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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.
This is interesting. If I hit it in Mozilla, I immediately get service unavailable. If, however, I just telnet in, I get the page after a few minutes of waiting.
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.
Do you have ESP?
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.
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!
There's also a big difference between a paper catching fire and an IR remote signal getting confused by flashbulbs going around it. If you read the blog, you'd see they just went ahead with the slideshow manually. The Xbox game was kind of unexcusable, though (although, Bungie did pull off an impressive demo during E3 last year, so it kind of makes up for it).
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".
Wait... does this mean that the slashot story coverage claiming that the "Media Center PC Presentation Crashed" was an exageration? Say it isn't so...
"It takes considerable knowledge just to realize the extent of your own ignorance." - Thomas Sowell
Windows is crap, no surprise there.
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.
$ telnet blog.seanalexander.com 25
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)
I work for the Department of Redundancy Department.
It was my understanding that the machine suffered a BSOD. If it did not in fact BSOD and only had ir pointer problem then what is the big deal. I hate MS as much as anyone but I am not going to bust anyones chops over a ir pointer gone haywire. On the other hand if it did BSOD or suffer a shell reset then they deserve every bit of criticism they get.
Got Code?
> I'm glad that I outed you as a former MS employee,
:) Oh dear, I think I'll be turning my tail and running now. The great "Doc Ruby" is after me! It's too bad he didn't even bother to find out whether I can fight.
:( Now you'll actually have to get off your lazy butt and walk ten feet to the DVD player and press the PLAY button. Such torture! How did people ever survive without remote control?
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
It's an interesting explanation, but I'm having a lot of trouble buying it.
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*.
I've seen IR sensors saturated by bright sunlight fail to capture signals. On a live stage those overhead lights would probably have the same effect.
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.
A physicist is an atom's way of thinking about atoms
How does a power failure cause a blue screen of death and how does a usb booster cause infrared interference? His "explanations" really don't make any sense at all and seem to be distracting blame from the products that failed onto things that had little to nothing to do with it. Don't fall for this blog article it is obviously part of a coverup as to what really happened.
411 Y0UR 8453 4R3 8310NG 70 U5!! -NSA
Speaking of technical glitches when it matters most, here's a quick story of a wedding I was running sound for (not something I normally do, but I was drafted).
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
Better known as 318230.