Computer Glitch Halts Seattle New Year's Fireworks 202
supersat writes "At the stroke of midnight New Year's Eve, Seattle's fireworks show ground to a halt. The source of the problem is reported to be a corrupted file that wasn't checked until the last minute. After two reboots, the fireworks had to be detonated manually. And yes ... one blog commenter, claiming to have worked on prior shows, said that the shows run on Windows."
Runs on Windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Runs on Windows? (Score:5, Funny)
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If you're a straight guy looking to masturbate, what's the difference between two chicks getting it on, and two dudes?
Re:Runs on Windows? (Score:5, Funny)
Pardon me, but your Freudian slip is showing...
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Re:Runs on Windows? (Score:5, Funny)
Like when your co-worker drops his coffee on his lap.. you don't hate the co-worker, but you have lots of fun at his expense. "Coffee's hot, I bet."
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Anders
Re:Runs on Windows? (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now, a comment on a blog is hardly trustworthy, so the second thing pointing this out does is put the claim out there for actual reporters to verify, if they choose to do so. It might even stir up some comments by Microsoft or the company hired to do the show.
Mo
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But even this is irrelevant because as you should know and other slahdotters state, file corruption under window
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LoB
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Could be, but then the news would be that the previous 13 editions everything worked well.
Seriously, of the last two presentations I saw, both involving dvd video playback on XP, one failed miserably in front of 100 people, the second had periodic glitches (maybe the screensaver kicking in?) in front of 600 people.
Speaking as someone who just discovered his mplayer isn't fin
Lessons in reliability? (Score:3, Insightful)
Yes the underlying reasons for this happening are of interest to us, since many of us are charged with implementing or running systems, while not as showy, have to run to pay the bills.
Yes, the operating system in use is an issue, since it has part of the job of keeping files from being corrupted. It has the job of catching errors.
It was a flashy semi-failure in our collective business, we would be the stupid ones not to learn all we
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There's a saying: Of what you see on TV, believe 25%. 5% if the reporter is wearing a windbreaker.
The article was posted on the P.I.'s website at 1:55am, less than two hours after the problem occurred. That puts this fine piece of journalism in the esteemed company of football post-game loser interviews.
As a sysadmin, I hear accusations of "corrupted files" regularly. Very rarely is the problem actually a corrupted file. Shock
Culture (Score:3, Insightful)
However, the point of many Microsoft 'haters' on
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But honestly, from a neutral observer of channel 5 in a bowling alley, I didn't notice any problem with the fireworks and I can guarantee nobody else there did, either. They said it was 'out of sync with the music', well, we couldn't hear the music, and the big blast happened at exactly midnight.
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I couldn't connect to my webserver last night during a power outage. Incidentally, that server runs on Linux. Giggle giggle snort. My niche with mod points will love that!
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Credibility does matter (Score:2)
Of course, because everybody knows Linux has always been much more reliable than anything that comes from Microsoft.
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So /. just takes the word from some blogger that "claims" to have worked on the show?
/. would have demanded more proof or conveniently forgotten about that blog?
How much you want to bet if this blogger said it ran on Linux,
More Proof?
How about this:
The New tears Seattle show was produced and directed by Pyro Spectaculars. who list the Seattle shows as well as the Olympics, and a number of other very well known fireworks shows as events they've managed. They do not, however, list the software they use on their website.
On the Infinity Visions [infinityvisions.com] website we find news items listing the same shows as being managed by the software they market, including the 2005 Seattle show. The software is windows only (it is vist
Re: Runs on Windows? (Score:2)
When you say "this year", are you sure you didn't mean "the year before last"? Why would anyone switch from Dreamweaver to GoLive in the year Adobe announced to ditch GoLive for Dreamweaver? GL isn't even included in CS3 anymore, and Adobe heartily reccomends switching to DW.
Now, switching from GL to DW probably wouldn't be such a hot idea just prior to a big proj
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" I know of a graphics shop in town that swore by dreamweaver and switched to GoLive this year, just prior to starting a major web project...."
When you say "this year", are you sure you didn't mean "the year before last"? Why would anyone switch from Dreamweaver to GoLive in the year Adobe announced to ditch GoLive for Dreamweaver? GL isn't even included in CS3 anymore, and Adobe heartily reccomends switching to DW.
Now, switching from GL to DW probably wouldn't be such a hot idea just prior to a big project, but from DW to GL? Now? That sounds insane.
Heh, when I said "This year" I meant 2007, and yes, it was insane for a number of reasons....
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I wonder if you can have the manual-firing and show control up at the same time, so that, although it runs automatically, there's someone still hitting the contacts to fire them by hand. Once they see the show-control computer is running right, they can stop doing it manually, but still follow the cues in-case it goes down again...
