Microsoft's Technical Glitches at CES Explained 428
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.
some folks never learn (Score:4, Interesting)
Well, try again and I don't:
mdchaney@fractal:~/taxi$ telnet blog.seanalexander.com 80
Trying 66.226.14.131...
Connected to blog.seanalexander.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
GET / HTTP/1.1
Host: blog.seanalexander.com
HTTP/1.1 503 Service Unavailable
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Sat, 08 Jan 2005 14:49:42 GMT
Connection: close
Content-Length: 28
Service UnavailableConnection closed by foreign host.
Re:Behind the Scenes at the CES Keynote (Score:1, Interesting)
Re:Behind the Scenes at the CES Keynote (Score:4, Interesting)
Random note...this same thing happened when Microsoft was going to demo the Xbox on The Apprentice...the xbox must suck some serious juice, or these road show teams just don't understand how much power one circuit can handle!
Re:Never seen Steve Jobs in this situation (Score:5, Interesting)
As far as I know, Steve Jobs has resorted to trickery for most of us presentations. The original iBook that had Airport used a custom external wireless video interface to display on the main screen (it cost more than the iBook itself). Steve claims he's used "Keynote" for most of his presentations (even before it was released), but the fact that it caused kernel panics on ATI hardware makes me question that. That's why he referred to as a "master showman" and not a "master presenter".
Re:Behind the Scenes at the CES Keynote (Score:3, Interesting)
No surprise (Score:2, Interesting)
But what I want to know is why you can walk around the show floor at LinuxWorld in the morning, before it's open to the public, and see so many Windows logos on the big projection screens they use for presentations. This always boggles my mind.
RTFA you moron! (Score:1, Interesting)
"The most disturbing report was that Steve Jobs, after his Mac OS X Server demonstration went awry, was obviously angry, cut his speech short, and left the stage so abruptly, that when the demo began working, he was long gone."
Re:CES keynote, a bad infomercial at 2am? (Score:1, Interesting)
That's probably the way it was originally, and then Microsoft bought out the Company was was supposed to deliver the keynote...
Re:come together (Score:1, Interesting)
Are we even slightly surprised it's down? (Score:3, Interesting)
Trying 66.226.14.131...
Connected to blog.seanalexander.com.
Escape character is '^]'.
220 dedi312 Microsoft ESMTP MAIL Service, Version: 6.0.3790.211 ready at Sat, 8 Jan 2005 08:00:47 -0800
(I didn't feel like checking to see if it was also an open relay, that would just have completely topped it)
BSOD (Score:5, Interesting)
You'll get beat up some day, you know... :) (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't recall hiding it. I'm happy to tell anyone who asks about Microsoft and how little basis there is for bashing it.
> Who knew that you actually produced that crappy software?
Excuse me, but I did not produce any "crappy software". In fact, it was all pretty damn good, considering what it had to do. I don't know how long it's been since you've actually used any Microsoft software, but it must have been decades, since everything made by Microsoft on my machine is functioning very well, thank you. Any crashes I've seen were caused by third party software, mostly by games. Furthermore, I've seen no OS crashes since I've left Microsoft, where I had to run all those "buggy" daily builds of W2K, which in reality were more robust than the Linux developer branches.
> selling your developer soul to the beast
If that's how you say "making a living", you have my condolences.
> you don't even know that the only universal
> language among programmers is "profanity"
I would clarify that "profanity" is the universal language of bad programmers. Good programmers don't curse as much because our code usually works, and we don't put profanity in it because we respect our coworkers and, generally, have good manners.
> when you don't even realize that Stallman, who actually *is*
> a communist, doesn't speak for all of us in the commercial, yet open, software biz.
Oh goody! Stallman is a communist now, but you are not? Would you be so kind as to outline your disagreements? You seem to be in the same boat to me so far.
> Calling me a communist gets you a "fuck you" on Slashdot, and worse in person
Is that a threat?
> Here's a clue: since MS source code is as open within
> an MS corporate project as is any GNU code to anyone
No, it isn't. You get only your group's source code, and only because you need it. You certainly do not get write access to any code that you are not directly working on. Although you can ask for the code from another group, it is not a common practice and I don't recall any instances where that happened.
> does that make the MS Redmond campus some kind of "commune"
More like a college, really.
> So drop the obnxoius "communist" rhetoric that betrays your fascist attitude.
Perhaps you could clarify your meaning of the word "fascist"? I am getting an impression that you use it as "someone who doesn't agree with me".
