This was at Sea-Tac airport today! Home airport of Microsoft. The message said it was running low on virtual memory. Ironic.
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I’ve seen those screens at SeaTac way too many times in October. I had no idea those screens ran on Windows, but given it’s the home airport of Microsoft, that shouldn’t be a surprise.
Makes me wonder what else might be running on the computer that’s serving up that screen. Either that or what program inside the OS is leaking memory 🙂
Looks like win9x. The airport deserves it if so.
Seen similar error messages at WalMart cashier machines. Or the ones sitting idle will show a “Windows XP professional” screensaver.
The shading in the title bar make me think its Win2K (though it might just be an artifact of the viewing angle), but even so, its no where near good enough image quality to actually see what the error was or what caused it (probably some ignorant fool running kazza or something).
Any airport that uses such an old OS deserves this happening, even if its not entirely the fault of the OS, rather an IT department that should be immediately fired.
it could be WinXP with the eye candy turned off, so it looks more like windows 9x/2000. Just because they use an old OS isn’t a bad thing. Like do they really need win7 for a flight departures list?
probably something trivial like the hard drive filling up on the partition with the virtual swap file. Not grounds for being fired. Besides if it is a virtual memory error, the computer doesn’t freeze on that; it’s a warning, not something like a BSOD.
Yes it should fail like osx applications and just silently fail and give you no indication that something is wrong. That would be much better.
More likely the issue is that the IT department has been RIF’d down recently and mundane tasks such as doing basic maintenance on the kiosk servers wasn’t accepted as a key metric on anyone’s yearly performance review. Heh, should be a Dilbert cartoon in there somewhere.
John, your pictures are a great addition to the blog. Looks like I have to make another No Agenda donation to keep you in charged batteries.
I prefer Fail
I agree it looks like a vintage Windows. That’s the big problem with America. No investment in new hardware or software. I can guarantee you if they were running Mac’s they would probably be running OS9.
#6 – Did your mother have any kids that lived?
Seems to me they probably ‘developed’ that application specifically for this airport. Chances are it was developed using M$ .NET, with Visual Studio. This should be a fairly easy task at programming, unfortunately a program’s only as good as the tools that were used to make it. Since these ‘higher’ level languages and visual development environments take care of resource management any idiot that can work out a basic algorithm can program. With crap like this being the end result.
Like PhoneBoy (like the name) I’ve seen that at SeaTac frequently. It’s especially ironic before you head up the 405 to Redmond.
In other news: “Victim in fatal BSOD tragically not Windows 7”
Too soon?
I have seen the same messages on the screens in Terminal E at DFW…
I’ll bet it is a turnkey system from the company that makes the display. If so, nothing will be upgraded until the airport buys a new display.
I get these errors all the time on my WinXP Pro SP2 laptop trying to run DOS apps after the system has been running for many days with multiple “suspend” periods … rebooting (the 2nd R of the 3 Rs of Ubersoft -Retry, Reboot, Reinstall) usually cures it.
A company not investing in IT getting OS errors…? Now why would that happen.
Well, I told them to restart the damn PC every other day or so…
The system probably ran for many many months, maybe even years without a reboot or an error of any type. Some memory leak finally caught up with it… big deal… if you want a good laugh look at the system reliability of the Dvorak.org blog… it would be what? Maybe three days without something going wrong that has nothing to do with the OS.