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I'm just curious... what drugs are you on? I just searched both articles and neither said anything about a BSOD except for a comment half way through one of the article. I mean
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LoB
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Would you care to list them? Apart from errors caused by people using old ext3 journals after they'd accidentally mounted a partition as ext2 and modified it, I'm aware of no recent reports of file corruption bugs. There was an invalid inode size problem about a year ago that could cause a system hang, but as I understood it ext2 and ext3 couldn't create that invalid size itself.
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Ext3 is flawless unless your doing something very low level or the physical media has a problem.
Even then its pretty damn good.
It wont one day just corrupt data unlike Windows (Home server at least).
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Care to list all the ext2/ext3 file corruption bugs that have existed in Linux over the past 5 years?
Few and far between. I recall 2.4.15 was a dontuse because buffer flush to disk was completely broken, which broke all file systems. Oops. Fixed within hours, obviously never shipped by any Linux distribution. A few years earlier there was a corruption bug on file tails that could be triggered by certain access patterns, the only known example of which was inn (internet news). The 2.6.19 kernel was a dud release with a subtle dirty page bug that Linus personally tracked down and killed over a 10 day p
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Actually, it would be rather nasty if we found out that the "Periodical Windows File Corruption Routines" spared system files.
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Windows XP could not start because the following file is missing or corrupt: \WINDOWS\SYSTEM32\CONFIG\SYSTEM
That seems to happen quite randomly, not sure of the cause, but it's happened to me on three (of five) systems, after a clean shutdown and all that. One of those times it happened on holiday, when I didn't have time to fix it, and another time it happened just as I was about to leave to a LAN party.
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can't really be sure if the program you are using has the possibility to corrupt your files.
So from a users point of view this is basically "randomly corrupting files" when it happens.
There's no list because MS can't possibly know what programs do or don't setup the scenario. From a user's perspective, it doesn't seem like this is a huge deal, because you'd think that it would be all over, but it's not.
This is M
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I have sometimes had my windows core files just corrupt for no reason, how am I supposed to know if this was the reason or not?
I'm sure lots of people save files and then never, ever open again. Sure. Also, it only occurs over a FILE SHARE, so why would something in \windows be 1) shared and 2) overwritten through said share and 3) using the file mode specified in the KB article? Not likely. More likely is a c
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Oh well. That's what patents are supposed to do
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Doesn't run on Windows® (Score:4, Funny)
It's obvious what happened (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's obvious what happened (Score:5, Funny)
Re:It's obvious what happened (Score:5, Funny)
do you want help with that?
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It's windows. You either click 'Yes' or 'No'. However, you have to read the dialogue to know what you are saying 'yes' or 'no' to.
So, in this case, it should have been 'Click yes if you want to not continue on, losing all fireworks settings, or no if you want to continue on without any issues.'
I hate those!
BTW, The Mac style guidelines (IIRC) say that clickable options on any dialogue have action associated to them. So, in Windows, it asks "By removing this file, other software might stop working.
Obviously... (Score:5, Funny)
Sounds Vaguely Familiar (Score:3, Insightful)
Gee, who can guess which version of Windows they were running?
Microsoft's Windows Home Server corrupts files [computerworld.com]?
Last MS caused disaster... (Score:3, Funny)
...or 2008th first ?
The best part is that it happened in Microsofts backyard.
--
Just trying to get my first "Funny" tag in 2008
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LoB
You need more data before you jump to conclusions (Score:5, Insightful)
How about the reputation of the fireworks people? (Score:2, Informative)
Pyro Spectaculars [wikipedia.org]. They have been in business for 30 years, have done multiple Olympic game shows and do other high profile shows every year. You can compare that to M$'s reputation for screwing everything up.
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What blows me away is that with that kind of history, they didn't have a backup system so the show still went on and sync'ed to SOME music. Obviously, engineering is not something they thought was important when it comes to their computer control software and hardware.
Makes you wonder what kind of things are getting put into oth
Re:You need more data before you jump to conclusio (Score:2)
Re:You need more data before you jump to conclusio (Score:5, Interesting)
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trigger and off they go using their own clocks. Its not like they need to individually slowdown/speed up because you just said that cannot be done, tho
it should have been possible with multi smpte signals from a generator with individual speed controls/pause/restart modes.
Even in more past earlier days on Amigas using 3 to do music+stuff, we only syncronized the
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If you look up corrupted file you will see that every operating system known to man has to deal with that. There is no operating system that can magically correct the corrupted file and cause a fireworks display to run correctly. That is just silly talk.
ZFS checksums everything, and mailing lists and blogs are full of people mentioning that it's detected and corrected corruption on their HD's. Sometimes it's corruption that's been happening unnoticed for years on other filesystems, aside from the odd mysterious crash, now reduced to a number in the CKSUM column of zpool status (provided there's a good alternative copy, which doesn't have to be on a different disk).
