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Hello Group,

this evening I decided as every so often to get some money out to
purchase these mundane essential household items like food. Life's
better with something in the fridge. Unless of course you live near
the Polar Circle where one does not need a fridge, but I won't go
there.

The woman in front of me using the machine seemed to take forever, and
I was already starting to grumble something like 'why are these darn
people always so slow' etc.etc. Turns out my own prejudices have again
got the better of me (generally thinking that most people in this city
are a complete and utter clueless waste of space who don't care and
don't know about anything more than an inch away from the tip of their
noses [this generally seems to hold true, but not always, as generally
already implies]) and this person's actually got a good reason to look
a bit dumbfounded and sort of helpless. She turns around and says 'the
machine's kept my card' (slightly panicky tone here). I take a look at
the screen and right there, on top of that NATIONWIDE logo and kiosk
interface, a box with a Windows XP logo saying something about an
error and 'Please wait...' in the title bar. Blimey. They do run
Windows on these things?
I had always assumed that services as crucial as these would run on
some sort of Unix and that banks knew what they were doing in IT.
After all, it's about money. Then again, they may not care that much
if you can't get yours out. But I definitely know which one I'll never
open an account with, or even try use their machines.

It didn't get better for her and after a few more seconds of Windows
showing signs of deep confusion the box disappeared and the kiosk
interface changed to an 'Out of Service'. No money, no card. B*ll*x.

In the end she's lucky I guess, she is living locally and can complain
to the branch tomorrow, and they might be able to fish out her card.
Failing that, the bank she got the card from is just up the road, so
she can get a new one. Only takes about two weeks. And tomorrow is not
good enough. Why should she and her one year old have nothing to eat
this evening because she can't get hold of her money, or overdraft,
because a bank made a crappy choice. They either had incredibly bad
advice or some board members chose to disregard good advice and go
with 'the safe choice', what they run at home. But this invokes real
costs, and thinking back this cash machine is down half the time I
walk past it. The UK has always been a MS shop, now more than ever, at
least seven years ago they had the occasional (one) copy of SUSE or
Mandrake on the shelves, they're long gone. As always, at least you
can choose between five disk defragmenters and about 12 AV programs in
PC World.
I only hope other banks here have got more sense and aren't doing
exactly the same.

To make it more on-topic, would this have happened with Slackware? I
think we all know the answer.

Good night.

--
B.Hoffmann

Using google groups while getting slrn configured. GUI newsreaders
suck. It's a pity that Opera can only fetch 250 messages when first
subscribing. Apparently that can't be changed according to their
website, it's a huge drawback. Well, Opera wasn't designed for
newsgroups, it's just an add-on.

Made the jump with Slack12 from a VM to a T42. No, not the tank.

dark.project@ntlworld.com wrote:

> Using google groups while getting slrn configured. GUI newsreaders
> suck. It's a pity that Opera can only fetch 250 messages when first
> subscribing. Apparently that can't be changed according to their
> website, it's a huge drawback. Well, Opera wasn't designed for
> newsgroups, it's just an add-on.

It seems Mozzy's Thunderbird isn't much better on nntp. I just moved
from the joys of a 5G/s broadband area (metro CA) to a 2K/s dial-up area
(remote CO) and am stuck with using a XP box til I get my slack boxes
up. T-bird asks for username and passwd 3 times and then downloads 4-10
copies of the same post giving me hundreds of duplicates. Whatta piece
of crap. Time to point wget at slrn and see if I can't get a copy in 2
or 3 hours.

nb

notbob wrote:
> T-bird asks for username and passwd 3 times and then downloads 4-10
> copies of the same post giving me hundreds of duplicates. Whatta piece
> of crap.

mileage does vary eh? I've never _ever_ seen this kind of a problem with Thunderbird

On Thu, 04 Oct 2007 09:00:52 -0400, the_bmac wrote:

> notbob wrote:
>> T-bird asks for username and passwd 3 times and then downloads 4-10
>> copies of the same post giving me hundreds of duplicates. Whatta piece
>> of crap.
>
> mileage does vary eh? I've never _ever_ seen this kind of a problem
> with Thunderbird

I prefer the 'nix way of using small focused programs to do a single task.
I have not been pleased with any combination mail and news reader. I stick
with pan.

OTOH, the advantage of using a product like Thunderbird is lack of a
Window manager dependency. For example, Evolution requires Gnome, KMail,
et al, KDE. Pan, while officially a gnome product, does not depend on it.

