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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.
Seems to be running his blog on the same machine as they used at the CES presentation.
The explanation we were all waiting for! Bill Gates' demo failed because...
:)
"Service Unavailable"
That makes it all clear in just 2 short words! Great summary
"Backups are for wimps. Real men upload their data to an FTP site and have everyone else mirror it." -- Linus Torvalds
Remember that video that was floating around of Win98 blue-screening during a presentation? Good times.
[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.
Click here to view a streaming video. It shows Conan O'Brien easing the tension with his classic humor as Bill Gates encountered problems with his remote control while demoing the Windows Media Center.
Ant(Dude) @ Quality Foraged Links (AQFL.net) & The Ant Farm (antfarm.ma.cx / antfarm.home.dhs.org).
http://mirrordot.org/stories/5aee263e631cd510f6540 3b6904151fa/index.html
But Netcraft (and "What's that site running?") goes a long way to explaining why!
blog.seanalexander.com Windows 2000
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?
Has anybody ever seen an OSX box crap out on Steve? I have not heard of this or seen it.
Hmmmm.
Good excuses are still just good excuses.
JsD
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.
Things would have gone better otherwise.
to see BG's machine craps out when he needs it the most just like mine does when I do.
Unfortunately for me, I don't have anyone to fire.
You know you're a geek if you've ever replied to a tagline.
The most interesting part of this story is that Alexander still has all his fingers left to type a report on the debacle.
The other most interesting part of this whole story is that the rest of us don't have Alexander, the MS Media Center Team, or the Windows source code. So when we get the BSoD, we're left scratching our heads. That's why we use Linux: with Open Source, we're as privileged as Bill Gates, to whom Windows is Open Source, because he's got the keys to the vault. His CES debacle should open everyone's eyes to the difference. Especially the "communists" in the global IT community who'd rather not spend more on Gates' closed source, and get less - and get hung out to dry with a crashed Windows app thousands of times a day, around the world.
--
make install -not war
If Bill Gates had a nickel for every time Windows crashed, he'd be... oh wait never mind
"Service Unavailable TM" is a registered trademark of Microsoft Corporation. Copyright 2004-2005. Other registered marks that Slashdotters may not use without appropriate attribution include:
Please see the Microsoft Trademarks website for additional details.
fwiw: I got into the page after 15 tries, myself.
cheers...ank
Still hoping for Gentle Treatment...
Explaining what went wrong in the demo, and how environmental factors contributed to the glitch/crash, misses the point that the audience so obviously got:
Microsoft products have problems with crashing. Everyone who uses them knows that. Conan knows that. Bill knows that.
The amusement factor is that even the leader of the company knows that and experiences it in the most sensitive moments.
If you need software to run critical proceses in a nuke plant or an airplane, would you use Microsoft products?
All year I read about how Bill Gates is the wealthiest, most successful businessman in the world. I don't want to hear about internet access challenges when you are showing off technology that uses the internet. At that point in the keynote I began to wonder why is Microsoft even at the show (nevermind the keynote address)? Shouldn't the keynote be given by a person from Sony/Apple or some other vender that can deliver reliable hardware and software?
The Forza Motorsport demo should have been a slam dunk. Who wants their console gaming experience to be more like a pc experience? With the Xbox Microsoft is introducing unreliability in the gaming console market. Bravo.
They should only have a small booth in the back of CES in my opinion.
In my other life I do tech for a local community theatre group. Folks, anything can happen during a live performance. No matter how much you might prepare, stuff happens, and it happens in front of everybody. Power can fail, body mikes can break, lamps burn out, RFI can wreak havoc. You can't prepare for every eventuality, but you can handle the situation with grace.
It sounds to me like the Microsofties did fine.
Say what you will about Microsoft but I think it's really great the amount of communication that they are sharing with the public through blogs and posts like this. I think that to work somewhere where you can post a blog entry about technical glitches at CES and not get fired is pretty cool. Microsoft's most famous blogger, Robert Scoble, is often offering up posts that many might find to have "anti Microsoft" tones and he can do so without fear of losing his job. Sometimes criticism, even self criticism, can be a good thing and allows us all to improve. What impressed me the most about Sean's post is that it was allowed to happen at all. It adds a very human element to Microsoft and opens up a way for Microsoft and the public to directly communicate. I think the tollerance that Microsoft has and the willingness to be open about problems and issues with their software is refreshing and will make the company and the software that much better in the long run. Kudos to Sean and his team. They did a great job and pulled off a great recovery in one of those awkward technical moments that we've all been through ourselves in the past.
Whatever happened to running rigged demos for trade shows? Heck, Bill ran a rigged demo _during_ the antitrust case _in_court_. Are we to believe that they have forgotten how to do a rigged demo in recent years? Why would they put themselves through all this ridicule?
I know a salesman that tells a story of running a rigged demo every 45 minutes for 2 days straight during a trade show in order to sell pharmacists on the idea of getting a computer system. It's not all that uncommon a thing to do.
