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Admin
I have nearly that exact same picture of the BSOD, taken in February /07. My boyfriend and I were driving past while on vacation there, and I had to do a double take... I knew I recognized that screen from somewhere....
Seems that it's not an uncommon occurance for it to do that either. Scary.
(And damn for not submitting it myself!)
-- Seejay
Admin
What confuses me is why only a small part of the desktop is displayed on the screen.
I smell a real WTF underlying this seeming accident.
Maybe the presentation app runs in one part of the screen, and the administrator uses the rest of the screen to do maintenance work? Very careful never to move his windows over the presentation window?
Admin
i think the funny middle-of-the-screen visibility is the real wtf... at least in the airports when this happens you see the entire blue screen of death.
Admin
That's the only thing that seems to make sense to me. Otherwise, why would a simple repeating stream cause a BSOD on a fairly new computer? I find it virtually impossible to BSOD my XP Pro computer, and I do all sorts of stuff on it. Therefore, someone else must be using the computer at the same time as the stream, and that person is responsible for causing a BSOD.
Admin
Wait... is that Windows ME??
Admin
the real WTF is it looks like they are using Windows ME, i dont remember 2000 having that pattern on the left side of a file browser window
Admin
Admin
No, Windows 2000. The desktop UI is virtually identical, but the BSOD is completely different.
Admin
Nine out of ten times when you see a BSOD like this, it's a hardware failure. But since we cannot see the STOP code, there's no way to find out in this case.
Admin
It's probably more likely that a single compute controls multiple screens (or at least the software/hardware is designed for that), so each screen gets a small rectangle of the desktop. The BSOD is probably caused by a hardware failure (bad RAM?) due to the computer being on 24/7 in a hot environment (Las Vegas isn't the coldest place in the world). As it is running Windows 2000, it is likely that the computer is several years old, so if it has been running 24/7 since then, I'm not surprised that it's failing.
Admin
Note they have both streams and mpegs in that folder and it is ONLINE!
I wonder how much Vegas Pron I can actually download from that server.
What happens in Vegas is videotaped, stored on our server in an online folder and shared with the world!
Admin
Seems like a photoshop to me... In the second photo the screen on the other side of the marquee is displaying the proper image. It is possible that they have a different computer for each screen... but that doesn't seem right as they almost exclusively show the same advert on every side simultaneously.
Admin
I figure that the display has some wierd resolution, but the pc driving it is svga. We have similair issues at my company, where we have cheapo PCs driving plasma tvs, and we have to arrange everything to only use the top 2 thirds of the screen.
Admin
Gotta love an OS that you identify by its critical error/crash screen.
Admin
Nope. Not Photoshop. Saw the exact same thing when I went to Vegas in February. Got a pic of it too:
BSOD in Vegas
Admin
As someone who's done work with a system of this sort, let me say that the reason you only see a small part of the desktop is because there's a 1-1 pixel ratio, and a hardware component that's grabbing the screen buffer and sending it out to the lights.
That's the reason you can still be getting updates even as the machine is dead; the card is just sending out what it last had. It's kind of neat, but obviously it doesn't have a "oh crap, turn it black" methodology.
Light signs/LED machines are almost always 5 years behind current technology because of the classic "it's proven and will work for a long time, why change things up" idea. Also, once a customer buys a unit, they kind of keep the unit.
I'll bet the Windows box they're using is stored in a very inappropriate place.
Admin
Like the back of a Volkswagon Bug?
(sorry, I had to)
Admin
Err... you do realize that it's talking about the connection status to the file server, right?
Admin
Yeah but you do realize most of these places may not know how to secure their network.
Of course, to be fair, Vegas may have better network security than our Dept. of Homeland Security after reading a story released today.
Admin
Admin
Depends on what bug you're talking about. The old slug bug, Herbie-mobile, designed for/inspired by Hitler car had a rear mounted air cooled motor. The new Jetta derived New Beetle has a front mounted water cooled motor. Not sure if i've heard anyone call this a bug, Beetle usually.
captcha: quake, what i should be playing
Admin
What happens in Vegas, stays in Vegas...
...except that bad case of clap you got; that tends to follow you home.
