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Unisys Smoking Hot Demo at Linux World Boston
This year's LinuxWorld Boston started off with a bang...and a fair amount of smoke. Unisys apparently had a few problems launching their first demo, as our own Robin "Roblimo" Miller reports over at Newsforge (also owned by VA Software). From the article: "Less than an hour after the show floor opened at the 2006 edition of the Boston LinuxWorld Expo today, fire alarms went off and a plume of smoke arose from the server cabinet in the Unisys display. "I knew we had a magician scheduled," said one rattled Unisys employee,"but this isn't what I expected." Indeed, this was an unexpected event. It was a real fire -- or at least a considerable smolder, complete with firemen, evacuation orders (soon rescinded), and other hoopla. Photos and a video clip included."
Those are some sweet details and video...
Someone fall asleep at work again?
Its not what it is, its something else.
Yeah, I mean, it's all good... don't bother to give us a link to the article, or anything.
Was that the announcement they were going to make?
Photos and video clips included
Somewhere? Or did we already burn down the server with the media, too?
So much for "Photos and a video clip included.", the article has no links!
A pizza of radius z and thickness a has a volume of pi z z a
a beowulf cluster of "Powerbook 5200s" (see yesterday's news...)
"Win treats sysadmins better than users. Mac treats users better than sysadmins. Linux treats everyone like sysadmins."
Someone forgot to include a link to TFA.
t id=2&tid=18&tid=3
e 63f9af2eaad7d2090c
Luckily Google News came to the rescue
http://os.newsforge.com/os/06/04/04/169215.shtml?
Link to video:
http://www.newsforge.com/blob.pl?id=02083954d3d50
[Fuck Beta]
o0t!
http://os.newsforge.com/os/06/04/04/169215.shtml?t id=2&tid=18&tid=3
http://os.newsforge.com/os/06/04/04/169215.shtml?t id=2&tid=18&tid=3
The Preemptive Slashdot Effect.
http://os.newsforge.com/os/06/04/04/169215.shtml?t id=2&tid=18&tid=3
Get it while it's hot!!
Wow...
RobLimo the magician has managed to make the self-stated obligatory URL disappear!
That's all fine and dandy. One thing though: May I please have the URL?
Brought to you by Carl's Junior.
As soon as someone posts the link we will : )
Im not here now... Im out KILLING pepperoni
Really. Just shows some light smoke coming from behind a wall. And there is a loud beeping in the background which likely comes from a fire detector. Neither flames nor servers visible and although the video is 3MB large it is only 18 seconds long.
http://www.newsforge.com/blob.pl?id=02083954d3d50e 63f9af2eaad7d2090c
Okay from the video's and pictures on my really low res(800x600) lcd I would say that a powersupply to just one of the servers burned out.
Inside the case there didn't appear to be a lot of damage(a deck of cards was untouched).
I would love to know what happpened but hey it's on the spot news.
i thought once I was found, but it was only a dream.
server fires cause slashdot stories sorry.. someone had to do it
-Lod
someone's bound to get fired over this one. ... sorry.
Just maybe they were trying out some new server based on this concept.
George N. Capalbo, VP of backbone networks corp really got lucky with a shot of the flaming Moe.. um I mean, flaming Unisys.
Who would have thought that Unisys would go out with a bang, smoke, and wimper?
Hey, wasn't that Unisys, the evil patent holder of GIF...
Keep it up, Unisys.
Seems like calling their next iteration of this system the "Phoenix" would be obvious.
The links will be in the dupe, eh?
Or is this a new trick to get me to subscribe for your "journalism"?
In the subject line -- mods: recognize.
Smokin'!!!!!
GetOuttaMySpace - The Anti-Social Network
The way out of the building that is ...
Seriously, am I the only one who finds it ironic that the company that geared up with microsoft to dethrone unix/linux from the server centers now has one of the largest booths at linuxworld and is trumpeting the superiority of open source?
Bah!
I guess their boothbabes were just too hot.
