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Computer Glitch Halts Seattle New Year's Fireworks

Posted by Zonk on from the probably-not-funny-for-seattle dept.

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."

7 of 202 comments (clear)

  1. Runs on Windows? by Oligonicella · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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?

    1. Re:Runs on Windows? by dasOp · · Score: 3, Insightful
      To be honest, I'd much rather read stories in the line of

      "The magnificent fireworks display in <insert city here> was actually controlled and detonated from a laptop running <insert favorite distro here> with a soon-to-be foss-application written in <insert programming language of choice here>. <online mag of choice> had a talk with the man responsible, <insert name here>."


      Anders
    2. Re:Runs on Windows? by Harold+Halloway · · Score: 5, Insightful

      ...because Seattle is the home of Microsoft. There's a certain irony in this story.

  2. Sounds Vaguely Familiar by sk999 · · Score: 3, Insightful
    From the article: "The source of the problem is reported to be a corrupted file ..."

    Gee, who can guess which version of Windows they were running?

    Microsoft's Windows Home Server corrupts files?

  3. You need more data before you jump to conclusions by director_mr · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Unless you know what the file was stored on, what interactions with the computer caused the halting of the program and on what basis they decided to continue manually, you are jumping to conclusions. One guy even claimed there was BSOD mentioned in the article (nowhere was it mentioned I can see). After years of supporting computers and servers, I can confidently tell you there is no way of knowing what caused the glitches from the article. A corrupted file on which several pieces of hardware are going to coordinate something as complicated as a fireworks display is probably not caused by the operating system, as the operating system has no reason to modify the file at all, and will only be reading it. More likely is a malfunctioning hard drive, possibly bad media that was used to transfer the file from one location to another, Or possibly a bad connection between the file storing device and the computer running the program. If you look up corrupted file you will see that every operating system known to man has to deal with that. There is no operating system that can magically correct the corrupted file and cause a fireworks display to run correctly. That is just silly talk.

  4. Why Windows? by kilodelta · · Score: 3, Insightful

    I've seen so many instances of BSOD's on things like gas pumps, ATM's, etc. Windows sucks. Am I using it, yes I am. I'm well familiar with its eccentricities. Would I use it for mission critical projects, hell no.

  5. Culture by Crag · · Score: 3, Insightful

    Your point is valid: the failure was probably not directly attributable to the operating system. It may be that the automation was developed in Java/Eclipse and would have broken identically on any platform.

    However, the point of many Microsoft 'haters' on /. has been that Microsoft tools are explicitly designed to interfere with the freedom of its users and especially developers. This is not an especially contentions point in the debate because the Microsoft side of the argument is that this is their value-add. Deployments of Microsoft products are argued to be more consistent because the tools prohibit 'hacking'. Microsoft proponents also claim that there is less need for freedom in Microsoft tools because they tools integrate with each other seamlessly and 'just work'.

    The reason some folks make these childish comments may be little more than "I told you so"-ism with a little confirmation bias, but the longer-winded version of these comments don't get any attention any more. The longer versions are basically re-hashes of essays by the likes of RMS, ESR, Bruce Perens, Linus Torvalds, Larry Wall and other FOSS folks.

    So, in short, tools which are designed to prevent their users from modifying them attract and breed users who have no interest or experience in knowing how their tools work, how they don't work, and how to integrate them with tools which were not developed by the same company. "It only runs on Windows" is an indication to some that a tool is fragile, so whenever something breaks those people will naturally assume that thing runs on Windows even if Windows was not the cause of the breakage.

    To answer your question, the point of mentioning that it runs on Windows is to re-iterate the above.