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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."
Seconded. If you're a PRO, and your Show Control is important, then you have duplicates in place for everything which would stop the show.
I wonder if you can have the manual-firing and show control up at the same time, so that, although it runs automatically, there's someone still hitting the contacts to fire them by hand. Once they see the show-control computer is running right, they can stop doing it manually, but still follow the cues in-case it goes down again...
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Who modded this insightful?
- The article doesn't mention BSODs once.
- Windows is not known to 'spontaneously corrupt' OS files any more than Linux is.
Parent is just a fucking liar posting for karma and the moronic sheep moderators fell for it hook, line and sinker.
Pyro Spectaculars. They have been in business for 30 years, have done multiple Olympic game shows and do other high profile shows every year. You can compare that to M$'s reputation for screwing everything up.
Might work better if you used / instead of \ ?
the mods are smoking shitty crack i guess... Because the losers who have minishitty sites get mod points every now and then too.... It balances out after a while, though......
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.
A video of the event in H.264 video and AAC audio of if you're interested: http://aws.bluehome.net/2008.mp4 (Listen for the booing in the background.)
How much you want to bet if this blogger said it ran on Linux,
How about this:
The New tears Seattle show was produced and directed by Pyro Spectaculars. who list the Seattle shows as well as the Olympics, and a number of other very well known fireworks shows as events they've managed. They do not, however, list the software they use on their website.
On the Infinity Visions website we find news items listing the same shows as being managed by the software they market, including the 2005 Seattle show. The software is windows only (it is vista compatible, now, the website says)
In addition, though I don't have a screen shot for you, The discovery channel special on the new fireworks extraviganza's (Featuring Pyro Spectaculars) does show how they layout the show on a computer (a windows interface, beyond question). The bloggers comment that they used a Windows based system in the past (as recently as Summer of 2006 is provable.) can readily be confirmed.
Pyro Spectacular may have switched to a non-windows based system since the Olympics, After using a solid product that they've depended on for years to handle explosives is conceivable but it seems unlikely. It does happen, after all; I know of a graphics shop in town that swore by dreamweaver and switched to GoLive this year, just prior to starting a major web project.... With the obvious results (cost overruns, missed deadlines, and such) I'm not hammering GoLive, I use it by preference, in fact, but a major switch before a big job is stupid, and yet companies still do it. So it's POSSIBLE the production shop switched in the last 18 months, but it's ratehr unlikely.
A positive attitude may not solve all your problems, but it will annoy enough people to make it worth the effort.