London's BT Tower Broadcasted Windows 7 Error Message Over the Weekend (theregister.co.uk) 139
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)."
Queue (Score:1, Funny)
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Not quite porn, but it did happen [imgur.com] in Atlanta several years back.
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Goatse-like image on a billboard.... Yikes.
Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? (Score:4, Interesting)
The idea that massive public electronic displays like these aren't monitored by a human 24/7 is preposterous.
Re: Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? (Score:2)
Do humans monitor anything? I thought with everyone touting meh neural networks as "AI", that humans are out of the picture.
Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? (Score:5, 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)
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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.
Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? (Score:4, 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).
Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? (Score:4, 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.
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Still, if I was one of the developers writing the sign software
What developers? Their software didn't even get to run. As you can see from the error message itself all this sign does is take a video input and display it.
As a developer, do you routinely spend lots of time on features no one asked for, no one is paying you for, and isn't part of the larger engineering design?
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What developers? Their software didn't even get to run. As you can see from the error message itself all this sign does is take a video input and display it.
I'm assuming (maybe I'm wrong) that their system consists of both hardware and software, sold together as a package. If so, then they would have the ability to handle even hardware failures gracefully, if they chose to include that in their design (e.g. by using a separate switching mechanism to display a suitable static image from a backup image source whenever the primary computer hasn't been heard from within the last so-many milliseconds).
As a developer, do you routinely spend lots of time on features no one asked for, no one is paying you for, and isn't part of the larger engineering design?
Not routinely, but occasionally -- and at times those features h
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On the bright side, this is also a flaming endorsement for Microsoft products. You can always count on Microsoft products! (to fail)
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NO, it's a BIOS message, asking you to pick an Operating System:
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)."
Operating systems don't normally ask you to pick an operating system - you've picked one already...
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The picture literally says "Windows Boot" at the top. The BIOS's job is long done.
this isn't bios (Score:3)
It's the windows boot manager, that's part of the volume boot record. The OS is already started.
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When traffic lights fail, car accidents can happen.
That's my favorite spectator sport at a busy four-way intersection. Most drivers don't know what to do when the traffic lights fail and forget the rules for a four-way stop. Never seen an accident but plenty of near accidents and road rage.
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We don't get four way stops in the UK but when traffic lights fail people cope very well. The behaviour is less rigid but comparable in nature to how US four way stops work.
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If there are traffic lights then there isn't also a stop sign. Lanes are painted on the road. You give way to people that have the right of way ahead of you, and that's rarely a cause for confusion.
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Over here in Sweden we have small traffic signs directly under the stop sign that tells which lanes that needs to yield in case the light stops to work, somehow I thought that this was the same throughout the entire EU but I guess that this is now how it works in the UK then?
The rule in the UK is that you give way to traffic on your right at roundabouts etc if it was there first.
If everyone arrives at exactly the same time at a set of broken traffic lights or roundabout, you get a Mexican stand off and common sense has to prevail, i.e. if you're on a moped, let the big fucking lorry go first.
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No one is going to die or be maimed.
Unless of course they're posting the social media gibberish while driving...
Re: Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? (Score:1)
When a Windows error message goes up on a roadside billboard, accidents happen from people rubbernecking to gawk at it.
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When a Windows error message goes up on a roadside billboard, accidents happen from people rubbernecking to gawk at it.
I think you are overestimating the fascination of normal human beings with computer error messages.
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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?
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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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At a minimum, why not a scheduled task that reboots the display driving computer once a day so that at least you're not waiting for a memory error or some other long-run glitch hosing the system.
Even better is the software that generates the display would have a parallel watchdog process and they exchange "I'm OK" messages, and the watchdog communicates with the signage. If the "OK" messages stop, the signage just turns off, displays black, or some failsafe image stored internally.
Chances are, though, that
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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
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I've had several clients with bog-standard PCs being fed into various forms of video distribution systems and it actually did improve the reliability of all of them to be rebooted at least weekly.
