Someone please have mercy on this poorly Ubuntu parking machine that has been force-fed maudlin autotuned tripe
- Reference: 1597840744
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2020/08/19/bork/
- Source link:
In a break from the usual examples of Windows suffering a whoopsie, the screens serving the car park of an Asda in Falkirk, Scotland, are running a slightly unhappy Ubuntu by the looks of things.
Eagle-eyed reader Duncan Stewart spotted the scanner sadness last month on a socially distanced trip to the supermarket. Fortunately, he was spared from paying for parking.
[1]
[2]
Running in kiosk mode, both screens are out of order, or "OUT OFF ORDER" judging by the duct-taped bit of handwritten paper stuck over where the ticket scanner would normally be.
Spelling error aside (let him who is without sni cast the first stone), it looks to us like Canonical's finest would like an update, but there is nobody around to sate its appetite.
The good news is that the touchscreen appears to still be functional, judging by the antics of a previous user. After all, what better thing to do in the delightful Falkirk weather than fire up YouTube and check out the output of American singer-songwriter Trevor Daniel.
The parking prodder has elected to go for Daniel's seminal 2018 hit, Falling . The track has proven popular judging by the views of the official video on YouTube, even if one of your more musically inclined vultures declared it "maudlin autotuned tripe" before returning to the warm embrace of some terribly loud and shouty metal
[3]Pallbearer actually – ed].
Seems a bit harsh, although we should perhaps be thankful that it was merely the popster on screen rather than what Samsung [4]delicately described as an attempt to view "unsavoury content" following a borkage of one of its oh-so-clever refrigerators at a John Lewis store last year.
Those Falkirk screens, to be frank, look more than crusty enough as it is. ®
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[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/19/falkirkfail1.jpg
[2] https://regmedia.co.uk/2020/08/19/falkirkfail2.jpg
[3] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hd6wzHRQ2bM
[4] https://www.theregister.com/2019/10/21/internet_of_fridge_part_2/
[5] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Huh?
Och, it's muir than ma job's worrrth, laddie.
Re: Huh?
It'll ask for a password the moment you do if it's configured correctly that is.
Re: Huh?
Staff? Whats that? Definitely not something I find around my local supermarket carpark. They also seem to be hard to find around the actual Supermarket as well. Bloody self service kiosks...
Re: Huh?
Not the store staf'f's job or equipment, the parking contract is almost certainly outsourced and the operator pays a good price to be allowed to manage it. Store staff unlikely to care that you're using a parking space to go for a walk around the other shops.
One store locally uses the same sort of scheme - park 30 mins for free, park upto 2h free if you spend £5 in store. Finally got into the habit to check if the machines are even working, before popping in to spend a fiver, as it's broken often enough to let me avoid the extra time sink.
Out of order
See title for grammar nazi fodder
Re: Out of order
Out off order
It has been mentioned in the article, from the start...
Thanks for the tips
I'd never heard of Trevor Daniel or Pallbearer. I won't be listening to the maudlin autotuned tripe again but Pallbearer absolutely demand further investigation.
Re: Thanks for the tips
Agree. Pallbearer sounds a lot better than the description "loud and shouty metal" made me expect.
As for that Trevor lad: nope, just nope.
Re: Thanks for the tips
Strangely, autotune filtered vocals always give me a splitting headache. No idea why. Thankfully all such so-called "music" is crap, so I'm not exactly missing anything by avoiding it.
Re: Thanks for the tips
How weird Jake, your boring, self involved posts on any Linux thread give us splitting headaches!
Re: Thanks for the tips
Jake, you do know autotune has been used for decades on all sorts records, your just pobably not aware of the 99% of times it's used.
Why did they set that unit up with a full fledged consumer desktop environment?
These automatic updaters are a menace. Keep the system on an offline network and all your problems go away.
Working to a budget. When it loses enough revenue to cause problems, they can spend some money to tighten things up. The device needs to talk to the outside world anyhow, I doubt the parking company wants to set up their own network infra.
Full fledged consumer desktop environment?
Shit, that thing probably has a full developer environment on it. Why bother with a targeted sub-set of the DVD when "install all" is a mouse-click away?
As we all know, having the full GCC system on a parking kiosk somewhere in the wilds of Scotland might come in handy someday. Might be fun to switch the language to Tagalog ... and the calendar to Julian. They left in the options, so we might as well use 'em, right?
Huh?
Since these are touchscreen devices, you'd have thought that a member of staff could have acknowledged the messages and let the relevant software complete it's updates.