Special Interest Group on CRAP

I recently took a trip in which I was amused to see two operating systems crash in dedicated applications.

The first instance was on Delta airlines in-flight video system, which about an hour into the trip decided that it really didn’t want to finish playing the video, so it prompty gave a kernel panic and started rebooting. The hilarious part was that it was a flight out of silicon valley, and when the crash occurred there were over a hundred screens showing the kernel panic, and about ten guys on the plane started trying to read the log messages on the screen in front of them to try and figure out what happened. Needless to say when the thing came back up it didn’t remember where it was in the movie, so naturally it started at the beginning.

The second instance was in the national air and space museum near Dulles Airport, where one of the information kiosks was displaying the helpful (and familiar) blue screen of death of windows, with the message:

“A fatal exception 0E has occurred at 0167:BFF9DFFF. The current application will be terminated… Press any key to continue.”

Of course, the kiosk didn’t have any keys, so the instruction wasn’t of much use. Also, since it was the ONLY application that is supposed to run in the kiosk, the computer was functioning as little more than an inefficient space heater.

It’s amusing to note that both of these computer applications had something to do with aviation. Thank goodness these weren’t being used in the autopilot of the airplane for my trip. Maybe someday we can all have the oxygen masks drop down because some idiot used strcpy in the code for the airline software. I can at least console myself with the fact that nuclear weapons don’t yet run windows.