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London's BT Tower Broadcasted Windows 7 Error Message Over the Weekend (theregister.co.uk)

Posted by BeauHD on from the technical-difficulties dept.

An anonymous reader quotes a report from The Register: Generally a system crash is a private affair, but the BT Tower, one of London's tallest landmarks, spent much of the weekend displaying a Windows error message in a very public fashion. The building, originally known as the Post Office Tower, is famed for both its revolving top floor and, more recently, for the banks of LEDs at its summit that act as a very prominent billboard. Sadly for BT over the weekend it was showing what looks very like a Windows 7 error screen. "Choose operating system to start or press TAB to select a tool: (Use arrow keys to highlight your choice and then press ENTER)."

23 of 139 comments (clear)

  1. Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by kriston · · Score: 3, Interesting

    The idea that massive public electronic displays like these aren't monitored by a human 24/7 is preposterous.

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    Kriston

    1. Re: Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by nullchar · · Score: 2

      Do humans monitor anything? I thought with everyone touting meh neural networks as "AI", that humans are out of the picture.

    2. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by Jeremi · · Score: 4, Insightful

      The idea that massive public electronic displays like these aren't monitored by a human 24/7 is preposterous.

      Why bother? They're already monitored by dozens or hundreds of humans 24/7, most of which have cell phones and many of which will happily upload a photo of any malfunction to one or more of the major social-networking sites. All they really need to do is monitor social media for the appropriate keywords, and take action when they see posts appear.

      (On a more serious note: shouldn't a massively expensive electronic display like this have some sort of fail-safe mechanism that would do something reasonable in the event of a system crash? Even the lowly intersection stop-light has a watchdog that will automatically put it into blinking-red-stop-sign-emulator-mode when it detects a malfunction)

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    3. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by dwywit · · Score: 3, Insightful

      A heartbeat service from another computer would have sufficed to send a message to someone.

      --
      They sentenced me to twenty years of boredom
    4. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by Jeremi · · Score: 3, Insightful

      When this board fails, people post gibberish on social media. No one is going to die or be maimed. I don't mind discussion - people should be interested in the world around them - but lets not lose our minds.

      Yes, that's probably the answer -- that nobody really cares enough to implement a watchdog mechanism.

      Still, if I was one of the developers writing the sign software, I'd be embarrassed enough that I'd spend the extra time to make sure this failure mode never happens again (at least not on devices running my software).

      --


      I don't care if it's 90,000 hectares. That lake was not my doing.
    5. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by bobby · · Score: 2, Interesting

      The idea that massive public electronic displays like these aren't monitored by a human 24/7 is preposterous.

      It could be that someone who could have done something about it had noticed but let it stay that way. Maybe general cynicism, dislike of Yankee OSes, thought it was funny, maybe they wanted to switch to Linux but the boss forbade it.

    6. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by bickerdyke · · Score: 2

      I bet those Billboards have a watchdog, too.

      Implemented as application to Autostart along with win. What could possibly go wrong using a pure desktop OS for every other scenario...

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      bickerdyke
    7. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by AmiMoJo · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It's probably not a software failure. More likely the PC running the software has been left on in the corner, gathering dust for years and years until it overheated and died. RAM failed, HDD crashed, cosmic ray flipped a bit in the CPU somewhere.

      --
      const int one = 65536; (Silvermoon, Texture.cs)
      SJW, n: "Someone I don't like, and by the way I'm a fuckwit" - AC
    8. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by stealth_finger · · Score: 2, Interesting

      When traffic lights fail, car accidents can happen.

      When this board fails, people post gibberish on social media. No one is going to die or be maimed. I don't mind discussion - people should be interested in the world around them - but lets not lose our minds.

      Apart from the guy that gets rear ended by the person distracted by the giant gaping rear end?

      --
      Wanna buy a shirt?
      https://www.redbubble.com/people/stealthfinger/shop?asc=u
    9. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by fgouget · · Score: 3, Insightful

      It could be that someone who could have done something about it had noticed but let it stay that way. Maybe general cynicism, dislike of Yankee OSes, thought it was funny, maybe they wanted to switch to Linux but the boss forbade it.

      Or they're not going to be paid overtime or even get a thanks if they come over the week-end.

    10. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      Why? Other than a bit of embarrassment, what major negative impact has result from this incident which would necessitate continuous monitoring?

    11. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by kenh · · Score: 2

      So your plan to reduce problems with the billboard computer is to reboot it, introducing infinitely more opportunities for a problem during startup?

      Let sleeping dogs lie - as public as that tower is, do you really think the people responsible were unaware of the problem for any real length of time? I've seen similar errors in other public places, and the issues persist typically because the computer that needs to be rebooted is secured somewhere hard for an average worker to get to, requiring a key or tool in possession of someone with more important responsibilities than reboot the signage computer.

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      Ken
    12. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by apoc.famine · · Score: 2

      It probably did. It's just that that person left two years ago, and they didn't have a functioning transition plan so the contact email was never updated.

      I think this has been the case at every place I've ever worked. When you don't document systems and you don't design a regular review process of those systems and documentation, things get lost. Very few places do a good job documenting business processes.

      --
      Velociraptor = Distiraptor / Timeraptor
    13. Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? by thegarbz · · Score: 2

      The picture literally says "Windows Boot" at the top. The BIOS's job is long done.

  2. Befitting by quax · · Score: 4, Funny

    Sign of the Brexit times.

  3. Just stupid by Gravis+Zero · · Score: 4, Insightful

    It's a simple fact that if you want a rock solid system that you shouldn't be bothering with any version of Windows. I know they don't have to use any exotic hardware either because those giant displays have FPGA based translators that take a simple video input (I used to chat with a guy who made them). A simple SBC running some Linux or BSD variant would have been the sane choice.

    Someone put in the minimum amount of effort into this display and it shows.

    --
    Anons need not reply. Questions end with a question mark.
    1. Re:Just stupid by aix+tom · · Score: 2

      That's what RAIDs are for. ;-)

      But we had something similar that, when our NAS crashed a few years ago. After it was fixed, 90% of the Windows VMs were broken and didn't boot anymore, and had to be restored from backup.

      100% of the Linux VMs just hat a "whoops, something looks wonky, I better replay my file system journal" boot message buried somewhere in the logs before starting up normally.

    2. Re:Just stupid by houghi · · Score: 2

      Yeah, because Linux NEVER has any error messages to show people.

      --
      Don't fight for your country, if your country does not fight for you.
  4. Error message? Where? by vinceval · · Score: 2

    Last time I checked, that is the Windows Boot Manager, not an error message.

  5. BSOD in 2008 Olympics by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, during the opening ceremonies, a BSOD was projected in large characters, on a wall of the Bird's Nest. But in contrast to the message in London, I doubt the BSOD in Beijing stayed up very long.

  6. The joys of standardization by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 2, Informative

    Most of these fancy LED billboards are really just VGA displays (well, part of one anyway). They just leave some crap running on a bog standard PC, and have the billboard driver software pointed at a certain part of the desktop, simaler to video screen capture software.

  7. link with other /. article by sad_ · · Score: 2

    you can link this with that other /. post about why people don't switch to linux.
    decades upon decades have we seen posts on the internet of failing public displays with BSOD's, windows popups, reboot loops, safe boot menu etc.
    still for some reason people keep using windows...

    --
    On a long enough timeline, the survival rate for everyone drops to zero.
  8. this isn't bios by eaglesrule · · Score: 2

    It's the windows boot manager, that's part of the volume boot record. The OS is already started.