Pay no attention to the PowerPoint slides behind the curtain

By Matt Wood in News on Feb 14, 2006 9:27PM

CTA Tattler posted some fun pictures yesterday that a reader snapped at the revamped Jackson subway station. An information screen went rogue, revealing the software running beneath. From the looks of it, the monitor was just playing a PowerPoint presentation on Windows XP, but someone forgot to lock things down. Riders even got to see a helpful security popup letting them know that the computer wasn't running a firewall. Neat!

This is red meat for all you anti-Microsoft zealots out there. Trust us, as a Mac user, Chicagoist dislikes Windows as much as the next geek. But in this case we think it isn't so much a Windows thing as it is an amateurish deployment. As some of the CTA Tattler commenters pointed out, the system is working properly, but whoever configured it was just lazy. C'mon CTA, how many f-ed up public computer terminals do you have to see before you realize you can't just plop a PC out there to fend for itself, in a subway station no less, and expect it to run smoothly? We know you're not exactly flush with cash, but if you're going to this much trouble, you could at least spring for some profesh touch-screen displays like they use in the museums.

Since this is the day of love, we'll let you slide CTA; you guys are trying to implement some cool technology. You just need to try a little harder.

Image from CTA Tattler