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London's BT Tower Broadcasted Windows 7 Error Message Over the Weekend (theregister.co.uk)
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)."
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.
Sign of the Brexit times.
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.