JM2C



--
Peter

<dark.project@ntlworld.com> escreveu na mensagem
news:1191453254.858769.265290@g4g2000hsf.googlegro ups.com...
> Hello Group,
>
> this evening I decided as every so often to get some money out to
> purchase these mundane essential household items like food. Life's
> better with something in the fridge. Unless of course you live near
> the Polar Circle where one does not need a fridge, but I won't go
> there.
>
> The woman in front of me using the machine seemed to take forever, and
> I was already starting to grumble something like 'why are these darn
> people always so slow' etc.etc. Turns out my own prejudices have again
> got the better of me (generally thinking that most people in this city
> are a complete and utter clueless waste of space who don't care and
> don't know about anything more than an inch away from the tip of their
> noses [this generally seems to hold true, but not always, as generally
> already implies]) and this person's actually got a good reason to look
> a bit dumbfounded and sort of helpless. She turns around and says 'the
> machine's kept my card' (slightly panicky tone here). I take a look at
> the screen and right there, on top of that NATIONWIDE logo and kiosk
> interface, a box with a Windows XP logo saying something about an
> error and 'Please wait...' in the title bar. Blimey. They do run
> Windows on these things?
>

....I guess they do... Here in Portugal, my guess is that ALL ATM machines
run some version of Windows... I remember even seeing a DOS 6.2 screen once
in one ATM being serviced... They probably ran Windows 3.11 on top of it...!
I've seen shutdown screens of NT ("You may turn your computer off"), BSOD
(any version will offer you these) and DOS 'dir' listings... I'm not badly
impressed as you are though, since they work quite reliably around here -
error screens and messages are quite rare indeed, at least in my everyday
experience. They probably started using the wintel plataform because it was
a 'comodity' platform, widely supported and since it works, banks just kept
the thing going. I doubt the costs of reconverting such a network to another
OS would compensate, given the benefits that could be collected.

Best regards

Paulo

--
I don't have a sig...

On Oct 4, 3:06 pm, "Paulo Costa" <paulocosta[at]uniarde[dot]pt> wrote:
> <dark.proj...@ntlworld.com> escreveu na mensagemnews:1191453254.858769.265290@g4g2000hsf.g ooglegroups.com...
>
> ... remember even seeing a DOS 6.2 screen once
> in one ATM being serviced... They probably ran Windows 3.11 on top of it...!
> I've seen shutdown screens of NT ("You may turn your computer off"), BSOD
> (any version will offer you these) and DOS 'dir' listings...

That's how serious they take customer service, using an OS'es for
service provision that are known to be unreliable.

> I doubt the costs of reconverting such a network to another
OS would compensate, given the benefits that could be collected.

You're probably right, as long as it still sort of works and people
don't complain. Tidy profits are everything to banks, and we now live
in an era where each year achieves new heights in record profits. All
by mostly screwing people over.//Sorry, end of rant.//

B.Hoffmann

On Oct 4, 12:39 pm, notbob <n...@nothome.com> wrote:

> from the joys of a 5G/s broadband area (metro CA) to a 2K/s dial-up area
> (remote CO) and am stuck with using a XP box til I get my slack boxes
> up.

> nb

Oh no, can't even imagine the pain. Is it worth it?

B.Hoffmann

On Thu, 04 Oct 2007 11:47:46 -0700, dark.project wrote:
> On Oct 4, 3:06 pm, "Paulo Costa" <paulocosta[at]uniarde[dot]pt> wrote:
>> <dark.proj...@ntlworld.com> escreveu na mensagemnews:1191453254.858769.265290@g4g2000hsf.g ooglegroups.com...
>>
>> ... remember even seeing a DOS 6.2 screen once
>> in one ATM being serviced... They probably ran Windows 3.11 on top of it...!
>> I've seen shutdown screens of NT ("You may turn your computer off"), BSOD
>> (any version will offer you these) and DOS 'dir' listings...
>
> That's how serious they take customer service, using an OS'es for
> service provision that are known to be unreliable.
>
>> I doubt the costs of reconverting such a network to another
> OS would compensate, given the benefits that could be collected.
>
> You're probably right, as long as it still sort of works and people
> don't complain. Tidy profits are everything to banks, and we now live
> in an era where each year achieves new heights in record profits. All
> by mostly screwing people over.//Sorry, end of rant.//
>

Some months ago, I saw some kind of commercial - I don't know what
they were selling, but the scene is a cop car slowly patrolling some
dark alley. They chat up some street guy, ask him something, and he
says, "Oh, you have to press F8 to get your boot options..."

Let's make sure that Homeland Security relies on Windows! ;-)

Cheers!
Rich

On Wed, 03 Oct 2007 23:14:14 +0000, dark.project wrote:
> I take a look at
> the screen and right there, on top of that NATIONWIDE logo and kiosk
> interface, a box with a Windows XP logo saying something about an error
> and 'Please wait...' in the title bar. Blimey. They do run Windows on
> these things?

It gets even better:

Linked from www.theinquirer.net

http://zparks.lv/lat/literatura/e_risinajumi/?doc=1152

>
> http://zparks.lv/lat/literatura/e_risinajumi/?doc=1152

Great! Lost for words. As usual, people are placing too much
confidence into the competence of institutions.

B.Hoffmann