5 ms·
They used to use OS/2, but then Windows came along and we've been living in a world filled with misery ever since. On no planet does using a consumer version o
by astrodust 8y ago
They used to use OS/2, but then Windows came along and we've been living in a world filled with misery ever since.
On no planet does using a consumer version of Windows in these things make sense.
- mrguyorama 8y agoGood thing it's not typically a consumer version! If you watch one reboot (or other applications like store POS systems) you can see that it is Windows XP embedded, or nowadays sometimes Windows 7 embedded, which is decidedly NOT a "consumer" oriented OS
- astrodust 8y agoIt really depends on the vendor. Big names are at least careful enough to do that. The bottom of the barrel white-label vendors often don't care. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if some of those Windows installations are using pirated keys. It's perpetually concerning how bad the state of systems like this is. A grocery store near me recently deployed a brand new set of self check-out counters...running Windows XP. Amusingly the credit card/debit card reader is running Linux and shows the old-school penguin image on boot.
- cimmanom 8y agoI enjoyed seeing Tux on the boot screen of a seat-back in-flight entertainment system recently. And was also amused to see startup sequences for things like MySQL and postfix scroll by.
- mrguyorama 8y agoI don't. That usually means it crashed!
- cimmanom 8y agoThis was during pre-flight when normally all they play anyway is ads that you can't turn off.
- da_chicken 8y agoI remember when ATMs ran basically plain text terminal software and you had to drive to a bank to get one. It was a real blessing when ATMs started to show up in shopping malls.
- kalleboo 8y agoI've also seen ATMs displaying Internet Explorer scripting errors, and uninitialized Microsoft FrontPage Components