Sure, media center is a little complicated to rig a demo for, but it's a lot easier than putting up with the aftermath of 3 BSoDs. I'd rather have something approaching a slide show than have Conan O'Brien make fun of me. (too bad they don't have any rich-media slideshow software to write this in, like Hypercard or something)
But that's their problem. I really don't care. Any "media" PC that has DRM is something I don't care to buy. If it comes to not being able to buy some movie or whatever that won't run without DRM telling on me when I do so, I'll just pop in a VHS tape or a commercial-stripped DVD and enjoy myself anyway.
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.
I've said this before many times... Apple isn't innovative, they are an early adopter. With a good track history of picking the right things to adopt.
Apple was the early adopter in the GUI/mouse controlled interface, 32-bit systems, 24-bit color displays, laser printing, powered serial bus, CD-ROM in every system, the sacking of the floppy, Combo driver (DVD read/CD writer) in every system, network capability in every system, 64-bit systems...
In none of these cases did Apple invent the technology, nor were they the first to market. In all cases Apple implemented the technology in their systems well before the technology/ideas started to be implemented elsewhere in the PC industry.
This is directed toward Sean. Great explanation of the events leading up to the hiccups. All-in-all, it sounds like you guys did a bang up job. I'm a bit curious, however: Roughly how long was that USB extension, and how much did the USB repeater cost? I've been a bit interested in that. And, as said above, cell phone fan is being, at a minimum, unduly harsh. I could almost understand a post like that if the reason for a failure was "we forgot to test" or "the media center PC had spyware". It was a live show. I've done live shows and demos, I've taught multiple classes, and I know how things love to go wrong. (Ugh... that senior citizen's MS Office class.... bad memories...) None the less, it sounds like you and your team handled it gracefully, with a witty ad-lib recovery (which, I might add, was appropriate because of Conan's presence). And right now, you're doing what Microsoft as a whole should be doing: being open and transparent, and explaining everything that could get wrong.
Imagine that. I wonder if they have contacted their hardware vendor.
Join the Slashcott! Feb 10 thru Feb 17!
Whatever the reasons why the presentation failed in this particular case, in general it is a bad idea to use non-wired technologies for important presentations where reliability needs to be assured.
Infrared and bluetooth and wifi are great for use at home where the environment is stable and controlled, but in a major international event like CES, the conditions are exactly the opposite. If one could see in the IR band, I bet the CES stage would have appeared swamped in a blizzard of unwanted IR confetti from numerous sources.
"The question of whether machines can think is no more interesting than [] whether submarines can swim" - Dijkstra
$ 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.
Your brain is not getting the message that the OS needs to be stable enough to handle changes like that. The proof of the kernel crash is the BSoD, regardless what caused it. What happens to the thousands of home users who do something like that, call Alexander? It's not acceptable to peddle something that fragile to unsophisticated users who just want to watch their movie in their darkened living room. Especially when they will *have* to use that piece of crap, because their movie is sold with DRM forcing them to play it on a Microsoft rig. Drop the baseless Microsoft apologies, flamer, and leave the "troll" accusations for mods who can't even post a hollow attack like yours.
--
make install -not war
When I was at Apple, if you were doing a demo in front of a large group and something crashed, the cry would come up from the audience "push-ups, push-ups!" with the presenter supposed to do push-ups on stage until the demo got fixed by the rest of the crew.
The best demo ever, though, was when the QuickTime crew was demoing some new stuff on Mac OS 7. They're going along, and suddenly the screen jumps into MacsBug (the old low-level debugger - this was what you got instead of the bomb screen if you had MacsBug installed). We all start yelling "push-ups, push-ups" and the presenter goes "Well, let's see if we can look a little deeper into this" and clicks the mouse. The MacsBug screen peels off and we get this video of guys banging around with hammers inside the machine. What a great setup.
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
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.).
I use Friend/Foe + mod-point modifiers as a karma/reputation system.
"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.
--
Given enough personal experience, all stereotypes are shallow.
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
Versions of Windows that have failed utterly:
Windows NT 3.5 for MIPS processors
Windows NT 3.51 for Power PC processors
Windows NT 4.0 for Alpha processors
Windows XP for the Itanium processor
Why? No one would write any software for these NEW NON-Intel compatible hardware platforms. Not even MS Office. Yes there was one version of Office for a RISC platform, Office 4.2 for the Alpha.
Your Average Joe
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.
http://books.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=71358&c
Q: How can you tell an extroverted computer geek from an introverted computer geek?
A: The introverted computer geek will look at his shoes while he talks to you. The extroverted computer geek will look at your shoes while he talks to you.
Q: How do you tell if an Extroverted computer geek is Russian?
A: His shoes look at you while he is talking.
I about died laughing when i first saw this, but your mileage will vary.
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
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 :)