What Happens in Vegas, Stays in 0x9940B925
November 29, 2009
Just when I thought I was done geeking out …
July 2008: I walk into a Palazzo elevator en-route to a suite on an upper floor and I glance at the small video screen above the button panel.
Just as the doors close, it turns blue, lines of cryptic white text scroll down the screen, quickly followed by a “Windows XP” logo.
“Well, it’s been nice knowing you all”, I said to my fellow passengers, “if the elevator is running on Windows, then we’re all goners.”
Nervous stares.
Flash forward to last Friday.
I got to the top of the City Center walkway, and what greeted me at the top other than a gigantic version of a spectacular failure which used to greet me on a daily basis with Windows 95.
I was stunned.
Las Vegas Strip Planet Hollywood - Huge Blue Screen of Death
Las Vegas Strip Planet Hollywood - Huge Blue Screen of Death
Las Vegas Strip Planet Hollywood - Huge Blue Screen of Death
Now, I’m not saying this to embarrass or ridicule anyone.
These little malfunctions are kind of fun because they look out of place. We all get a little bit of a vicarious thrill when the largest of companies suffer the same indignities us little guys do, and spectacularly fail in public, while the rest of us simply kick the dog in the privacy of our own home and move on.
S**t happens, and there but for the grace of the almighty shortstop go we. Jesus knows that I have my technical problems and will continue to do so until someone pry’s the ethernet cable from my cold, dead hands.
With the possible exception of the Riviera, Planet Hollywood has the most compelling exterior of any other casino in Las Vegas. It’s bright, busy, and gaudy … the way Las Vegas should be. I’m a huge fan of Planet Hollywood and their wide assortment of video screens, and I think they should be recognized for a job well done.
That being said … I can’t help but be shocked at just how many large companies still use Microsoft Windows for anything even remotely mission critical and/or things which would cause public embarrassment were they to fail.
“Rex, you drank the Kool-Aid, didn’t you? After you pack your castrated balls away in the storage box under your bed, I suppose you are going to tell us that the Palazzo and Planet Hollywood should use OS X to run these things you fanboi fruitcake.”
Actually, no.
I don’t think either Windows XP or OS X even approaches true stability. If I never see another “spinning beachball of death” (ask a Mac user what this means), it will be too soon. If I have to ssh into my iMac and manually kill the Front Row process to get my desktop back one more time, I’m going to methodically extract each one of my hair follicles with a pair of tweezers just to take my mind off of slitting my wrists.
OS X is a great commercial version of Unix, but to call it a bastion of stability and predictability would be asinine. Given a choice between the two, however, I would use OS X for public performances because it is Unix (there’s a reason that most DJ’s use MacBooks, and it’s not necessarily because they are douchebags).
This is not about desktop OS religion, though. What surprises me about places like the Palazzo, Planet Hollywood, etc … is that they use a commercial desktop operating system at all.
I cannot for the life of me figure out why huge casino companies with massive resources are content to run Microsoft Freaking Windows Freaking XP or Vista on something as spectacularly visible as their external signs.
I used to use an operating system called Linux, and the OS was as solid as Steve Wynn’s pecker when he watches men’s figure skating. I may use it again someday if the video applications ever mature to the level of say Final Cut. While it does not have great peripheral support, it can be built in, and server builds of Unix are almost un-crashable.
Given that marquee signage is a single-tasked application, I cannot figure out why these companies do not use Solaris, BSD, or even a customized Linux distribution for their 24/7/365 visible applications.
The very notion that casinos city-wide run some of their most visible software on Windows simply fries the synapses. I’m an idiot, and even I know that Windows is wholly inappropriate for public performance. This being the case, how can the IT departments of billion dollar companies not know this?
Then again, maybe this is all part of some greater plan. Maybe, just maybe, when it’s 4 in the morning and all of the tourists have gone to bed, the IT guys sit across the street and play World of Warcraft on the side of the building.
After racking my brain to figure out why Windows remains ubiquitous in our local casinos, this is honestly the most rational explanation I can come up with.
Written by mike_ch on November 29, 2009 at 6:56 pm
Honestly, they’re pretty dumb to not have it automatically restart and launch it’s demo reel app when it blue screens.
I have a camera phone picture somewhere of a TI change machine whose Windows XP couldn’t even finish boothing, so it was just restarting over and over, flashing it’s splash screens in a loop. I’ll share it with you sometime when I return.
Written by BigRedDogATl on November 29, 2009 at 9:24 pm
Rex:
What you fail to realize is that the CIO (Chief Information Officers) of most of these Casino companies are not techies. In fact, for most large corporations the CIOs or VP of I.T. have very little technical skills at all. These people are uninformed MBAs that are using the position as a stepping stone to something higher. I doubt any one of them could even know how to load an operating system onto a machine, much less know how to keep it patched and running.
The other problem they have is that they are running some third party developed content management system to determine what video clips get played and in what order. After awhile, with as many changes as are made to the play lists, if the system isn’t rebooted to release memory that the ill written programs leak, the system will crash because all of the system’s memory is used up. They could head off these problems if they had two parallel systems and switched to a secondary system while they powered off the primary, cleared memory and cache, and rebooted and they did this daily.
Anyway, the Casino companies need to hire real I.T. people, with real experience, not they young kids with no real world experience or the uninformed MBAs who don’t know a RAM chip from a EEPROM.
Written by Eric S. on November 29, 2009 at 10:53 pm
Ah, yes. I remember the fun of explaining to the CEO of the high-tech company I worked for that his computer wasn’t broken, but that he could not save any more Word Perfect document because his hard drive was full. It took about ten minutes, using very simple language, to explain this in a way that wouldn’t get me fired or get the computer hurtled across his office. I understand that he was very good at accounting.
Written by KenP on November 30, 2009 at 6:31 am
I do wonder where OS/2 would be if it had survived. Yes, IBM is anal to a fault but that isn’t all that horrid these days.
Written by yeti on November 30, 2009 at 4:32 pm
I have a BSOD picture of the station casinos Players Card Kiosk in BSOD mode.
And Rex, its not that Windows Sucks, its that they dont patch or update the system. That BSOD was fixed in XPSP2
Written by mike on December 2, 2009 at 11:19 pm
I also collect pictures of public BSOD. They are quire common in airports.