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Yes, that's what you would expect. But if this really were a Windows glitch, it wouldn't be the first time. I remember something about a Windows file server system silently corrupting files...that was on Slashdot a few days back, IIRC.
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See: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ZFS [wikipedia.org]
Also, I'm betting they were using consumer-grade hardware, which is notorious for skipping the 5$ extra chip needed for ECC.
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Everything you just said would've cost more money. I'm pretty sure that wasn't a priority.
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I'm pretty sure it is now.
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Running a fireworks show is not a high availab
The Blue Screen of... OOOhhh! AHhhhh!! (Score:5, Funny)
Hello 2008...just like 2007 (Score:2)
And yes
I see Slashdot is going to resort to low brow sensationalism just as much in 2008 as they did in 2007.
New Years Resolution (Score:3, Funny)
Why Windows? (Score:4, Insightful)
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So don't dismiss this is just a fireworks show. Sure, the Space Shuttle isn't going to come tumbling down if the system fails
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Since the synchronized fireworks display was the mission, and the actual firing of said fireworks was critical, yes, the system in question was mission critical.
At least they didn't use the Window's "time" stuff (Score:5, Funny)
10... 9... 80.. 6430... 6... -3..
happy new years
Re:At least they didn't use the Window's "time" st (Score:2, Insightful)
corrupt file - windows? (Score:2)
Yes, in my blog you can read I run Windows Etch.
I mean I THOUGHT I had installed Debian, but as I read the article it seems corrupt files are a Windows thing so I must be running Windows Etch....
Video (Score:2, Informative)
BSOD renamed to... (Score:2)
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Dear Alberto (Score:2)
It doesn't matter which OS you use as your controller, you ALWAYS have a fail-safe machine, or two.
I bet you'll remember that in the future.
ALWAYS.
Yes, I WAS a show tech.
Fireworks synchronised to music, suck. (Score:2)
It never seems to work for me. The reason, is that they synchronise the mid-air explosion to the music, not the kaboom that accompanys the launch of the shell.
That is, every shell goes boom and a few seconds later when airborne, boom again. The second boom is usually a lot quieter. This is also before you add in the delay of the boom getting to you based on dis
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It's a growing trend to synchronise major fireworks displays to music.
[...]
It never seems to work for me. The reason, is that they synchronise the mid-air explosion to the music, not the kaboom that accompanys the launch of the shell.
Actually, I think they synchronise it to the visuals of the explosions, which works fine for me. The "kaboom" sounds are more of a necessary evil, IMHO. You still have to be close enough to the speakers, of course, otherwise the light will reach you before the music. At one major show I watched, they compensated for this by slightly delaying the soundtrack in the speakers farther away from the fireworks.
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Yeah, that's what I meant.
The "kaboom" sounds are more of a necessary evil
Are you kidding? Without the Earth-shattering kaboom, it's just a screensaver.
Didnt notice.,.. (Score:2)
Re:Real Story (Score:5, Funny)
Dear Taco,
I realize retirement is good but could you please come out of hiding, fix the code that shows the url a link points to in case it redirects...
And if not then please release the IPS of these clowns, I promise I won't leave any traces.
Happy new year
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127.0.0.1 xrl.us
127.0.0.1 myminicity.com
127.0.0.1 tubeurl.com
127.0.0.1 tinyurl.com
127.0.0.1 tinyurl.co.uk
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the mods are smoking shitty crack i guess...
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Because of their past history [computerworld.com]. It's a common legal practice to take into account former violations [wikipedia.org] when accusing someone.
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Yes, it is. The UK police tries, condemns, and executes on the spot people who look or behave in a suspicious way [wikipedia.org]. This is absolutely normal, they have to start somewhere. Who are the usual suspects? In the case of computer programs misbehaving, Microsoft Windows gets the rap, if no other evidence is available. Or would you prefer the police to start investigating people at random when any crime is committed?
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Re:relevant enough to plagiarize (Score:2, Insightful)
The hypocrisy lies in building prisons and interrogation centres in foreign countries to avoid those pesky American laws that would otherwise prevent the activities that go on in them. You seem to be under the mistaken apprehension that allowing the indefinite detainment and torture of suspects
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If I were to venture a guess, I would say "people who have been doing exactly that, successfully, for a number of years."
``A Linux system would work much better''
Yes, but would it actually run the show? You need applications for that, you know.
``Using a Windows machine was just asking for a "Hundreds hurt in fireworks accident, Windows to blame" headline in all major US newspapers.''
Unlikely. Windows has been to
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So what? When it comes to the design and implementation of process control systems, the simple fact that something can be made to work has no bearing on whether it will continue to work! What matters is that the fundamental design is sound, and that the implementation was tested. Even then, things go wrong
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But, hey, I have many years of practical experience with demolitions