“After a computer failure stuffed up Seattle’s New Year fireworks show, bloggers have been quick to blame Microsoft,” Nick Farrell reports for The Register.
“The show at the Seattle Center was supposed to ring in the New Year but the computer running the display did not work,” Farrell reports.
According to reports, workers had to run the show manually.
Full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Linux Guy And Mac Prodigal Son” for the heads up.]
MacDailyNews Take: Par for the course or, as “Linux Guy And Mac Prodigal Son” wrote in his email, “home field disadvantage.” Maybe this year, Microsoft will start making a vacuum cleaner, so they can finally brag about making something that doesn’t suck.
Microsoft
Your fireworks. Our fizzle.
rofl!
Microsoft cant even get a bang done right.
Jesus – to think that 90% of the world’s companies depend on Microsoft fills me with dread.
Their software is a mess, the company is a mess… god help any business relying on their software!
They should have used XP.
The Gang that couldn’t Shoot Straight
I’m glad I stayed in and didn’t bother going to town to see it. We watched Baraka and The House of Yes with friends instead. (Clockwork Orange was vetoed)
Good times and no Microsoft.
I suppose a frickin’ photo montage of a Democratic candidate’s campaign could be titled, “Baraka Obama”.
@ Petey
Wanna hear something even more frightening? The FBI staff uses PC’s!! I know a worker there. Husband suggested she get a Mac laptop when her PC died, and she refused saying everyone there uses PC’s.
FBI, Government, Military (thought that is changing), banking industry, ALL PC based. And we wonder why things are screwed up and stolen. DUH!
It’s an odd comfort to know my lame ass e-mail to friends on my Mac is more more hack proof than government secrets on PC’s.
When I used to travel a lot, I’d see the airline flight schedule monitors displaying a BSOD quite often. Pretty scary that people out there use MS for mission critical applications.
Just for fun, or if you believe this might be an isolated incident:
http://www.flickr.com/search/?q=BSOD&w=all&s=int
I watched it on the toob. The talking heads were dumbfounded by the fiasco because they all of a sudden had nothing to blab about. This town thinks the sun rises from Msoft’s rectum. The end of the year business page in the Seattle Times was crowing about how Msoft’s stock price had soared to $35/share or somesuch. Pathetic.
“Even using OS X or Linux, something as time critical as this should always have a backup.”
Yup. Remember, even Steve Jobs has a backup Mac on stage with him for keynote demos, that he can flip over to with a KVM switch, if something like this happens.
lol it was so pathetic, they tried rebooting twice and it still crashed.
Tired Mac User,
Everyone who mentioned that AppleCare will send you a shipping box at no charge to you, except the amount of time it’ll take to speak to an AppleCare rep are right.
Stop your childish bitching, call AppleCare, and have them take care of it.
If you want a reason to drive 300 miles to an Apple Store, then just go to the Apple Store.
mw “issue” as in you have a few.
I don’t know wether to feel like I should bash Microsoft too, or just feel sorry for them.
Bash them. They deserve every last bit of misery they can inflict upon themselves.
On topic, I am sorry to say that windows was not to blame. The firing computer is a proprietary system that is designed only for pyrotechnics, and is based on some version of Dos (not MS Dos). More than likely there was a short in the cable network that causes the system to stop firing. The short has to be isolated and then removed from the system in order to continue with the show. The only windows component to the system is the show design software. I just use VM Fusion to run it on my Macbook instead of a windows machine. I would love to blame MS for the problem with the show, but just isn’t the case.