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."

Comments

Also happened in Cornwall

[Anonymous Coward]

It happened in Cornwall, England, but this time blamed on a programming bug[cornwalltimes.co.uk]

Don't insult the fireworks team.

[twitter]

Really though, anything automated like this that cannot be repeated should be designed to be testable as completely as possible, and should be tested several times in advance.

What makes you think they did not do this? They have been doing the same thing for years and you should expect they tested everything before hand this year too. You have to assume something changed between the last test and the actual firing.

for something as big as this I would expect no less than redundant computers. It's software for christ sakes.

The midnight timing makes this look like some kind of date roll over problem. Two identical computers would have the same problem. If it's really an OS issue, your laptop would have the same problem too.

The issue with Windoze is a lack of control. You don't know what changes when and can't ever be sure the system you qualify is the one you deploy. When things break, you never really know why and can't fix it even if you find the problem. Non free software is like that.