Dont you hate it when Norton gets in the way of your Weather

[K9EZ]

http://www.viddler.com/explore/failblog ... 47/23.323/

[Muadeeb]

But you gotta love that he plowed through and continued on.

[Scott.Cason]

That, my friends, was a professional. It didn't knock him off his game, He didn't stumble or stammer around it, he didn't giggle with the anchor over it, in fact he didn't mention it at all. That's how it USED to be. Now, everybody thinks they have to be funny and would have made crappy jokes over it and wasted air time. TV news needs more of this.

[NECRAT]

That, my friends, was a professional. It didn't knock him off his game, He didn't stumble or stammer around it, he didn't giggle with the anchor over it, in fact he didn't mention it at all. That's how it USED to be. Now, everybody thinks they have to be funny and would have made crappy jokes over it and wasted air time. TV news needs more of this.

That's why he is doing weather on the Fox affiliate in New York City.
Giggling over errors is very frowned upon in market #1. Unless you're Conan OBrien.

[Scott.Cason]

*sigh*, just wish we could see more of that in Louisville.

[VXO]

SYMANTEC REVOLUTION!

We're giving you sweet solutions!

http://wrgpmusic.no-ip.org/cheese/Symantec_Revolution.mp3

[Baylink]

I should make a comment here, about the professionalism of putting a Windows box on-air at all, but I'm the new kid, so I'll be polite and skip it.

[w4cl]

If WIndows is the only OS that a system is available on, you don't have much choice.

[Baylink]

That's true.

But I do not think that assertion means what you think it means.

And indeed, I'd bet a lot of that stuff would run under WINE on Linux, if you were motivated enough...

[NECRAT]

Most stuff is done on boxes designed and built out of house.

Weather Central, one of the countries' largest "weather computer for broadcast" manufacturers, uses a windows based system.

[PID_Stop]

I will grant the downside to using Windows for air critical applications... but having a plant filled with a number of different and incompatible operating systems isn't necessarily an improvement. Also, even if I do manage to make a box work under an alternative OS, odds are that if we ever have to get support from the manufacturer, we will be out of luck.

Personally, I liked equipment a lot better before they started sticking microprocessors in them. For us, the slippery slope began when ITC decided to use a processor (an 8080, wasn't it?) in the Delta cart machines, when a couple of relays would have been a lot less troublesome. Our 1962 vintage TP66s still work just fine, thank you very much...

-- Jeff

[w9wi]

That's true.

But I do not think that assertion means what you think it means.

And indeed, I'd bet a lot of that stuff would run under WINE on Linux, if you were motivated enough...

One might be able to get them to run under WINE but IMHO it would not be a particularly cost-effective thing to do. Judging from how much work I went through trying to get a particular ham application running I think it would probably be more cost-effective to install two parallel Windows machines & a switch to select whichever one is working at the moment...

But this entire thread reminds me of one of my pet peeves: software that decides it knows better than me what I want to be doing. To be trying to work & suddenly have some other application cover up my work with a popup window "Update available, download?" or something like that. Adobe is pretty bad at this too. A few websites (noticeably, cbc.ca) seem to be using a social networking applet that pops up if you move the mouse over it -- and doesn't go away when you move the mouse away. It covers half of the first paragraph when one's trying to read a news story... I've seen it on at least one US-based TV station site.

Even worse, is when one of these popups asks a question, and takes keystrokes you intended for another application to answer that question. OK, that popup that just appeared for a second & vanished, did it take the "y" from "I'll see you tomorrow" intended to go in an email, and use it to answer "Would you like to share your address book with John Doe?"?

[Deep Thought]

And indeed, I'd bet a lot of that stuff would run under WINE on Linux, if you were motivated enough...

Nobody who values their on-air product would use such a hacked-up arrangement. Compromising support and potential update capability to feed a silly OS vendetta is very unprofessional, and in this particular case it wasn't Windows that was the problem.

[Baylink]

Call it a silly OS vendetta if you like, though I think that's *entirely* unreasonably combative.

*I* call it a 25 year career working on Unix, where machines, and software, simply do what I tell them to, and don't crash or misbehave randomly. The quote apocryphally attributed to Bill Gates is certainly correct, as your reply demonstrates:

"Who cares about fault-tolerant systems? We just need fault tolerant *users*."

I remember the days when that sort of thing popping up on air would get someone -- someone of chief engineer rank, someone who made the decision to buy it in the first place -- *fired*.

A Windows dialog popping up in an on-air frame buffer? Come *on*...

In the immortal words of one of my favorite contributors on NANOG, the IP backbone operators' mailing list: I encourage my competition to operate in that fashion.

[NECRAT]

Call it a silly OS vendetta if you like, though I think that's *entirely* unreasonably combative.

*I* call it a 25 year career working on Unix, where machines, and software, simply do what I tell them to, and don't crash or misbehave randomly. The quote apocryphally attributed to Bill Gates is certainly correct, as your reply demonstrates:

"Who cares about fault-tolerant systems? We just need fault tolerant *users*."

I remember the days when that sort of thing popping up on air would get someone -- someone of chief engineer rank, someone who made the decision to buy it in the first place -- *fired*.

A Windows dialog popping up in an on-air frame buffer? Come *on*...

I don't think it's combative at all, and you're not seeing the forest for the trees here.

That's great you have 25 years working on unix, but you're looking at this from the prospect of a computer programmer or IT guys and NOT a broadcast engineer. DeepThought, W9WI and Myself are all describing this through the eyes as a broadcast engineer.

You are making this assertation that all windows boxes do are crash and fail. Funny, I have probably 200 windows boxes at work here, and don't have this massive crash problem. What happened at WNYW was unfortunate, it was also accidental and most likely a one time thing. It also isn't the kind of thing to be fired over either. If you have a boss who would fire someone over something like that, then that boss needs to resign and find new work.

Our biggest issue hasn't been the OS, but the P.O.S. PCs made by Dell in China using not enough cooling and caps which aren't rated for the heat due to the lack of proper cooling. I've changed a dozen caps so far easily on those.

With that said, I am stepping out of this discussion. Just remember to keep it civil.