In various spots around the city, mostly on the railings that ring the entrances to subway stations, video billboards have been placed. They're like the Jumbotrons at your local sports arena, built with an array of rasterized colored lights, but much smaller—say, two feet wide and four feet high. A cycle of ads usually run on these things, silent commercials for TV shows, upcoming concerts, soft drinks, and so forth.

I hadn't really been curious about what sort of computer hardware lay behind these displays, but now at least I know that it's AMIBIOS and a Pentium 4 processor. That's because for at least the last three hours, the one on the southeast corner of Park Avenue and 32nd Street has been displaying its BIOS startup screen instead of its ads. (Or maybe this is an ad, for American Megatrends or Intel. But if so, it's not a very good one.)

At a guess, it's a lot more likely that the OS is Windows than, say, Linux. As amusing as a bug like this is, it reminds me of the various times I've approached an ATM only to see a Windows startup screen in place of the familiar menu. I don't know about you, but I'm always a little disturbed to be reminded how many of my financial transactions are handled by Microsoft.