PC scuppers NYE fireworks in Seattle

RE: The big question

Sounds more like Windows Home Server by the description. ;~)

Windows for Fireworks

How would a reboot 'uncorrupt' the file? We might be onto something here.

Anyway, since when is 'Somewhere Over The Rainbow' suitable music for New Year's Eve and/or fireworks?

Did they read the reg's other articles today

@abigsmurf: "Windows is so incredibly unlikely to corrupt a file"

Let me direct your eyes to http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/12/31/home_server/

unlikely huh?

@ lozzyho and abigsmurf

get a life they are jokes

but to point out that the os can corrupt files i.e the current windows home server problems

or (and i know this might sound unlikly but there are companys still using windows 98) a w9x version righting 2 files to the same hdd cluster hmm might that cause a corruption

dry running

One thing I noticed when I adopted GNU ways was that everything should interlink and yet work independently... ie pipe information in and out of a chain of events.

With Windows the idea is to present an all-in-one GUI which does everything with a single click. All the internals are deliberately hidden and if they rely on a DLL that is corrupt you will never know until the the final click.

With GNU/unix you retain control over the entire sequence of events so can do as many dummy runs as you want and be fairly confident that there are no hidden easter eggs to surprise you on the night.

Yes, linux cannot prevent a corruption (ext3 might but the user will always find a way)... but the point is if you had to create a very esoteric program like fireworks control you would be much better prepared if you adopted the GNU way and not the all-in-one GUI way.

Since windows programmers are constrained to work in the commercial windows way, then, yes, windows is partly to blame.

fireworks out of synch

I doubt anyone would have noticed if the fireworks didnt match the music.

@ gareth

"But a comment from a reader, who claims to have once worked for ten years on the popular New Year's Space Needle show, on King5.com's blog, reckons the culprit would have been a Microsoft Windows machine.®"

doesn't sound like a joke, sounds like standard windows bashing.

As for Home Server, it would be illegal for them to be running that wouldn't it, being a business machine? Not that there would be any reason for them to be running it.

@billy Goat Gruff

But then in Linux, the GUI randomly failing is far too common based on my personal experience. Sure the OS still works but for most people a command line OS is unusable and it can take more time to fix it from command line than to reinstall.

@ abigsmurf

"But then in Linux, the GUI randomly failing is far too common based on my personal experience."

What in the name of all the odd gods are you doing, then? I've been running various flavors of linux since before Mandrake (now Mandriva), and have never had a GUI fail, not fluxbox, not gnome, and not KDE.

@abigsmurf

"""But then in Linux, the GUI randomly failing is far too common based on my personal experience. Sure the OS still works but for most people a command line OS is unusable and it can take more time to fix it from command line than to reinstall."""

Seems that we're not talking about most people, we're talking about the rather small segment of the population that runs computerized fireworks displays. No gui required for that at all. What Billy Goat Gruff was getting as was that if the control program had been made in the typical *nix ways, it would have been more testable and more reliable. Seems like if you're going to code a program for fireworks, might as well do it for *nix than much else. Then just have some type the command and hit enter, or, even better, let cron start the show for you.

And yeah the file corruption could have still happened... So when you're doing something critical, have some backups. Maybe on read-only media like a CD, which you verify has the expected bits in all the right places.

I guess fireworks people might just not be computer people.

I'm not going to blame the OS

I bit iwas some crappy customer software like people soft.

Silliness

It's unlikely the operating system had anything to do with this. If a script was messed up, it was messed up by a user editing it. It's astrononically unlikely that the file system just randomly garbled a file. No OS does that.

Billy Goat Gruff, piping commands is Bell Labs UNIX stuff, ripped off by GNU not invented by them. Are you trying to say, somewhere in that word salad, that command line interfaces are better than GUI interfaces? These guys were trying to run a command script, which has nothing to do with the GUI shell.

@abigsmurf

> But then in Linux, the GUI randomly failing is far too common based on my personal experience.

And in my personal experience I've never, *ever* had a GUI randomly failing - through various distributions over several years.

Besides, you should realise that saying "in Linux" is pretty meaningless. Almost as meaningless as saying "the GUI".

@abigsmurf

Remind me never to get my machine fixed by you...

"Yeah, it looks like this is the work of a cheap memory stick- I also notice you're using a lot of free software- expensive software works best"

Now, since the program will have been tested and shown to have worked before being sent off, this reboot during saving was when exactly? Maybe they wrote it, got it working and then pasted it into this new machine, compiled it and turned it off part way through?

The fact of the matter is, if it happened on windows, its a windows problem. If it has worked before, and they've just tried it on, say, vista then its clearly a vista problem. Unless of course the code gremlins have been at the source again? You know, those ones you see when you drink lighter fluid