Comments on: What Happens in Vegas, Stays in 0×9940B925

By: mike

mike — Thu, 03 Dec 2009 07:19:43 +0000

I also collect pictures of public BSOD. They are quire common in airports.

By: yeti

yeti — Tue, 01 Dec 2009 00:32:47 +0000

I have a BSOD picture of the station casinos Players Card Kiosk in BSOD mode.

And Rex, its not that Windows Sucks, its that they dont patch or update the system. That BSOD was fixed in XPSP2

By: KenP

KenP — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 14:31:22 +0000

I do wonder where OS/2 would be if it had survived. Yes, IBM is anal to a fault but that isn’t all that horrid these days.

By: Eric S.

Eric S. — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 06:53:54 +0000

Ah, yes. I remember the fun of explaining to the CEO of the high-tech company I worked for that his computer wasn’t broken, but that he could not save any more Word Perfect document because his hard drive was full. It took about ten minutes, using very simple language, to explain this in a way that wouldn’t get me fired or get the computer hurtled across his office. I understand that he was very good at accounting.

By: BigRedDogATl

BigRedDogATl — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 05:24:30 +0000

Rex:

What you fail to realize is that the CIO (Chief Information Officers) of most of these Casino companies are not techies. In fact, for most large corporations the CIOs or VP of I.T. have very little technical skills at all. These people are uninformed MBAs that are using the position as a stepping stone to something higher. I doubt any one of them could even know how to load an operating system onto a machine, much less know how to keep it patched and running.

The other problem they have is that they are running some third party developed content management system to determine what video clips get played and in what order. After awhile, with as many changes as are made to the play lists, if the system isn’t rebooted to release memory that the ill written programs leak, the system will crash because all of the system’s memory is used up. They could head off these problems if they had two parallel systems and switched to a secondary system while they powered off the primary, cleared memory and cache, and rebooted and they did this daily.

Anyway, the Casino companies need to hire real I.T. people, with real experience, not they young kids with no real world experience or the uninformed MBAs who don’t know a RAM chip from a EEPROM.

By: mike_ch

mike_ch — Mon, 30 Nov 2009 02:56:35 +0000

Honestly, they’re pretty dumb to not have it automatically restart and launch it’s demo reel app when it blue screens.

I have a camera phone picture somewhere of a TI change machine whose Windows XP couldn’t even finish boothing, so it was just restarting over and over, flashing it’s splash screens in a loop. I’ll share it with you sometime when I return.