You would think that running PowerPoint or some dumb JPG viewer in an infinite loop would go for months, and maybe sometimes it does, but there's a ton of opportunities for memory leaks and general desktop PC/OS/Windows unreliability if left unbooted for a long time.
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I thought about it a bit, and a simple periodic OK signal generated by the software would prevent messages like these, but to what benefit? It's not like it's accidentally displaying porn or foul language.
Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? (Score:4, Insightful)
A heartbeat service from another computer would have sufficed to send a message to someone.
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This probably existed, and it quite probably was the very realistic assessment: Screw it, not worth the callout, it's a sign and therefore can wait until monday.
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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.
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Better set up monitoring of some sort that if the computer don't display what's it supposed to display send you SMS or automatically reboots the machine... but even that, why bother ?
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A RaspberryPi with two jobs is not a ton of complexity.
Ping host.
Success?
yes? got to 10
no? SMS to admin
It's not "unimportant" if a company is paying $BIGNUM to have their message displayed on a significant landmark.
And from the message that was displayed - IT HAD ALREADY REBOOTED - unsuccessfully.
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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.
Re:Why aren't public displays monitored 24/7? (Score:4, 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.
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Or they're not going to be paid overtime or even get a thanks if they come over the week-end.
That's certainly another possibility, but I didn't want to include the story of my life.
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No business case for it. It fails so rarely, and the consequences are a few mocking tweets. Why spend any effort or money on it?
The reminds me of the post yesterday asking why everyone hasn't switched to Linux yet. Businesses don't care if it's "better" or "more reliable", they care about the cost and disruption when changing.
Besides this was probably a hardware fault, and Linux would not have helped. EEC RAM may have.
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Yeah, or hard disk failure, or rogue sw or malware clobbered boot sector or something.
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You're probably right. I haven't seen that MB firmware message and I was thinking it was a 3rd-party boot menu like grub or lilo.
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It's just a sign. It's not a safety critical piece of equipment, and very little is lost when it is down for a bit. In fact, the free publicity may be a net positive.
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Why? Other than a bit of embarrassment, what major negative impact has result from this incident which would necessitate continuous monitoring?
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Fixed that for you.
Befitting (Score:5, Funny)
Sign of the Brexit times.
LOL ... wow ... (Score:1)
That is just simply awesome.
One more epic Microsoft suck for the ages.
I can't tell you how many store signs, kiosks, and god knows what that I've seen displaying a Microsoft Blue Screen of Death.
Abort? Retry? Fail?
Windows; the operating system which made "did you reboot it" the first troubleshooting question of idiots who don't understand uptime.
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Windows; the operating system which made "did you reboot it" the first troubleshooting question of idiots who don't understand uptime.
If the system has crashed keeping it up is kinda pointless.
Just stupid (Score:5, 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.
amiga no better the preview guide channel crashed (Score:2)
amiga no better the preview guide channel crashed all the time
LOLs (Score:2)
I remember the community bulletin board channel on my local cable provider ran on an Amiga. Every few months you could see what a Workbench desktop looked like by flipping to that channel over the weekend after the system had crashed and rebooted. It's output wasn't even that great. Looked like a VIC-20 outputting big blocky text-mode text and graphics.
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I've heard claims that you could see the Fremont Street Experience do that way back when.
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I know people that'd pay for that.
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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.
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The host systems I know have large NAS attached to them where all the data resides. Thus for instance, a second host can take over if the first one fails.
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Windows and Linux behave differently by default in the presence of underlying disk errors...
Different hypervisors also behave differently in the event of their network storage devices suffering problems.
Different network storage protocols also behave differently.
For instance if a drive fails or starts returning a large number of errors, Linux will remount it readonly in order to prevent further corruption while windows will continue trying to perform writes. This can be pretty damaging in the case of NAS st
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If you read carefully, I didn't *BLAME* Windows. I just said, Linux handled the error condition better.
If you want to know the details: It was basically the "only" major downtime my company had in the last ~20 years. It happened during a weekend, while we where in the process of moving some stuff around in the server room.
