All their memory
are belong to dump

Clever advertising campaign for Apple I say.

@virtualmatt: lol
as long as they can keep 3rd party hack apps from causing the same problem

This is my new wallpaper, anyone got a high res copy?

It worked for the XMas Ring of Death and it works here:

EPIC FAIL

It's art.

@virtualmatt: You should work as a campaign consultant. Seriously. That is some quick wit.

Now if the person responsible for those PCs could get the Giz running on there, I think he'd have himself a Nokia Internet tablet...

Imagine the burn-in on those screens, someone is screwed.

who the hell lets a computer let alone one running massive displays on the side of a building sit at a bluescreen for miltiple days, restart the damn computer or install XP for gods sake.

@phantam: Have you considered that rebooting the computer may prove difficult?

I remember when I was doing tech support for this guy who had an island in Central America. In order to reboot the computer, I had to go to this little quonset hut on the other side of the island, listening to some dumb Aussie in short-shorts yammer about tigers, all while having to worry about velociraptor attacks.

Stupid Unix system.

it's canada. they're a bit slow.

The power switch to this server must be near the same place they keep the beer. I can understand the distraction.

Umm...monkey couldn't push the button no more?

Who wants to bet that the guy in charge is a Mac fanboy? Greatest OS X advertisement ever.

@omg-ponies: So you're saying the delay is due to the Toronto Raptors?

I know this intersection well. The BSOD replaced the too early Christmas ads. My guess is that most pedestrians prefered the BSOD to Christmas commercials the day after halloween.

With the soaring Canadian dollar, everyone is shopping online/south of the border. No one has been in that shop for weeks.

@Danomite: The Canadian Dollar is not soaring; the US Dollar is plummeting.

do I detect the odor of a viral ad campaign?

@omg-ponies: You're correct that the US dollar is plummeting. However, the Canadian dollar has been performing strongly against all world currencies.

@OMG-Ponies: It's both; the US dollar is dropping and the Canadian dollar is rising against all other currencies.

@omg-ponies:

And all you really needed to do, instead of crossing the island in a big storm and getting eaten up by dionsaurs was to wait for a 13 year old girl to come along and say, "Unix? This is easy."

that will be an awesome MacOS X Leopard Wallpaper

@leicaman: I wanted to, but no. They sent me on down to reboot the damn thing.

Plus, who the hell designs a computer that needs to be primed before it can be reset?! Probably some fat-ass, Cheetos-fingered idiot who couldn't get a job delivering the mail.

You know what my suggestion was? Send the samrt-ass girl and doe-eyed boy down there first as bait to distract the raptors. But some douchebag in a leather Members Only jacket and eurotrash glasses said that that would be wrong.

hahahahahhaha i work there i see that every day

The WOW is now.

@drewheyman:
Very witty indeed... How long did it take you to come up with that gem?

If they had a XP box driving the display, they would be back up and running in minutes. I wish they would have called me, because I have a solution for them.

And here's a similar thing. Not BSOD, but annoying nonetheless: [i.document.m05.de]

@otherorange: Oh cruel not-so-ironic irony. Given that the comeback came 16 comments and over an hour later, I'm guessing that you are in fact Canadian?

"N'oh Canada.
Their homes will be our land!"

(I'm just kidding of course. I love going north of the border to rest and relax. It's like taking a nice, extended nap.)

@92BuickLeSabre:
or that some people have better things to do than read the same Giz comments forum all day.

@otherorange: That sucks. I'm glad I'm not one of them.

Oh crap, yes I am.....I was supposed to do my routine check of the display screens here at The Bay like 3 days ago!! I sure hope everything is still working okay!

@otherorange:

Not long, but i didn't booze last night, so I must confess my mind is pretty sharp.

Leopard upgrade?

How come this always happends, no one fixes something for days. Come on, where's the computer controlling the screens? On the outside of the building three stories up? Just switch to a Mac.

Its the Bay they can't afford tech support.

I saw this the first day it happened and immediately thought of posting it here, but then I saw something shiny or thought about Portal or something. Anyway, what I really wanted to say was this: It's kind of hard to see in the photo, but these really aren't 'screens' as such. They're more like really loose pixelboards, just strings of controllable lights. The resolution on the actual field of lights is really low, as the lights are SO far apart. So much so that you can't really even read the BSOD text, you can just sort of make out that there are lines of 'something' there. Anyway, yay Toronto. :)

I walked by this the other day and didn't even realize it was a BSOD. Someone just sent me a link to this posting. I thought it was some crazy art. It wasn't easy to tell that there was text as the previous poster mentioned.

Meh.. Macs crash all the time too. There's just so few of the machines around nobody notices. I've had the same PC for 7 years. I've never had a BSOD, never had to reinstall WinXP for any reason, never had a virus that my Virus Scanner didn't catch first.

@Peebert:
I think it's an LED array.
Similar to the kind NIN uses on stage.

Source Four display screens on The Bay in Toronto suffers the BSOD for days — GizmodoYour FaceBook or MySpace profile could cost you your job — SwitchedDiscovery Channel to air video-game documentary — KotakuiPhone launch in UK isn't exactly the same as US launch — Shiny ShinyTeamSugar user Shiloh...

@drewheyman:

Hey drew.. we (canada) sure are slow .. just like your american dollar

I know that venue.
It is the Richmond Ave. Bay Store.
It was scheduled to be upgraded to Leopard earlier this week for the display system Mac.
It is a tiled 4 panel multi-display setup - 2 ATI cards w/dual DVI out (the leftmost panel does not appear in the photo).
I know, because our company, Digital Signs, is in charge of the large panel display system for that venue.
That is a OSX BSOD I'm afraid.

One of the best BSODs I have ever seen.

It's not BSOD - it's advertising funded by the Apple Store.

@gizmodome: OS X uses Black or White backgrounds for kernal panics. So why is the backround blue?

Gizmodo reports that this may be the biggest BSOD ever. It went on for days. A few people have sent me this and asked if this was our work. They think maybe we rented these screens and did this on purpose. You know what? We didn't. You know why? We don't have to. That's the beauty of Windows.

It might be big, but it is not the "bigges BSOD of all time" ... not even the biggest BSOD in Toronto! Just north of this at the corner of Queen and Dundas there used to be a 7-story high display/billboard for "Ask Jeeves" the thing would roll the "what are people asking right now" feed to pimp the service and one glorious weekend it was crashed for about 40 hours - a 7-story BSOD shining like a failed electronic god down on the city. It was wonderful :)

(NOTE: I always thought a 7-story DogPile feed would have been more fun, but this city is too tight-butted for that ... )

The only reason its on a Windwos PC is because there is no damn Mac OS X application that does anything other than the basic crap :-)
The reason there is less crahes in Mac is because there are less apps out there for it.

@gizmodome: OS X does not have a BSOD. an OS X Kernel Panic looks like this: [en.wikipedia.org] - this image is overlayed in the centre of the screen. See? Macs look pretty even when they crash.
@jeewaka: I get on fine without Windows. (MS Office and Adobe Creative Suite both run on Macs, but I prefer iWork against the former.) Besides, we have Boot Camp, Parallels and VMware Fusion.