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
In case of slashdotting, here is a picture:
\|/ <-----Smoke
+--+
| | <-----Server
| |
+--+
Just a year ago I had a Unisys employee rant and rave about how linux is the sux0rs and how Windows Cluster Whatever is where it's at...
Usually that happens after the /. story.
1 (short ton / firkin) = 89.1432354 slugs / keg
That was a cabinet holding, what look to this ex-stagehand, like a rack of dimmers, not servers. My guess is one channel of dimming or perhaps audio (though no one uses socopex for audio do they?) went up in smoke. It happens sometimes. Ask about the waterfall over the Christie Digital booth at NSCA 2005...
-dave
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
If the conference was being held in California, Unisys wouldn't been allowed to smoke their server inside the building and the server couldn't smoke within 15 feet of an entrance outside.
...when I was in the Coast Guard. I was demo'ing some shiny new bar coding equipment, plugged in the barcode printer, and smoke rose and sparks flew. That kind of squelched the demo.
The Coast Guard was a big Unisys customer for a while - lots of workstations running the Convergent Technology Operating System (CTOS). I'll bet that even here on Slashdot no one's heard of CTOS...
The Army reading list
For a second there, I thought the fire system was just being ran by a Windows machine that crashed which made the alarms go off. I mean come on, it must be the end of the world if a Windows box crashes.
Click Click Bloody Click PANCAKES!
I guess this gives a whole new meaning to "Burn all GIFs" Day.
Epitaph would never have these kinds of problems.
Oddly enough, the story link appears on the front-page, but disappears if you click-through to the article.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Holy crap, they're still in business?!
Arn't they the GIF assholes? Or LZW, LHA, or whateverthefrackitwas.
I had a job with them way back in the late 80's but the company they were working for canned the project before I even started. I'm so happy I never worked for them.
Yes. Just like the guy who filmed the Hinderberg. 70 years from now, this crappy video of smoke coming out of a little white tower will be as etched on the human consciousness as the Hindenberg tragedy is now. Give me a break.
I'd like to know what value is_computer_on_fire() returned.
Apparently the server was hosting one of slashdot's earlier stories today....
The lower couple of rack spaces seem to be used up by a distro box - I've seen similar types of multipin connectors used for both audio snakes and lighting. You can also make out some twist-lock power connectors and what look like BNC connectors (possibly wireless mic antenna).
Really. It shows some light smoke coming from behind a wall! Then there is a loud beeping in the background which likely comes from a fire detector! While neither flames nor servers visible, the video is only 3MB large, and it is a full 18 seconds long! :)
Ok, so forget stop drop and roll, forget calmly leave the building via the emergency exits when you hear a fire alarm, what you should do when there's a fire in the vincinity; try out your newest movie recorder! On the video you hear the guy taping say, "...uh, Movie mode, that wouldn't be a bad idea" as he turns the camera on it's side. Later adding, "There is a fire in their booth". This must be the same kind of jackass that doesn't pull over when there's a firetruck coming until the last minute, and then floors it to try to keep up. I hope he later told evenone, "d00d, I got the whole fire on this 1Gig memory stick! Technology is so kewl!"
fak3r.com
What is this "Hot Demo" they were smoking, and does it come in menthol?
Oh, you meant "Smoking-Hot Demo". Never mind.
It must have been something you assimilated. . . .
source
...resetting the circuit breaker in my machine as I go... ..to the next stall...
Mr Smiles likes the words "Fast", "Top of the Line" and "Expandable". He runs over to a machine surrounded in glitter and advertising and gestures at it. "This is probably what you want then. The latest thing. There's only two in the country and luckily we have one here today"
"Yes yes, but will it talk to my laptop?"
"THIS baby will talk to ANYTHING. What's the interface, ethernet?"
"No, a SCSI-1 Interface. My machine pretends to be a disk, ID 3. But lots of machines kill my machine's powersupply with inductive transience backflow due to a non-standard SCSI interface...
*DUMMY MODE ONE*
He practically BEGS me to try the new machine out. Which I've been waiting for. I drag out my luggable, which is, admittedly, a bit of a beast.
