The Militant may or may not have joked about it the other week, but the old adage of "be careful what you wish for" couldn't have rung more true as the Militant passed by this ticket vending machine at an unspecified (M) subway station on Thursday afternoon (If there are any of you who work for Metro who need to know, so you can, like, get it fixed, email the Militant (militantangeleno at gmail dot com) and he'll tell you.As you can see, what normally would display the trippy-looking Metro logo "screensaver" or the menu where you can "Purchase Paper Ticket" et. al., appears as what is known as a BSOD - the Blue Screen of Death, which plagues certain Windows PCs. Passenger inconvenience notwithstanding, it's a rather embarrassing sight for the public to see. Even moreso than having the MetroVue video monitors remind you to clean up your unused desktop icons.
The upside, though, is now that the Militant knows that each Metro Rail TVM is really just a PC (hey, it's got a monitor, a printer and all), maybe with some l337 h4xx0r skillz, he can learn to blog on one of these things. Now wouldn't that be something. To paraphrase a line from the movie Robocop, the Militant would buy that for a dollar...uh...dollar twenty-five.
Lol. Thats my first time seeing that (not that I saw it personally per se) on the vending machines. I have however seen that screen on the Transit TV monitors (and quite often, I might add)
ReplyDeleteJust wait til they have faregates, also probably running Windows--then BSOD will keep you from actually getting on the train.
ReplyDeleteDr 295bus, at risk of revealing his secret non-web identity, is an employee of Microsoft (not by choice!) but still recommends Linux for these sorts of applications.