Microsoft's Technical Glitches at CES Explained

Thomas Hawk writes "Sean Alexander is one of the guys on the Media Center Team at Microsoft who was involved in the CES presentation with Bill Gates. Sean also runs a very interesting blog called Addicted to Digital Media. Gates and Microsoft have taken a lot of heat over the course of the last two days for the technical glitches in Microsoft's presentation at CES. Sean offers us the rare glimpse on why the glitches happened and what it's like to be backstage at the big Microsoft presentation at CES. Very good follow up on Sean's part." Update: 01/08 19:03 GMT by T : Hawk writes with a static link to Alexander's story.

Behind the Scenes at the CES Keynote

[Anonymous Coward]

[Disclaimer: the following comments are my own based on my own perception of events. Provided as-is and confers no rights]
Wow, things have been so busy here at CES that I'm just getting around to blogging, starting with my promised behind the scenes of the Bill Gates CES 2005 Keynote. I've done a short version and a long version for those who have been emailing, asking me to follow up on my earlier post.

Summary
Wednesday night, Bill Gates hosted the 2005 CES Opening Keynote along with his surprise guest, Late Night's Conan O'Brien. Overall I think things went well, but as can happen with live events with so many variables, there were a couple of technical issues noted by sites like Engadget. The key thing for me that I could have done a better job on-stage pointing out is that despitea small glitch with a remotecontrol (IR) receiver, a single Media Center ran all theMedia Center demos andwe kept rolling despitethe hiccup. According to the postmortem, it appears a 2nd IR receiverrun over to Bill's seat failed, so the Media Center never got the signal. It could have been all the IR interference in the venue- cameras and plasma displays and lights, or the powered USB booster - a piece of equipment that gets a USB signal over a long-stretch. The production team also handled a small power outage exceptionally well in the minutes leading up which might have contributed. These things happen and the team pulled it out despite some obstacles out of their control.

Below is my account of what was happening back stage.

Rehearsals
Setup and runthroughs went great the day before and day of.We did about a half-dozen individual runthroughs and 3-4 end to end runthroughs. Everything was running great except for an intermittent Internet bandwidth issue. We replaced a router and that appeared to solve part of the problem but bandwidth continued to be intermittent as I noted in my previous entry.

15 Minutes Till Showtime: Makeup
Yes, we had to wear makeup. I sat in a chair next to Conan and we discussed our Irish roots and he was cracking jokes. The night before, I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to have dinner with Conan and a few folks from his Late Night team at Nobu in the Hard Rock Hotel. What a great guy, a great storyteller and super-funny. I can see why he's been announced as the next host of The Tonight Show when Jay steps down.

Showtime!
For the account below, here are my own thoughts and the timing is approximate thanks to Engadget :)

6:30pm - Everyone is charged up and ready to go. Gary Shapiro, President of the CEA (host of CES)is getting ready to go on-stage. But firsta little background - in order to drive the slides and overall production coordination, a sort of "Mission Control" is set up backstage to drive the technical systems - slides, prompters, timers etc. We're settling in for Conan's monologue when two electrical engineerswalk behind themain operations tables to check a piece of equipment. From my vantage point, one the UPSes (Uninterruptable Power Supplies) has been triggered and they're troubleshooting.

6:31pm - Everything is still running- troubleshootingis going onin the dark with flashlights, more engineers and members of the production crew are working methodically, as the UPS is running down, tracing connections, circuits. I'm standing clear w/ my team going over what I want to say. I find out later the presentation systems are all on the same UPS- slides moved to backup and systems are being powered down.

6:40pm - The UPS is going. The Xboxes for the Forza Racing game sneak preview demos (which we had back stage due to space restrictions on stage) lost power. It appears the main demo systems on-stage weren't affected except for Xbox from what I can tell. Their bringing their demosback up.

6:41pm - Keynote starts. We're looking good- the power circuit is back but the production team decidesto continue on backup PPT cuing systems as best I can tell. The show must go on. :)

Blooper Video

[antdude]

Click here [zdnet.com] to view a streaming video. It shows Conan O'Brien [nbc.com] easing the tension with his classic humor as Bill Gates [microsoft.com] encountered problems with his remote control while demoing the Windows Media Center.

Mirror here:

[Anonymous Coward]

http://mirrordot.org/stories/5aee263e631cd510f6540 3b6904151fa/index.html [mirrordot.org]

IIS - that explains it!

[Hamstij]

Wow - not even half a dozen posts and his website is already down.

But Netcraft (and "What's that site running?") goes a long way to explaining why!

blog.seanalexander.com Windows 2000

Re:Up and running Win XP 64 build 1289

[JustNiz]

Oh man what a troll. Do you even check your 'facts'?

1) There IS 64 bit Linux. (e.g. RedHat Enterprise 3 64 bit version)

2) The analog to a start menu was in the first Apple Mac GUIs, WAY before Windows.

3) Popup blockers have been around a LONG time in mozilla/firefox etc. IE has just finally got a very poor implementation of it.

4) 3 button mice were on many Unix Workstations as standard at least 15 years ago, At that time you couldn't even buy a 3 button windows mouse. Middle mouse button usage is stil far better integrated into the X window/Unix/Linux world than Windows.

Re:Same machine

[bigman2003]

Wow...you must be fun at parties.

The second poster was actually furthering the first posters joke.

First poster "ha ha...the webserver doesn't work either"

Second poster "he he...no, it's working...but the report only consists of the two words 'Service Unavailable', which sums up the problem"

So now I'm in the asshat category for trying to explain it...oh well.

