Unexpected item in the bagging area as Windows Activation error pops up at check-in BORK!BORK!BORK! Weary travelers making their way through airports have enough to contend with these days without some Microsoft borkage popping up over departure information. Heathrow airport departure boards display flight information with a Windows activation watermark on screen. A Heathrow Terminal 5 flight information …
So many companies literally use hacked versions of windows for their signage.
BT, BA, Sainsburys, Morrisons, Waitrose, Tesco, goahead (bu company)
ALL have been seen with signs showing they have unregistered/non activated copies of windows XP. A few have shown errors indicating they were pirated editions with cracked product keys that have since been blocked.
Don't be daft. It'd be an amazing sign. Fast, fully customisable, crash free. Just what everyone wants (even if they don't know it).
Sure, it'll display all prices in French francs until you run that really obscure shell script but that'll be your fault somehow.
What, like this?
https://xibosignage.com/open-source
https://github.com/xibosignage/xibo
If only!
/OK, it's not a dedicated distro, but it is very good.
Mostly because there's not that much a standard needs to do. Any normal distro not optimized for signage can manage the display and network hardware. The specific content on the sign might be unusual enough that you need a home-built GUI application to display it, but for most other things, there are plenty of simple display programs or a browser running in Kiosk mode which can do the job.
I think a standard signage distro would have some of the same problems that affect things like low-code automation tools, content management systems, and things with similar levels of user involvement. Either they're so open that you can do anything, but you need most of the same skills you would have needed if they didn't exist at all, or they are simplified so you can only do the subset of things the creators thought of and, if you want anything slightly different, you have to abandon the version built on the standard and build your own.
"It constantly amazes me that there isn't a dedicated digital signage Linux distro with management application. It wouldn't be rocket science, it just needs a bit of standardisation for software vendors to develop against."
I've managed the Subcontractors deploying FIDS (Flight Information Display Systems) at a few airports around the world and, it's same reason most (not all) companies run Windows - common management standards, mostly through GPO's.
The FIDS Windows Activation message isn't going to hinder the system technically in any way, in fact, when going through deployment/commissioning they are often not activated. Usually, they only start getting activated during the ORAT (Operational Readiness and Transfer/Test (Test/Transfer depends on who you ask) as we start getting test public groups in and officials. ORAT can last a year.
That's why it only shows on that one flight.
The rest is OK but this specific plane may need a reboot mid flight to keep it going. It'll have to make sure it's a a high enough altitude to do that so it can afford to lose some height while the systems try to talk to Microsoft via the satellite link. That is, of course, assuming that happens when there's a decent signal, otherwise passenger may get to test if their life jacket whistle and blinky light do indeed attract any attention in the middle of the ocean.
BTW, that plane is probably made by Boeing.
What, too soon?
I would not get on a plane that runs on legacy Windows 11. Note that some anesthesiologists run EEG monitoring software on Windows to monitor brain waves of people sedated for surgery. Yes, those laptops have locked up during surgery and yes, brain damage has occurred. But really, how addicted are some people to primitive legacy operating systems?
Bags were once a schoolboy name for trousers (dacks another.)
So [to] Active Windows drop trousers.
I am sure anyone who has ever dealt with MS gets the picture.
There are plenty of realtime and embedded OSs that would be more suited to this application than any version of Windows. Many are open source and at least one is GPL viz eCos (eCosPro is proprietary) and most will run on fairly basic microcontrollers.
What surprises me is that these screens clearly are presented to the application as a raster graphics display when the displayed data is purely textual and could be described by a terminfo entry and driven through a curses library. A FPGA could convert these large displays into a serial 80 column x 128(?) row VT type terminal screens.
A basic rule: if a thing can do something that it never needs to do, ensure that it really can't. Things† that do stuff that they never need to do cause enough grief in this world as it is.
† And people but disabling them is a little more involved than flicking the write protect switch.
Which gang were you a member of? The Garden Gang or the Munch Bunch? Were you rivals like the Bloods and the Crips?
Was there any truth to the rumour about Alice Apple and Peter Potato?
What was the deal with the seemingly bizarre fact that- according to Wikipedia- both series came out at almost exactly the same time? Did one rip off the other- the timing seems too close- or was it a genuine coincidence?
Did Jayne Fisher pay you a share of the royalties for your likeness or did she keep the billions for herself and retire to a Caribbean island at the age of fourteen?
And are you jealous that Methyl Orange was more successful than you in the pH indicator business?
