Daily Tech — Blue Screen of Death Haunts Department Store on geeksugar -- Geek is chic.

@Peebert:
I think it's an LED array.
Similar to the kind NIN uses on stage.

ANoel

Meh.. Macs crash all the time too. There's just so few of the machines around nobody notices. I've had the same PC for 7 years. I've never had a BSOD, never had to reinstall WinXP for any reason, never had a virus that my Virus Scanner didn't catch first.

diverguy

I saw this the first day it happened and immediately thought of posting it here, but then I saw something shiny or thought about Portal or something. Anyway, what I really wanted to say was this: It's kind of hard to see in the photo, but these really aren't 'screens' as such. They're more like really loose pixelboards, just strings of controllable lights. The resolution on the actual field of lights is really low, as the lights are SO far apart. So much so that you can't really even read the BSOD text, you can just sort of make out that there are lines of 'something' there. Anyway, yay Toronto. :)

Peebert

Its the Bay they can't afford tech support.

mpercy

How come this always happends, no one fixes something for days. Come on, where's the computer controlling the screens? On the outside of the building three stories up? Just switch to a Mac.

timerider42

Leopard upgrade?

king_of_fools

@otherorange:

Not long, but i didn't booze last night, so I must confess my mind is pretty sharp.

drewheyman

@otherorange: That sucks. I'm glad I'm not one of them.

Oh crap, yes I am.....I was supposed to do my routine check of the display screens here at The Bay like 3 days ago!! I sure hope everything is still working okay!

92BuickLeSabre

@92BuickLeSabre:
or that some people have better things to do than read the same Giz comments forum all day.

otherorange

@otherorange: Oh cruel not-so-ironic irony. Given that the comeback came 16 comments and over an hour later, I'm guessing that you are in fact Canadian?

"N'oh Canada.
Their homes will be our land!"

(I'm just kidding of course. I love going north of the border to rest and relax. It's like taking a nice, extended nap.)

92BuickLeSabre

And here's a similar thing. Not BSOD, but annoying nonetheless: [i.document.m05.de]

Rain-man

If they had a XP box driving the display, they would be back up and running in minutes. I wish they would have called me, because I have a solution for them.

ulaq27

@drewheyman:
Very witty indeed... How long did it take you to come up with that gem?

otherorange

The WOW is now.

Kaiser-Machead

hahahahahhaha i work there i see that every day

djay1717

@leicaman: I wanted to, but no. They sent me on down to reboot the damn thing.

Plus, who the hell designs a computer that needs to be primed before it can be reset?! Probably some fat-ass, Cheetos-fingered idiot who couldn't get a job delivering the mail.

You know what my suggestion was? Send the samrt-ass girl and doe-eyed boy down there first as bait to distract the raptors. But some douchebag in a leather Members Only jacket and eurotrash glasses said that that would be wrong.

omg-ponies

that will be an awesome MacOS X Leopard Wallpaper

EL_RIEL

@omg-ponies:

And all you really needed to do, instead of crossing the island in a big storm and getting eaten up by dionsaurs was to wait for a 13 year old girl to come along and say, "Unix? This is easy."

leicaman

@OMG-Ponies: It's both; the US dollar is dropping and the Canadian dollar is rising against all other currencies.

whiteoak

@omg-ponies: You're correct that the US dollar is plummeting. However, the Canadian dollar has been performing strongly against all world currencies.

ZMJ

do I detect the odor of a viral ad campaign?

lpranal

@Danomite: The Canadian Dollar is not soaring; the US Dollar is plummeting.

omg-ponies

With the soaring Canadian dollar, everyone is shopping online/south of the border. No one has been in that shop for weeks.

Danomite

@omg-ponies: So you're saying the delay is due to the Toronto Raptors?

92BuickLeSabre

I know this intersection well. The BSOD replaced the too early Christmas ads. My guess is that most pedestrians prefered the BSOD to Christmas commercials the day after halloween.

whiteoak

Who wants to bet that the guy in charge is a Mac fanboy? Greatest OS X advertisement ever.

Monty

Umm...monkey couldn't push the button no more?

Razta

The power switch to this server must be near the same place they keep the beer. I can understand the distraction.

axiomatic

it's canada. they're a bit slow.

drewheyman

@phantam: Have you considered that rebooting the computer may prove difficult?

I remember when I was doing tech support for this guy who had an island in Central America. In order to reboot the computer, I had to go to this little quonset hut on the other side of the island, listening to some dumb Aussie in short-shorts yammer about tigers, all while having to worry about velociraptor attacks.

Stupid Unix system.

omg-ponies

who the hell lets a computer let alone one running massive displays on the side of a building sit at a bluescreen for miltiple days, restart the damn computer or install XP for gods sake.

phantam

Imagine the burn-in on those screens, someone is screwed.

Justapspfan

Now if the person responsible for those PCs could get the Giz running on there, I think he'd have himself a Nokia Internet tablet...

singlecoilpickup

@virtualmatt: You should work as a campaign consultant. Seriously. That is some quick wit.

zenpoet

It's art.

ANoel

It worked for the XMas Ring of Death and it works here:

EPIC FAIL

omg-ponies

This is my new wallpaper, anyone got a high res copy?

MagnoliaBoy

@virtualmatt: lol
as long as they can keep 3rd party hack apps from causing the same problem

EMoShunz

Clever advertising campaign for Apple I say.

virtualmatt

All their memory
are belong to dump

Dr.Danger

@drewheyman:

Hey drew.. we (canada) sure are slow .. just like your american dollar

wildwarren

I walked by this the other day and didn't even realize it was a BSOD. Someone just sent me a link to this posting. I thought it was some crazy art. It wasn't easy to tell that there was text as the previous poster mentioned.

Tri-Pod

I know that venue.
It is the Richmond Ave. Bay Store.
It was scheduled to be upgraded to Leopard earlier this week for the display system Mac.
It is a tiled 4 panel multi-display setup - 2 ATI cards w/dual DVI out (the leftmost panel does not appear in the photo).
I know, because our company, Digital Signs, is in charge of the large panel display system for that venue.
That is a OSX BSOD I'm afraid.

gizmodome

One of the best BSODs I have ever seen.

Palestina

BSOD rules! on The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

The only reason its on a Windwos PC is because there is no damn Mac OS X application that does anything other than the basic crap :-)
The reason there is less crahes in Mac is because there are less apps out there for it.

jeewaka

It might be big, but it is not the "bigges BSOD of all time" ... not even the biggest BSOD in Toronto! Just north of this at the corner of Queen and Dundas there used to be a 7-story high display/billboard for "Ask Jeeves" the thing would roll the "what are people asking right now" feed to pimp the service and one glorious weekend it was crashed for about 40 hours - a 7-story BSOD shining like a failed electronic god down on the city. It was wonderful :)

(NOTE: I always thought a 7-story DogPile feed would have been more fun, but this city is too tight-butted for that ... )

Geekboy_X

@gizmodome: OS X uses Black or White backgrounds for kernal panics. So why is the backround blue?

akiyia

It's not BSOD - it's advertising funded by the Apple Store.

macfoo