LX desks and Windows

[niclights]

To suggest that software at this level is without faults would be one grand statement for any developer, especially one so young as Vista. Only real world tests can and will ultimately show the faults that need fixing. To claim there aren't any sounds mighty foolish to me!

[david.elsbury]

I'm pretty sure this is one of those topics that keeps coming around... if it's dongles and a PC, the less crap on it the more stable it is. If its a stand alone console, then pretty much they are so stable it is irrelavant what it's running as the supplier keeps them locked down anyway.

[doc_blume]

Which desks around these days are there which don't run windows? My school has recently bought the Strand PresetPalette and we have lost count of the number of times it has crashed. Aside from the Zero88 desks and the Pearl 2008, which desks don't run windows? The Avo Pearl Expert and Tiger and the Diamond range do, as do all of Strand's new desks, Martin Maxxyz and the ETC/Avab Congo. Why is the industry suddenly switching to much flakier software?

 

Notwhoyouthink

 

I'm a software developer on a major console in the industry. Let me first off just say that I, in no way, have a love for Windows. As others have said, many of the major consoles out there right now do indeed run on Windows Embedded XP (as opposed to a full version of windows xp). And as others have stated as well, this isn't a true embedded operating system. But it does strip out most (if not all) of the items which give people the discomfort they have for the stability of the operating system.

 

I have worked on development of consoles on DOS, VXWorks, Windows, and now Embedded XP. Without sounding like I'm patting my self on the back, I can say that our current console is the most stable piece of software I've worked on...running on Embedded XP. And in the years I've worked on our current console, I can honestly say that since we made the decision to work on an Embedded XP platform, we have yet to have had a crash which we debugged on our current console that was due to a problem in Windows. I know that is hard to believe, but it is the truth.

 

When problems have occurred on the system, every single one has been traced back to either bug in the software (which would have crashed on any operating system), or a problem with the hardware or a hardware driver...again things that would have been seen if the console was developed on any operating system.

 

And in support for other developers in the industry, as we continue to move toward developing more and more complicated consoles, the software becomes exponentially more complicated (as well as the hardware). If you look at the strides made on lighting consoles in just the last 10 years, it is quite amazing to see the advances made in quite a short period of time, especially considering how much more complicated the devices which we control are.

 

For me, any crashing of a lighting console is unacceptable, which, believe it or not, is the stance of just about any person who develops a console in this industry. If we, at our company, thought in any way that the operating system we were running on was causing some sort of instability in our software or hardware, I can assure you, we would have switched to using a different platform.

 

Some of the consoles which were mentioned are very young in terms of their development cycle. I would assume that these lighting consoles which are perceived as "unstable" would continue to mature over the coming years and become more stable, while providing the new features needed to push limits of lighting design in the future. Once these consoles reach the maturity level of the consoles they are currently replacing, I would think they will be just as stable as those older consoles. And what is even better is that forums such as this are available for users to provide feedback to help make all that happen more quickly.

 

-D