Admin
Earlier this year I also saw something similar -- except that this was on a train station in Denmark. Several of the information displays were showing WinXP BSOD or bootup screens. Some were stuck on the boot menu, "previous attempt to start the system failed, want to enter safe mode?" I didn't snap any pictures of it though.
Admin
That would be a very uncomfortable place.
CAPTCHA: ewwww, yes indeed
Admin
Crashing? In my marquee? It's more likely than you think.
Admin
too bloody funny!
Admin
I'll have to dig it up, but i have a picture of that screen running windows calculator from the last time i was in vegas...
that would ALMOST make a OMGWTF entry? :)
Admin
Admin
One time waiting in an airport, I found these free-internet kiosks. You had to answer some marketing questions and you'd get about 5-7 minutes of limited access. I had time to kill and wanted to check my email, but, of course, none of them were working.
I caught one kiosk in process of rebooting after hitting a BSOD. It looked like it was NT or 2000 or something from MS. (This was a while back so forgive me for being light on details.)
Anyway, in moment of boredom I hit the escape key while it was going through its CMOS checks and got into the CMOS setup.
I thought "Woohoo! I'm gonna have fun now! Unlimited free internet." but as it turned out the keyboard had one of those cut-outs covering the Windows key and F-keys. I soon figured out I wasn't able to save any changes and then I found out that I couldn't even exit to allow it to finish its reboot. No ctrl-alt-del for you!
I tried to reach under the cut-out with a nail clipper (just need one F2 key and I'll be off the hook) but their "security" defeated me. A paper-clip might have done the trick, but I was on vacation and I was starting to feel like I was standing out. So I slunk away but noticed it still on the same CMOS screen over an hour later.
If I had let it reboot and used the MAGIC shift key, I might have been OK, but I only had a moment to decide whether to go into CMOS or not. I didn't think I'd be stuck in it.
Admin
Admin
I've seen several LCD room-signs (signs next to the entrance to large conference rooms) which had hardware error messages. Unfortunately, the first one I saw had a message about ext3 problems. I felt conflicted about that.
Admin
Reminds me of something I once saw in a youth hostel when I was young. It's long enough ago so that I can post it here... and I won't mention any names.
An internet terminal with two methods of access:
So... of course I wanted to get access without paying, so... well, there must be a way to get out of the site restriction... it surely was a proxy. So... I looked for a link to open in a new window... found a link... shift-clicked it (haha, no right click, but shift click)... and it opened in a new window. No more kiosk mode! I got a MENU BAR! And it was Netscape 4. Went into preferences, and - yes - proxy settings. Unchecked them, unrestricted access... but still time limited.
Well, that wasn't all possible fun... in the window, I entered
JavaScript:'ps ax > /tmp/foo.txt';
and saved it as /tmp/foo.sh, then assigned .sh files to /bin/sh in Netscape, and entered /tmp/foo.sh as URL and then looked at the txt file... and I found the monitoring Perl script. Entered the script in the URL bar, and I could view it... and one line was really standing out:
system('sudo kill ' . $sessionpid);
I think, from here it's obvious: not just sudo kill worked... I found out that sudo allowed to execute 'ls' too, so next thing to try was catting /etc/sudoers, and indeed, I found the real WTF:
terminal ALL=(ALL) NOPASSWD: ALL
And the final result:
JavaScript:'sudo kill -STOP 3420';
for the PID of the timer process, execute it, and voila, the clock stopped.
BTW, for the upcoming "my distro is worse than yours" fight - this box was a SuSE, stripped down to not contain any fun stuff like xterm.
Admin
"What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas."
I guess the city has a really big orphanage.
Admin
And then there was that other youth hostel... not much to hack there, it was already free... but someone found out it had three "bluescreen keys": whenever hitting any of wake/sleep/power, it bluescreened and someone had to come to reboot it as Ctrl-Alt-Del didn't do the trick. This went on for some days till they replaced the keyboard - by one without these keys...
And, then there was also this other one... To get access to the terminal too, I used a keyboard combination (I forgot which one it was again, too long ago) to switch from German to US layout when leaving. Then the others couldn't enter their passwords in their chatrooms, or if they could, they got annoyed quite fast because it's so hard to type... and the problem of the long queue in front of the computer magically disappeared.