"Wow! That IS old!! And *ungh!*.. quite heavy too. I guess you're quite attached to it?"
I mumble about legacy data, only use it at home, sentimental value and irreplaceable software while he plugs it in and starts the host machine.
"Okay, let's see what we can see" he says, and presses the power-on switch on my "portable" The 31 hefty nicad batteries that make up almost the entire inside of my "laptop" pour grunt into a tripling inverter which in turn supplies RICH, CHUNKY VOLTS to alternate pins on the "SCSI" bus, whilst emitting a dull "uuurk" sound.
"My Laptop!" I cry, reaching for it, just as smoke starts pouring out the back of the display machine. Mr Smiles dives for the demo machine weeping, while I exit, in "anguish"....
Was is an Itanium or Xeon server rack that went boom? Unisys sells both, though in the case of the Itanics I use the word "sell" in the theoretical sense.
I keep telling people to switch to Opterons, if only because they run cooler, but noooooo...
http://www.cnn.com/2006/TRAVEL/03/31/airport.secur ity.waste.ap/
"or at least a considerable smolder, complete with firemen, evacuation orders"
It's all OK, this is Unisys, They Have the Way Out!
It is a form of evolution I suppose. There are two kinds of people. Those that go and see what makes that growling sound in the back of the cave and those that spend the night in a tree and have kids.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Don't worry, it was just someone burning some GIFs.
:-)
A little late though
Was it a Apple MacBook Pro Touch N Dim board? The one where you have to build a fireproof /explosionproof enclosure around the battery and power supply to prevent innocent bystanders from getting fragged when the thing explodes?
Or was it the new Microsoft Xbox360 Digital Porportional Dimmer Board? The one you have to fabricate your own cooling system or the whole thing goes up in smoke?
First rule of holes; When in one, stop digging.
At least with Windows, you just get the blue screen of death... not a core meltdown...
Windows 98 just crashed on Bill Gates. This demo seems to have crashed and burned (or would that be burned and crashed?).
Free Software: Like love, it grows best when given away.
It had better be at the full +5 Funny within an hour or I'll be pissed.
Just another Unisys ploy to use smoke & mirrors... only they forgot the mirrors so it's no wonder it didn't work right.
FragHARD or don't frag at all
From the article: few show attendees panicked
Have you ever seen the video of the nightclub in RI that burned down with lots of people inside a few years ago? Nobody was panicking there either. Lots of laughing and milling about. I'm not saying that panic is an appropriate response - just that fire is no joke. I'm glad everyone is o.k.
I know, I know. I'm here all week, folks.
Free Conference Call -- No Spam, High Quality
To the grammar idiot who mod'ed this "Off Topic"....
It's not about "weed" dude. It's about the fact that "Smoking Hot Demo" is grammatically incorrect", unless they're actually smoking something called "demo" and it's hot.
If the demo itself is "Smoking Hot", then it's "Smoking-Hot Demo". Take an English class for Christ's sake.
I spent some time doing Software Testing, and according to our team lead, a bug/defect was not a Sevrity 1 unless the server was on fire. I never managed to find a sev 1 (though we did have a defect for a server that had fan burn up that I had to verify - never could reproduce it, though). It looks like these guys found one of the fun Sev 1s. :)
It was in the article link in the middle of the Fine submission.
Sheesh, how long have you been using the internet? An hour?
Semey, Kazakhstan - An international arm's dealer show was interrupted when one of the nuclear devices, the Platnav 9 Fission Bomb, accidentally went off.
"It was quite terrifying," said international war criminal Boris Yupyuv. "People were glowing, skin was melting, and some turd in a tuxedo kept shouting 'I'm shaking but not stirred!'"
The faux-pa was attributed to an intern to Russian President Vladimir Putin, who apparently mistook the red button marked "Kill Everything" for a dispenser of his favorite brand of vodka. The fellow has since been punished by being made Russian ambassador to Italy.
Fire crews were on the scene within a few minutes, and the burning corpses were quickly put out. Several hundred AK-47s were deemed too irradiated to be used and were sold at firesale prices to Hamas.
