Well...I've seen those types of error messages at the McDonalds in 30th St. Station in Philadelphia often enough around 12:30 a.m. They're system always seemed to crash itself when it tried to update either 1.) The time 2.) The system 3.) Menu prices. We could never tell, but it always crashed at the same time every day. You'd think they would have investigated it...guess they were too busy making burgers.

I do have to say though, as much as I hate Windows, atleast most of the time its error messages are somewhat understandable or it GIVES you error messages. I'm somehow finding ways to crash Linux constantly (Im gifted with the ability to break any OS, I swear) and most of the time it doesn't even give an error message. Just...crashes. Hard.

Its such a different world from Windows, I find myself tearing up at the thought of turning in my Windows key. My. God. I'm. Sad.

Excellent.

One thing I've nver quite figured out about people that design these high-profile systems, like the video displays in airports: why do they think it's a Great Idea to make the system control display and the application output display One and the Same?

Sure, you save $45 by not having the extra VGA card, but look at the embarassment it gets you...

The best of these has to be the one on the cash machine at Lloyds at Hyde park station.

I remember being in vegas once when one of the large billboards on the strip was doing a windows crash message.

I was wondering around Times Square in New York a couple of days back, and noticed not one but two instances of Windows crashing - once on the MacDonald' s menus there (as Chris mentioned above!) and another taking up the bottom third of one of the many flashing billboards...

This is so funny! You'd think for such things they'd use something reliable like Linux or FreeBSD - much cheaper to set up as well!

I won't even get involved in the whole anti-windows thing, but it is really really simple to catch the error and reset the video, close the process, open a SWF file of a spinning logo, etc.

It's bad development on the part of the application programmers more than anything. I used to do kiosk stuff in both Windows and Linux, and those noddy errors are the bane of kiosk development.