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Computer Glitch Halts Seattle New Year's Fireworks
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."
Who in their ripe minds would put Windows in control of launching fireworks at a big event??? A Linux system would work much better :) Using a Windows machine was just asking for a "Hundreds hurt in fireworks accident, Windows to blame" headline in all major US newspapers.
Well, unless it was an operating system problem and not bad data or bad programming, what's the point in mentioning that other than childish bashing?
In an isolated discussion, your comment makes complete sense, but in reality Windows is really at fault here, and if it isn't, we are merely applying blame based on probability. You can say it is a problem with "this" or "that," but in the end, these sorts of things are very common on Windows and that leaves me frequently wondering why these sorts of things are always happening on Windows.
Similarly, it is like MySQL. Sure, a *bad* programmer may do something wrong, and get a "cannot access database" message, but in my surfing experience, it is typically MySQL.
So, be it programmer error, OS error, there MUST be something inherent in Windows that makes this stuff common. Its too easy to dismiss it as something else, sooner or later you have to look at the lowest common denominator, and that is the Windows platform.