The world's burning. Moped Jesus spotted on I50. Details at 11.
I hope they're embarrassed. I hope they look bad. I hope they lose business. We still remember the shit you pulled with the GIF patent, Unisys.
That looks suspiciously more like a rack of sound/light equipment than a server rack (though it's hard to tell from that pic). Either way, with all that crap piled up in a small, enclosed space, I'm not surprised something got a little "warm."
Then again, it might have been just a couple of those long-haired Berkenstock wearin' communist open-source hippies burning a bud or two before the show...
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
remember "burn all gifs day"? guess the server was loaded with gif's and someone remembered...
Indeed. Specifically, I see a video switcher (all those BNCs you see are fo rvideo I believe), and what looks like the back of some control equipment from a company I can't remember the name of.
The rack appears to be holding a standard compliment of either 64 or 128 channels of dimming, and also seems to be used as a stand. The soco connectors are all naked, the twist locks are L21-20s or L21-30s (120/208 3 phase 4 pole 5 wire connectors, 20 or 30 amps per phase) and are receptacles, indicating that maybe the distro in the box is being used to provide normal 120V power from a 3 phase patch point, and there just happened to be some dimming in the rack along with it. Not terribly uncommon at large conventions.
This is not a sig. this is a duck. quack.
"[sarcasm]Now I know what that guy felt like at the burning of the Hindenberg back in the 30s [/sarcasm]"
;)
It's cool, we all miss it sometimes
They call me the wookie man, I guess that's what I am
You think they would have double checked the thermal paste when it was "grainy" and found the flash powder in it. ;D
J. Henager: If the average user can put a CD in and boot the system and follow the prompts, he can install and use Linux
There was smoke, I tried to take a picture, I was told to go away, then everyone went on about their business. Oh, and don't miss the picture of a fire extinguisher I took
If you haven't already read TFA, please just move along.
Too late to be known as Bush the First, he's sure to be known as Bush the Worst.
Kinda like "A screaming came across the sky." Makes sense to me.
... this:
http://flobbe.net/pics/unix-brandblusser.jpg
Silly person. LZW covered a lot more than just CompuServe's image format. Just ask the various communications companies that paid for the use of LZW before CIS decided to use the algorithm w/o permission...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
... they were able to show everyone the way out during the fire.
...Rob
The American Dream isn't an SUV and a house in the suburbs; it's Don't Tread On Me.
Wow... You have great insight and an excellent memory. Are you still living with your mommy or did she kick your 38 yo ass out of her basement finally...?
Didn't the LZW patent expire years ago?
You, my friend need to get a life and get out of the past. Grow up!
I just resigned last week! No, seriously, I did!
A Quicktime (TM) video on Newsforge (The Online Newspaper for Linux and Open Source)? Insensitive clods!!!! I'm running Linux here!!!!!
Friends don't let friends line-dance.
They have linux servers and still have these screw ups...No way...Such type of things should only be on MS world so we can bash against them here in Slshdot.
uname -a | tee > o
There are 0x40000000 types of people: those who understand 32-bit IEEE 754 floating point, and those who don't.
Darn, they should let us mod the original post. Definitely warrants a funny mod...
I must say though, it's pretty careless to not go in doubly rehearsed and fully tested in every aspect. Sounds like they were careless in their picking of the PSU or something to me (can't tell much from those images.) Either way, the fact they demonstrate a smoking system would discourage me from buying whatever they sell from them. ^_^
"First Unisys system to come with plenty of bells and whistles."
No? Try this one on for size:
"Sure, it's all fine and good to demo an exploding prototype. But can they deliver in volume?"
When I see the words "smoking hot", I'm expecting to see a sexy babe, not some computer stuff.
Less than three, to be exact. Is your memory that bad that you can't remember something that happened 3 years ago?
Unisys' actions drove up the cost of software by demanding payments from developers who made GIF creation software. In the open source world, because of the patent issue, the GD library could not legally create GIFs until a year later in 2004. GIMP would not open or save GIFs also because of Unisys' actions.
