Tech/Horsepower

Previously posted and imported from elsewhere

I was on vacation last week on the fine island of Puerto Rico. My fiancée’s good friend was married on Friday, so we spent the week in the territory and had a great time. We chose Delta, an airline which I mostly despise (but not totally despise, like American Airlines, but that could be another story). Delta was the cheapest airline available, we purchased our tickets just as they were emerging from bankruptcy but were also being threatened with a hostile takeover. A fantastic time to buy airline tickets, for sure.

The flights to the island were relatively uneventful, the typical pain-in-the-ass which is relegated only to air travel and a root canal with Orin Scrivello, DDS. The picture worth a thousand words (if it wasn’t terrorism) took place on the flights back from San Juan. At the check-in portion of airport terminals, it seems that many airlines (especially Delta) have replaced most or all real people with these ridiculously monotonous and extremely unfriendly “kiosks”. Enter part of your name on the touch-screen or slide in a credit card (no thanks, Delta, I’ll enter my name) and you get to check yourself right in. To make it worse (if forgetting that most people despise computers isn’t the worst) they usually have one or two obviously overworked and underpaid employees manning all twelve kiosks. These poor people are charged with not only having to hold the hand of most travelers through the process of check-in on these kiosks, and in most cases just doing it for them, they also have to check-and-tag each checked bag from every passenger at every kiosk. Nice.

So I was standing there, marveling at what an efficient process it would be if people liked to use computers and the employees were robots, wondering exactly how much money Delta saves by investing in these kiosks and canning real people. Just as I was deciding that Delta surely couldn’t be making money on a flawed system of very expensive but impersonal computers and overworked, understaffed employees pissing off all of their customers, I noticed something at the corner of my eye. Kiosk #1, all the way the beginning of the row, looked funny. Its screen was black. I glanced at my fiancée and pointed to the kiosk so she would know where I was going, strolled up, and a horrifying site beheld. It was a Windows 98 black screen of death! The screen with something to the tune of ‘Windows 98 cannot start because the following file is missing or corrupt: “c:\windows\system32”’ – it’s been so long since I’ve seen one that I can’t even recall the exact words. I was taken aback. The system in charge of running the airline’s check-in is based on WINDOWS? Not just Windows, but a vastly outdated, terribly insecure, networking-inefficient FAT-based version of Windows?!

Yikes. I didn’t know whether to laugh or be really, really afraid. So I chose to laugh, which attracted the attention of the manager-looking Delta employee who was giving me a very unnerving look. Just as it dawned on me to grab the camera so I could take a picture, he gave the nearby TSA “agent” a look of “come over here and get this guy to stop laughing at my broken kiosk”. We were ready to head to security, so I decided not to push the issue. Jail in San Juan for taking pictures of the airport was not something I was to tempt. The flight to Orlando to connect to Columbus wouldn’t have been bad if it wasn’t for the air conditioner leaking buckets of water all over the front of the cabin. The steward closest, in first class, was too busy taking drink orders to notice the three gallons of water pouring onto the floor. So I walked up, gently tapped him on the shoulder and said “excuse me, the plane is leaking” and pointed to the pond in the middle of the floor. He looked at the pond, then up at me and said “Oh, so it is!” and stood there looking very nervous. My goodness. The next 30 minutes was filled with hilarity as three janitors hooted and hollered around the leaking air conditioner, mopping up the water only to be mocked by another gallon of water pouring out, and attempting to “wipe” the water away from the ceiling panel from which it was dripping as if wiping it with a handful of paper towels would somehow stop the deluge. It really was hilarious.

But back to the story. We eventually landed in Orlando and are walking to our next gate for the flight home. We stop by one of the big monitors for arrivals and departures so we can find our gate, and what do I see in the lower-right corner? The Windows XP “desktop cleanup wizard” popup bubble, reminding every passenger that Delta has not run the wizard in over 30 days, and it might be a good idea to clean up the desktop icons. Again, as innocent as it is, I didn’t feel like being hassled about taking pictures inside the airport, so I passed on this hilarious picture opportunity as well. So it seems most of Delta’s computer infrastructure is Windows based. Hey, at least this one is XP.

Having something critical to say of Windows is probably coming as a shock to my friends; they know I’ve never shared their same spooks about Microsoft. There is great deal of value in their products when properly chosen, implemented, and understood. However in this case I’m pretty frightened that a major airline would trust so many systems (and who knows how many mission-critical systems) to something as, in the very least, fickle as Windows. A nicely chosen Linux distro seems to be a much more favorable alternative for reasons I shouldn’t even have to list. Google ‘Linux versus Windows security’ to start. The first topic that comes up today is from a favorite news source, The Register, I recommend taking a look.

So, in this case, two pictures would certainly be worth a couple-thousand words, but not at the risk of being branded a terrorist. Instead I deliver 1,033 (according to Microsoft Word).