Honored guest Bork visits Warsaw, Poland
- Reference: 1735815615
- News link: https://www.theregister.co.uk/2025/01/02/bork_comes_to_poland/
- Source link:
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You're almost done...
In this case, it's an advertising display at a train station in Warsaw, Poland revealing that it is running Windows – or rather is trying to.
At least it's a current version - it will probably warm the hearts of many at Microsoft to see an OS that is actually still in support as opposed to the usual suspects – Windows 7 or XP – lurking behind the display. Windows 10 and 11 are increasingly filled with nagware, as evidenced by this screen, which we are fairly sure is running Windows 10.
At the end of a normal Windows set-up, Microsoft likes to give users the opportunity to engage with its services. Fancy some cloud storage? There's OneDrive for that. A bit of browsing? Just fire up Edge. Need to do some productivity tasks? Microsoft 365 is right this way…
"Continue" will send the user into a warren of configuration screens for Microsoft's many and varied services. It can be skipped but, unless one turns it off in the Notifications and Actions section of Settings (for Windows 10), it will relentlessly pop up every time Microsoft wants to sell something let users know about new features or following a major update.
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The practice has continued in Windows 11, where the setting "Show the Windows welcome experience after updates and when signed in to show what's new and suggested" is hidden away in the Notifications section of Settings.
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While this might be merely irritating for a user glaring at a laptop, it is downright catastrophic for a poorly configured advertising display where there is no way to click skip, unless this is a touchscreen and passengers can, in a very real sense, put the boot into Microsoft's helpful suggestions.
Register reader Peter Valuks told us that he'd spotted the borked unit while taking in the sights and sounds of Warsaw prior to returning home to Fife.
[5]Raspberry Pi 500 and monitor arrive in time for Christmas
[6]Apple's backwards design mistake and the reversed capacitor
[7]Biz Daemon is too cool to respond to fans of his big screen work
[8]The amber glow of bork illuminates Brighton Station
We were delighted to hear that he'd also managed to visit the computer section of the Museum of Technology during his trip, which can be found in Warsaw's [9]Palace of Culture and Science . While there, he spied an [10]AKAT-1 prototype, an analog computer built in 1959 to solve differential equations.
It's a glorious looking thing, even if it never troubled mass production.
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It also never felt the need to flash a helpful screen of services a customer might want to avail themselves of. Progress, eh? ®
Get our [12]Tech Resources
[1] https://regmedia.co.uk/2024/12/18/warsaw_bork.jpg
[2] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=2&c=2Z3bGNEx1tDYrMVKhYc4-JwAAAQM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D2%26raptor%3Dcondor%26pos%3Dtop%26test%3D0
[3] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z3bGNEx1tDYrMVKhYc4-JwAAAQM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[4] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=3&c=33Z3bGNEx1tDYrMVKhYc4-JwAAAQM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D3%26raptor%3Deagle%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[5] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/09/raspberry_pi_500_monitor/
[6] https://www.theregister.com/2024/12/02/apples_design_reversed_capacitor/
[7] https://www.theregister.com/2024/10/26/biz_daemon_app_error/
[8] https://www.theregister.com/2024/09/04/bork/
[9] https://pkin.pl/en/home/
[10] https://www.retrothing.com/2008/08/akat-1-retrocom.html
[11] https://pubads.g.doubleclick.net/gampad/jump?co=1&iu=/6978/reg_offbeat/front&sz=300x50%7C300x100%7C300x250%7C300x251%7C300x252%7C300x600%7C300x601&tile=4&c=44Z3bGNEx1tDYrMVKhYc4-JwAAAQM&t=ct%3Dns%26unitnum%3D4%26raptor%3Dfalcon%26pos%3Dmid%26test%3D0
[12] https://whitepapers.theregister.com/
Re: Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science
Good points! It's better to remember history than to repeat it ... the outfit currently holds a [1]War up Close exhibit that " unveils the details of the atrocities against the Ukrainian nation " ... pretty much an anti-perspective to Stalin, Putin, and their nefarious ilk.
On a lighter note, I'd expect that in due time, museums the world over will also start featuring such dystopias as PC OS configuration in the late XXᵗʰ - early XXIˢᵗ century (in addition to their more regular fare) and I'm glad Reg Reader Peter V. brought us this colorful datapoint from Warsaw!
But AKAT-1, wow, beautiful screen and legs! Today's [2]actualized descendant , while not entirely as glamourously bodacious in curvature, looks [3]quite capable and worthy imho ... it does do mass-spring-damper, neuronal bursting, Lorentz attractor and more, all without the choppy little bits of digital that can stay stuck in your teeth ... yummy!
[1] https://pkin.pl/en/news-and-events/war-up-close/
[2] https://hackaday.com/2021/10/03/forget-digital-computing-you-need-an-analog-computer/
[3] https://the-analog-thing.org/
Re: Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science
Re: Remembering history, yea and verily , though I could do without the refresher courses into which we seem to periodically enroll.
Re: the analog system. . . a former colleague of mine told a tale of analog computing from his grad school days in the early 1960s, when electrical engineering departments were abandoning such "outmoded" technology for the new shiny future of digital computers.
His PhD advisor, it seems, was having trouble with a FORTRAN program solving some sort of gnarly partial differential equation * .
My colleague took note, trotted down the hall to the then decrepit analog lab, wired up a plug board, and had the solution in minutes. Hero for the day.
Sometimes the old songs are the best songs.
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* Are there any other kind?
Horses for courses ...
Kids, just say no to Windows for digital signage. It's not the right tool for that job. I know, I've tried Kiosk Mode and it's useless. Yes I know Windows is used in just about every airport round the world to hopefully display where you're going, but that doesn't make it right.
But then, what is? I've tried Ubuntu, Ubuntu Core, and some other packages without enduring success. And then the sun came up. Big shout out to PiSignage. Get a Raspberry Pi (any model, even Pi 1s), download the player image, register on the web site, off you go. It just works and works and works. It's so good you could (dear Baldrick) brush your teeth with it.
It doesn't help that just before Christmas someone took out the TV it was displaying on with a big step ladder, in true Who, Me? style. I never liked that TV anyway, it was an LG that didn't understand CEC commands over HDMI. Ho Hum.
Re: Horses for courses ...
But how else would signage contractors justify massive expenses when the customer finds out it's running on a bunch of Raspberry Pi(s)?
Is there no end to Windows nags and adware.
Actually, forget I said that, because I know there isn't.
If it were in a Scandinavian country would it be Bjorked?
The world needs a new OS
that isn't based on greed/addon sales.
maybe an AI will make one for us. We all known companies are to greedy to make anything that doesn't spy/harvest data.
Something from SCRATCH. no dos or csv for structure, no c++ or python, something so well coded the entre OS takes less than a few megs to run itself. And the browser, oh gads, goog and ms have driven that down to a sad state of bloat on bloat to eat your goat.
Warsaw's Palace of Culture and Science
The Palace of Culture was a "gift" from Joseph Stalin, maybe in recompense for when the Red Army watched from over the river while the Nazis flattened the city.
It was said that the best thing about the Palace of Culture was that it was the one place in Warsaw where you couldn't see the Palace of Culture.
I went there in 1994, when the Palace of Culture was the only skyscraper. I went again in 2013, when it looked like Manhatten.
I asked my Polish colleague which he preferred. He replied, "which do you prefer, Cholera or Typhoid?"