So, our commerical software was more expensive, and our open source software was crippled because of this company. Unisys has given nothing back or made ammends. Yet, you're willing to let by gones be by gones so easily?
Tell me something, are you going to go out and buy a SCO license a couple of months after they get asses handed to them?
I wouldn't phrase it the same way, but we need to remember who are good corporate citizens and who are not. If we just blythely ignore the nasty behavior of corporations, there's no reason for them to behave.
A better statement would be something like "That's too bad. I won't be buying anything from them, of course, until they make some restitution on the GIF crap they pulled." It would be nice to put that on any email you send to them. Any public comment site. Any survey, letter to editor, review, etc.
They need to know that bad behavior effects their bottom line and that we DO remember.
...that Unisys will do a Smoke test today to see the performance of servers.
http://www.michel.eti.br
The demo gremlins got us! Actually, the smoldering was in the electrical distribution box housing the lighting, not the Unisys server. The Unisys server itself did not burn or smoke. The Unisys booth was out of commission for only 45 minutes, and is now up and running. We encourage LinuxWorld attendees to come by!
Remember that the actual creators of the GIF format (CompuServe) decided to use the LZW data compression algorithm (which was patented at the time by Unisys, and which Unisys was actively enforcing and charging money for in other markets) without permission.
Yes, the folks at Unisys were dicks about it (they weren't initially, but they were later on), and for that alone they deserve most of the flack they get, but they didn't create the problem in the first place -- they were simply enforcing a patent that they has a past history of actively enforcing (as the folks at CIS should have known).
Unisys deserves to get hammered, but CompuServe caused the problem in the first place, and it seems strange to me they are always ignored by Burn All GIFs fanatics...
Mainframe/UNIX Bit Twiddler and long time Windows/Linux Hobbyist.
The Theorem Theorem: If If, Then Then.
What happened to the days when they ran ads on running Windows 2003 server on their 32 proc machines.?
They had a site, http://www.wehavethewayout.com/ --
Their anti-*nix campaign got insult added to the injury when it was found that the site was hosted on FreeBSD IIRC..
Here is a screenshot of their ad. Suck it unisys.
Seeing as how this is Unisys, a gif would seem the preferred graphics format.
I think we've pushed this "anyone can grow up to be president" thing too far.
They must have had Vista running at the time.
- i *hated* CTOS, and later BTOS!
- taxpayers were bilked out of hundreds of millions by inept govt. IT contracting in the Coast Guard (even DOT wasn't stupid enough to go with Convergent, and later, UNISYS)
- of course, the USCG was also a Wang client, too, so go figure...
Really. Just shows some light blinking from behind a firewall. And there is a loud beeping in the background which likely comes from an intrusion detector. Neither flames nor botnets visible and although the attack takes 3MB/s away from the bandwidth it only lasts for 18 seconds long.
Some conference organizer was running around screaming, "Where's the fire extinguisher?!"
Priceless.
"...today consumers have been conditioned to think of beer when they see a bullfrog..."
*rimshot*
CNET correctly reports that it was faulty convention wiring and not a Unisys server.
Smoking Pot Demo at Linux World Boston
darn. I need to cut down on the caffeine.
"Show me your tables and I won't usually need your flow charts; they'll be obvious".
"The hard drive is crashing at an alarming speed!"
What is this "hot demo" that Unisys is smoking, and where do I get some?
http://outcampaign.org/
http://news.com.com/2100-1001-870805.html
a vethewayout.com/us/index.asp
w ww.wehavethewayout.com/us/resourcecenter.asp
w ww.wehavethewayout.com/us/resourcecenter.asp
Stangely enough http://www.wehavethewayout.com/ has disappeared
Some waybacks
http://web.archive.org/web/20040815070955/www.weh
The difference between the June 2004 version
http://web.archive.org/web/20040619041226/http://
And the May 2003 version
http://web.archive.org/web/20030501180724/http://
of the report is interestingly different
There are places where the networks are not touching,and there are places where they are-Boeing's Lori Gunter