Re:Never seen Steve Jobs in this situation

[kristofme]

Here [macobserver.com] is just one of many examples (from a while back).
Of course, keep in mind that he gives demos all the time, and more so than Gates, so it's bound to happen now and then..

Slides located "here"?

[ansak]

As in here [engadget.com].

fwiw: I got into the page after 15 tries, myself.

cheers...ank

Re:Unrelated

[Anonymous Coward]

FireWire (IEEE1394)

a hot swappable power carrying serial bus (I'm referring to ADB, which is what USB is essentially a newer implementation of)

Not IR remotes...

[Anonymous Coward]

In conferences, it's more likely to be the focus bracketing IR beams on cameras. These can cause havoc as they spread over a wide area - a high-end SLR may have as many as 7 or 15 beams used to determine focal distance. If you have an IR viewer you can get some really neat pictures in conferences as people snap away - hundreds of beams lancing all over the place as the autofocus kicks in.

While I would say that they should have anticipated this, the actual risks wouldn't have been easy to test or replicate beforehand - you'd pretty much need a room of random model cameras snapping away while you tried your remote. In most cases, I'd go for a wired remote over anything else - remember a conference is a concentrated gathering of devices you can't control, rendering Bluetooth, WiFi and IR risky at best.

Having said all that, the continuous outage looks more to be a kit failure (as mentioned in the article) - an autofocus would give you a split second blast of IR which would cause a momentary glitch.

Re:Bill Gates

[MaynardJanKeymeulen]

Well, assume 800 million computer out there running.
Don't know how reliable this [answerbag.com] is, it was the first thing I found while googling.
(while looking at that page, take a look at the "previous question" too, quite funny)
Let's underestimate and say that 500 million of those run some form of MS Windows.
Each user uses his computer 1 hour a day (again underestimating I think)
this gives 500 million hours of computer time a day.
Windows lasts (for the sake of simplicity, don't forget a lot of those computer might still use Win9x)
50 hours before Bsod'ing, which gives 10 million Bsod's a day,
so It would take mr Gates 280 centuries.

Conclusion: he must be very old.

Re:Up and running Win XP 64 build 1289

[Paul Jakma]

Linux was ported to the 64 bit DEC Alpha, one of the first ports of Linux (first by Linus anyway, but there were earlier ports to, I think, m68k by others), over a decade ago.

Linux has been 64 bit for ten years. Before many *proprietary* OSes!

(NT for Alpha was not 64 bit, it was a 32bit port.).

Re:Config

[Trelane]

Your entire posting is factually incorrect, imho. The defaults for most things I see on my Linux desktop are correct and usable (e.g. by default, there is no WEP key or essid set; one can connect to any open AP). You sound like you either have little experience with Linux, or are very experienced with Windows and expected Linux to be just like Windows, which is next to impossible, and saw enough to convince you that your pre-concieved notions were right. From your postings below, I see that you're a former Microsoft employee, so that is quite likely the case.

So all Linux programs have their ugly text configuration files which require hundreds of manual pages to describe every possible configuration option without giving a single example of what should be the most common setup (a home user on a personal desktop).

This is also quite incorrect. Linux distributions aimed at non-geeks all feature highly usable graphical user interfaces for both installation and configuration, and should be usable with only a little help if the user is inexperienced in Linux. They do store the information you choose in a text-based configuration file, which you may use in lieu of the graphical interface if you so choose (similar to the Windows Registry, which you could also edit directly instead of dealing with the graphical user interface, if you had manual pages to guide you). Of course, if the user is coming from another operating system, it will likely take a little adjustment to get used to the new locations and phrasings, but this should have minimal impact, if the user is not hostile to the change.

"all Linux programs", "ugly text configuration files", "require hundres of manual pages to describe every possible configuration option". These are all phrasings which are not only incorrect, but which are hyperbolic, intended to distort perception and which are the hallmarks of either high emotion or trolls. Hopefully, you are the former, not the latter, and I may talk to you after you've calmed down a bit. But for now, for my own sanity, I wont' discuss things like this with someone who's hostile to them.

Re:BSOD

[EddWo]

It wasn't Media Center that bluescreened, it was an XBox. The Media Center PC ran fine throughout the presentation, it just wasn't getting any signals from Bills remote.
The XBox was running an unreleased preview of a game due out in April. I think it was a debug build because the error that appeared was an Assertion.

The screen read:

Assertion Failure
Out of System Memory. If you are loading, try decreasing your...

File: \mainHeap.cpp
Function: SimpleHeap::Alloc
Line: 355
Version 1.04.12.14.47..
PERF Build

Press A for a mini-dump
Press B to continue
Press X to break.

I've never done any XBox development, but it appears that type of error is caused by a problem in user code rather than a kernel failure. Sure they ought to fix it before the game is released, but it doesn't seem like a major problem. How often do Xboxes bluescreen in the real world running a release build?

Re:Same machine

[kv9]

or you have your alternate [msu.edu] definition.

Re:Deja vu

[Anonymous Coward]

There's never been a Blue Screen Of Death(tm) on ANY Xbox...

You might be talking about the GSOD, though...

The machine running Forza BSOD'd

[Anonymous Coward]

The machine that was running Forza was the one that had a BSOD. It wasn't running on an X-Box because the X-Box doesn't have a BSOD, it has a green screen of death. Either that or some developer thought it was funny to make errors in the game look like a BSOD, in which case he picked the wrong time for a joke :)