The NAS was super-redundant setup, four 19' racks full of spinning discs, plugged into the new UPS. The servers were a super-redundant setup, a Bladecenter (with no storage of it's own) in
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It's Windows fault the BIOS couldn't find a bootable OS...
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Or at least a secondary graphics card / port for the output so you don’t have to use the desktop.
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Aside from looking better when things go wrong [techeblog.com] (since dialogs usually appear on the primary screen), it also gives you a local display that can be used for a settings window or something. Given the cost of these things, one more monitor is not going to break the bank.
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Somewhere, in the bowels of that tower is a PC attached to a monitor or a KVM, and someone is likely responsible for monitoring that display - be it building maint., security, what have you. That person either failed to note, or failed to resolve the issue in a timely manner.
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Heh, thats pretty much the first thing that came to my mind too. But I chuckle everytime I see a blue screen on a giant public facing screen. Regardless of whose fault it is, its like "... and someone got paid for THAT piece of quality engineering"
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It's a simple fact that if you want a rock solid system that you shouldn't be bothering with any version of Windows.
Given the sign is showing evidence of system corruption following a restart I have to ask what magical fairy software you recommend people use for a 100% unimportant sign that only displays blinking lights?
I think people will be fine with not getting their "Good Morning London" message displayed in the sky today.
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How is it a simple fact? I get months of uptime on all of my windows workstations (desktop + laptop). This alone downgrades your so called "fact" to "opinion", or perhaps "facts" that only exist inside your own mind.
Someone put in the minimum amount of effort into this display and it shows
Looks like someone took your advice ..
https://imgur.com/a/Nbq0Yzz [imgur.com]
Oh, I know, its anything but a Linux issue... :)
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Cheap at all costs. No matter how expensive. Yes, that stupidity pervades the industry.
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I work on embedded systems and system level software for a living and I prefer the C++ tooling on Windows over Linux. Specifically I feel that my productivity using Visual Studio + Visual Assist is greater than when I'm developing/debugging on Linux. Its fine to like or prefer a particular OS for any reason or no reason at all, but its important to also recognize that people _choose_ Windows for rational and pragmatic reasons and not simply because they're forced or are stupid or just don't know any better.
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Error message? Where? (Score:2)
Last time I checked, that is the Windows Boot Manager, not an error message.
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BSOD in 2008 Olympics (Score:3, Interesting)
At the 2008 Olympics in Beijing, during the opening ceremonies, a BSOD was projected [gizmodo.com] 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.
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not an error (Score:2)
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So they could not even manage to automate booting? What cheapest imaginable morons did build this thing?
The joys of standardization (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.
link with other /. article (Score:3)
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...
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People are stupid. They prefer what they think they know vastly over things that are superior. There are countless examples available.
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Simple, because unlike you most people don't subscribe to observer bias. Or do you think all those windows devices would show Linux errors? I certainly have seen Linux devices show error screens on a variety of public screens. The most recent of which was the in-flight entertainment system on our Lufthansa flight crashing.
If you think Linux is somehow immune to boot partition corruption (what happened here judging by the sign) then I have a very expensive bespoke system to sell you.
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At least, a certain proportion of people are familiar enough with Windows to recognize that kind of message as a computer glitch. Just image what might happen if the masses were greeted by a "KERNEL PANIC" message the size of a full size container :)
Priorities (Score:2)
I'm in awe that people are so concerned over a freaking BILLBOARD.
I'm sorry but if BT's technicians have to choose between helping people with actual problems, and fixing a billboard (because heaven forbid we NOT be blasted with ads 24/7), the billboard belongs on the bottom of the queue.
Just because it's prominently visible doesn't mean it's important.
It is hard to show incompetence more publicly (Score:2)
Seriously, Windows is in no shape form or way suitable to be used in embedded systems or server systems. It is somewhat suitable as a game-launcher.
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Adding a second screen would only prevent the message from appearing, instead leaving a blank screen, which would be a more alarming issue than seeing a computer boot loader (not windows) error message.
Would a blank bank of lights be "better" in any meaningful way?