> rather than the monopoly fascism that you're defending from your ex-boss.
One of the reasons Microsoft has a monopoly is that nobody has written anything better. I don't consider OpenOffice as good as MSOffice, and OpenOffice seems to be the only noteworthy competitor. There's KOffice, and a few other copies, but nothing substantial. Why don't you write one, if you are so "secure in your own power"?
> the home users left hanging when they're just
> trying to watch a movie that requires Bill's
> latest monopoly gristle, and they were foolish
> enough to unplug the remote
Oh, you poor thing. Your remote is broken
Re:Deja vu (Score:2, Interesting)
Yes, it is absolutely shocking that a beta product that was demonstrated live at a tech show crashed at all.
I think all products that do this in the beta stage should be, by law, withdrawn from development and sale/distribution.
On a related note, I once installed a release version RedHat from CD, and after the process, the RH installation could not recognise the CDROM drive at all (i.e. the one it had previously copied about 1Gb of data from). I await the withdrawal of all Linux-based distibutions from the world with excitement :)
IR interference and a bridge to sell you (Score:4, Interesting)
My Myth box has a PS/2 keyboard connector, as well as several USB ports. I can easily connect a keyboard to it. If my remote control were to stop working for any reason, I'd still be able to control the system. I notice that the Alienware Media Center systems all have USB ports, too.
Given that they had set up a USB-based IR receiver with a powered USB booster, surely they were aware of the fact that relying on IR could be tricky. It's very difficult to believe that no one thought it might be a good idea to have some kind of backup input device that someone off stage could have used to kick off the damn slide show.
From the FA: "Sure, we could have had two Media Centers, but we wanted to show it all running off the same Media Center as a hub." This strikes me as classic misdirection. Like it would be utterly impossible to have one Media Center with two different input devices.
As I see it, either something more went wrong and this story was concocted to cover it up, or the whole team behind the presentation deserves to be fired for missing something so pitifully obvious.
I rather suspect the former.
I did enjoy watching Bill sit there all hunched over in his big cushy chair pecking away at the remote control. His plastic smile unwavering, even through Conan's "who's in charge of Mircosoft" comment. And then that weird comment about only having one remote control? No, Bill, it wouldn't be worse to have serveral remote controls, if they were for devices that actually *worked*.
a lot of heat (Score:2, Interesting)
The thing that they should take heat for is to call "communist" people who want to revise IP law. Microsoft deserves to take heat for that in particular because they are a convicted monopolist and the primary reason we don't have a free and competitive market in PC software.
Re:Not IR remotes... (Score:3, Interesting)
What happens is that the IR sensor signal is analysed for changes in amplitude (delta) rather than absolute signal level. If bright light saturates the dynamic range of the sensor then delta changes become smaller and smaller in absolute size and a delta falls below detection threshold.
Putting something over the IR sensor to cast a shadow would probably have been good enough.
Ian.
--
People are hired who build doghouses, then given cranes and expected to build skyscrapers. We're then surprised when they fail.
Re:Behind the Scenes at the CES Keynote (Score:1, Interesting)
And then the put on the 60hz hum remover, and pretend like everything's been fixed because you can't hear it.
Massve cover up! (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:BSOD (Score:3, Interesting)
A console typically allow much closer access to the hardware for performance reasons. So code running on a console does not have the same protections as code on a general purpose computer.
Second, this is not a kernel faliure, it is an Assertion caused by a low memory condition. The console OS is still running and is still accepting user input, hence "mini-dump", "continue", or "break".
An xbox doesn't have a general purpose windowing system underneath, so it can't display a nice polite error message, it just writes directly to the screen.
If you were developing and debugging a console game and you hit an assertion failure what would you expect it to do?
A Wedding Story (Score:4, Interesting)
I had the various wedding songs in mp3 format on my Dell notebook. I'd been given the cue that the bride was ready to make her entrance, so as soon as I started the Bridal March she would enter. I was just about to click Play on my notebook when it gives a siren-like sound (not out of the soundcard / line out, but out of some internal speaker) and turns itself off.
Now fortunately (extremely) for me I had copied the songs onto a CF card, so I popped it into my Pocket PC, plugged it into the soundboard, and the wedding began. There was maybe a 20-30 second delay which no-one even noticed.
After the wedding I found the problem. The HDD was somehow not well seated, and the alarm was the BIOS saying the HDD had failed. I popped it out and re-seated it and everything was fine.
I had used that notebook at least 8 hours a day, every day, for 3 years and it had never done that before.
Dan East