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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".
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?
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*.
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.