London Cabs with Windows Blue Screen on the go …

[German]Nice surprise for people living in London (GB). There are taxis driving around with advertisements on the roof. The display boards are controlled by Windows – and there are nice Blue Screens of Dead, with which the taxis advertise the product from Redmond.

Windows is everywhere in daily life, from the desktop to the refrigerator to the cash or ticket machine. Even Windows for cars is already being considered – and sneering tongues sometimes think that you have to do a quick update and defragment the starter before starting your journey. I would never say something like that – it all works. And the days when we saw photos of big screens that were forced to be updated to Windows 10 are also passé since summer 2016.

London’s black Cabs and the BlueScreens

I came across this article on The Register yesterday about this issue. On London’s streets you can probably see black taxis with an attachment on the roof to display advertising. The advertisements are dynamically fed in from a Windows computer. 

Blue Screen of Death #BSOD on a London cab. Welcome to 1998 and 2018 at the same time! pic.twitter.com/T1ZU9nxEpj

— Stephen Gillett (@stephengillett) June 14, 2018

And if the Windows computer has hiccups, it just happens to have a BlueScreen of Dead ‘on the go’. Doesn’t seem to be that rare, because the above tweet is from summer 2018 and shows a taxi with this BSOD on the roof.

Lol #bsod black cab of death . New windows advert on London black cab pic.twitter.com/NEWyGobjDa

— ₮ꗞꕯて ⠄⠵ ҉ (@yiannistox) March 1, 2017

Also I found a tweet from 2017, which shows a black taxi with BSOD. And now it happened again, as the following tweet indicates, which refers to the article by The Register.

May we present the BSOD on Wheels

Bork!Bork!Bork! Welcome to another instalment in The Register’s irregular look at tech behaving badly in public. Today we present Bork on Wheels. https://t.co/VNnwhInJOS

— worldtechvalley (@worldtechvalley) February 28, 2020

It seems, the taxi has a redundant backup system, because it is still driving. Only the GUI for the display is down – an IRQ_NOT_LESS_OR_EQAL is just the way it is. Does the taxi driver have to reboot, refresh the drivers or reinstall his system backup? If there is one thing you can rely on with Windows, it is that something is not working. Just beep.