had a pop up dialog box that said the machine was out of memory and the process had crashed. The whole side of the building had a huge MS windows crash displayed on it.
There were classes all over the hotel. In the conference room areas, they had 15" TFT screens with daily events listen on them attached to pillars. One of these was BSOD'd for the entire WEEK. I saw lots of geeks walk past and chuckle at that one. I know I did.
There was another BSOD'd information screen in the New Orleans airport on our way home. Not quite as entertaining though.
Hi-Technical Excellent Taste and Flavor!
The entire branch was up and down for hours. I could not get access to my account. Each tellers Win2K workstation was down, including the servers I've since moved my money to a different bank.
Best BSOD was the one I saw in Las Vegas that was one of the HUGE MGM Grand bilboards that had a blue screen on it.
Install it on your computer at work if you have the permissions
Needle Nardle Noo
We use Windows Media Player 9 and a special 1 meg upload cablemodem to put remote events on our cable TV system. On the first day we had this system up and running, we were all monitoring it very closely from a room next to the headend. It was going great until that wonderful Windows messenger popup ad regarding Penis Enlargement took WMP out of full screen mode. It took me about a minute to get into the headend and go fullscreen again.
Several years ago I saw several BSOD's on slot machines in a Reno hotel/casino.
Nothing better than those HUGE Jumbotrons or plasma screens with the BSOD. THe best one was on the HUGE jumbo tron on Paris, also saw it on plasma screens above slot machines in Luxor..
How about while installing win98 and a blue screen happens on the page where it trys to show how reliable the os is.
I was hoping it would start spitting out 100 dollar bills....
Can't remember what the actual error was.
If you don't pray in my school, I won't think in your church.
At O'Hare airport, I was waiting for a friends flight to arrive. Standing outside the secured area, I noticed that there were two metallic columns on either side of the exit where arriving passengers exited the gateways.
There was a lot of cross-traffic and, every time someone would walk close enough to the metallic columns, it would speak in a loud voice 'This is a secured area- please step away'. It seemed as though it was set a little too sensitive because it was more or less repeating itself constantly- despite the fact that no one was actually heading directly towards or even that close to the 'secured area'.
Suddenly, It said 'This is a sec-sec-sec-sec-sec-sec' and caught itself in a loop. This loop continued for probably 5 minutes and, finally, there was silence. After a couple minutes of complete silence, I suddenly heard, larger than life, the Windows startup sound emanating from the columns.
That's ok, Jesus likes me anyway.
Caught this one in Heathrow on my way back from Paris last April.
t
I'm not sure if they still use windows or not (I've moved abroad and haven't been back lately), but the wal-mart I used to shop at used windows for the displays in their music/electronics section. They were attempting to let you scan the barcode of an album or dvd and then showing advertising clips for it. It never worked. It was always on the BSOD. There's no sign of these screens at Asda, Wal-mart's subsidiary in the UK.
A *giant* screen above a casino near New York New York. Thousands of square feet of BSOD. I did not have a camera. :(
The latest Slashdot meme.
Now, this was not a blue screen of death-- it was some other OS that I couldn't immediately identify (probably a special designed embedded system) But anyway, I was on an American airlines flight from New York to London Heathrow. In the back of every seat they have these little touch-screens. This is where they show the in-flight entertainment, and they alos have this cool little real-time map showing the plane's position and heading. The in-flight entertainement was all over, and we were passing over Ireland. The map of the plane over the atlantic ocean hadn't been very interesting, but now we were passing over land, and as it was too dark to see anything out the windows, many people were watching our progress on the little computerized map, myself included. As we would pass near cities it would show them as red dots on the map, and every so often it would update and show a new set of city names at a different zoom level. Suddenly the screen glytched. The bottom half went dark, and the top half was filled with small distorted images of the map we had just seen, and there was a gigantic blocky spread-pixeled text error message wrapped a few times around the screen. I recognized it immediately! The flight map was being drawn to the screen in non-standard planar mode-X VGA, and an error message had forced the screen back into standard VGA screen 13 -- I knew this only because I have spent years programming mode-X VGA DOS games, and I know a spread-pixeled error message when I see one ;)
The screen remained frozen that way for a minute or two, then the system reobooted, and when through a short startup sequence that I do not remember very well (this was over a year ago). What I do remember is that it was not Window, nor Mac, nor Linux, nor DOS. It did identify itself, and gave a version number, but I failed to write it down and forgot it :P
And a few minutes later the in-flight map resumed as if nothing had happened.
Hey, you didn't mention the fact that it was mounted sideways. I guess that the installer must have been a little high when he installed it in the first place! ;-)
What I don't understand is why people would use Windows 9x on something that needs to be reliable. I know that NT/2000/XP can have BSOD's too and NT/2000 would be best of those three. But under an NT environment, BSOD usually means hardware, filesystem or driver problems. Under a Win9x environment, it could be all kinds of things ranging from a BIOS setting, to viruses, memory management issues, limited GDI or even a flaky app. Over a long period of time, a Win9x system can go downhill fast.
I've seen Win9x BSOD's on blood pressure checking machines, kiosks and other places where reliability is important.
If this isn't Troll what is ?
Gates should have used BSOD Properties durring his presentation, this shows how to change the color of your BSOD.
Sig: I stole this sig.
2 pics of a DOS read/write error on a french ATM here
Southwest Airline Ticket kiosks use win2k on them and i ran into one that had it's introductory text lines were superimposed upon each other! The watchdog kept it from running so i didnt get to see if the rest of the app was running ok. The attendent that finished reloading the adjacent kiosk with ticket blanks went to it, tried to reboot it and promptly got herself into a bind with the BIOS setup showing on the display. She nearly panicked when i stepped in and guided her thru getting out of the BIOS and into the boot.
:p
SwAir has more than a few of such kiosks at Houston and are great to check in and get your boarding passes without getting into lines. The ticklish part's getting to a working kiosk!.
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
You should have locked down the boxes for them. Perhaps a BIOS and Admin password? After setting the home page to goatse, of course. ;)
-Looking for a job as a materials chemist or multivariat
A few weeks ago I went to a bar with some friends from work. Walking down the street, we stopped at an ATM to get some cash. When we came out a couple of hours later, the ATM's screen was showing an OS/2 crash dump. It made us mildly paranoid, considering we'd just used it.
I was in the Phoenix Airport and I saw a BSOD over the security area... I snapped a quick pic with my digital camera, only to be apprehended by the Security folks. They confiscated my camera, and I promised them that I could delete the picture if they'd give me the camera back. So I did, and reluctantly they let me have it back.
That BSOD almost cost me my camera - ugh!
Don't think that a small group of dedicated individuals can't change the world. It's the only thing that ever has.
I've never had anybody doubt the authenticity -- a couple of times the cashier tried to give me three bucks too much change (thought it was a five).
One more note on two dollar bills: strippers like them.
I've seen a BSOD at a Sonics game. What makes it funny in my opinion is that the big three of Microsoft frequent the games (Ballmer, Gates, Allen). I have the BSOD right next to their pictures :). Actually, on Tuesday Ballmer sat in my row again. I waved at him, but I don't know if he saw me. He may have been freaked out because I was staring at him the whole game (we lost horribly, so I didn't miss much).
Andrew
A local public access TV station uses NT to manage its video feed. Fairly frequently, it will broadcast a BSOD during the weekend. Apparently the station is completely automated during off hours, since the blue screen will stay there for a while, sometimes until Monday morning. Their audio feed must be separately managed, because it keeps running.
I recently bought this shirt, and today at school, while wearing it, my computer experienced a BSOD. I just thought it was funny that my shirt and my computer said the same thing.