Admin
"Most of THESE places?" If by THESE you mean casinos, I'm guessing they have some fairly decent security. You know, they have LOTS of money there, AND (unlike some banks) they want to keep it. If by THESE you mean most business, then yeah you are right.
Admin
And stop calling me Shirley.
Admin
We get that in Sydney, Australia as well.
Occasionally the train timetables vanish off the screen just to make sure noone misses the popup about automatic updates.
Admin
Where I live, the 'bus stop' near the central train station was replaced by a big new system a couple (5-10) years ago. Basically, there are 7 big lanes with their own sidewalks and big overhead displays (no CRT or TFT though, they look more like oversized LED ones) that signify which buses will be there and where they'll go. To give you an idea of the scale, these signs were mounted about 10 meters high. Also, several groups of 4 CRT monitors that display the schedule and expected departure of all buses are spread around the 'bus stop'.
The overhead signs lasted less than a year. Though still in working order, they have long stopped displaying any useful information and are now off or (occasionally) display "look on bus". The monitors usually work, but aren't maintained all that well. For over a month, the most used group had on the leftmost screen, a standard BSOD, on the second, a harddrive error, while the last two were blacked out.
Though a huge waste of money, none of this was quite as unnerving as seeing a BSOD on an ATM.
Admin
Of course, the bug was not so much inspired by Hitler, but rather by Hans Ledwinka, who designed the Tatra V570 (1931) and the Tatra T97 (1937). Ferdinand Porsche looked for inspiration in the V570 design and, to prevent competition, Hitler later ended production of the T97. Various Tatra parts like clutches and gearboxes, actually can be fitted on early bugs and Porsches.
Admin
Sorry for the double-post.
Of course, the bug was not so much inspired by Hitler, but rather by Hans Ledwinka, who designed the Tatra V570 (1931) and the Tatra T97 (1937). Ferdinand Porsche looked for inspiration in the V570 design and, to prevent competition, Hitler later ended production of the T97. Various Tatra parts like clutches and gearboxes, actually can be fitted on early bugs and Porsches.
Admin
This is from 2001:
http://johnburnett.com/in/vegas.jpg
...wtf?
Admin
There is actually, the error message displayed is (similar to) "A thread or process crucial to system operation has unexpectedly terminated"
So, csrss.exe failed. That's the only process I've EVER seen cause that.
Admin
We use the newer NVidia drivers for that - it allows you to do custom resolutions for monitors. I've got a couple of machines driving big plasmas for financial data, and it works great.
Took awhile to find out the native resolution of the screens, tho...
Admin
This was taken in Port Douglas (Australia) in 2003. A real estate shop had a plasma display on in their shopfront window. I simply had to take the photo. And the error was still there later that evening!
[image]
Admin
The second photo is quite clearly a fake. The Explorer window is larger than the available screen area!
Admin
Btw, Star Trek: The Experience in Las Vegas is running on Windows 3.1!
Admin
As is the first, One thing I've noticed about TDWTF posters is many of them will seldom read the thread, and just repeat what others have said at the start before being corrected
Admin
I work with video displays and generally there is a converter box that you shove DVI out of your video card into, it has an area of the screen that it displays 1 for 1 pixel on the LED screen. It also passes the video signal through to a regular monitor for normal use/maintenance. The application generally keeps the mouse from passing over the displayed area of the screen so you don't have to worry about where you leave the mouse when you leave.
Admin
And those repeating what's said will say it in such an air of authority that they know definitively it's faked/photoshopped/pulledoutofgrammasbutt...
I know what I saw when I was in Vegas... A BSOD on the Paris hotel's signboard. We drove right under it, giggling hysterically (you can bring the computer geeks to Vegas, but you can't take the geek out of them!) If it's that muckered up, it's not unreasonable for it to also be showing other parts of a Windows OS at various points in time, as other pics have demonstrated.
-- Seejay
Admin
No one's challenging the BSOD one, as far as I can see. I wouldn't deny that the second one could be possible, but observe the bottom left corner of the affected screen. The Explorer display is overlaying the corner of the twisty frame thing on the edge of the screen. Someone seems to have pasted the Explorer graphic in without adjusting its shape to match that of the screen.