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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 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)
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
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?
In all seriousness, I find it frightening that Windows seems to be so ubiquitous in applications that scream out for embedded development. Why pick a Pentium processor running a multitasking operating system with all the complexities and foibles of Windows over a small, tight ARM-based system?
Development costs would be higher, but in the long run these systems would be much cheaper to mass-deploy. Have people forgotten how to write graphics code without using the Windows GDI?
I'm not talking about assembler, but surely a customised realtime operating system or something like embedded Linux, BSD, whatever would make for a much cheaper system than Windows, which ultimately isn't modular enough to do this kind of thing effectively.
#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...
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 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.
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!
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
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.
Have you ever wondered why windows XP "resets" itself for some reason. Most people just shrug it off as fault hardware or "something". I got really annoyed at it one day and looked it up.
:-)
The truth about why you get no blue screens is that by default you'll only see recoverable blue screens (although most of those are now in "Application Crashed - Send, Don't Send") the none recoverable blue screens just reset your computer. Since it's doesn't take to long to boot up most of the time you forget about it. To be honest though I've had about as many as those as I use to have blue screens (I didn't get to many).
Just though you might like to know why you don't blue screens in XP
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.