Windows-Based Keyboard Used In Super Bowl Halftime Show
Microsoft (or at least MicroMiel) is proudly trumpeting that Windows-based keyboards were used during Prince’s halftime performance at the Super Bowl. While any company involved in the musical instruments at that big event would talk it up, I think the real surprise is:
There are Windows-based keyboards?
Yes, indeed, Open Labs makes keyboards (that’s musical keyboards, not QWERTY keyboards, ya dope) that run Windows XP under the NeKo and MiKo brand. These monster “keyboard workstations” use some pretty powerful Intel processors (often 2.4GHz Core 2 Duos or 3 GHz Pentiums) and can cost between $2,500-$4,000. God, I hope they’re worth all that, but I suspect there are a lot of musicians that swear by them.
Good thing there aren’t any Windows-based phallic guitars. Methinks the maker of that particular piece of hardware isn’t issuing as many press released.
Q: What kind of music can you play on a Windows keyboard?
A: Blues-creenofdeath.
On a more serious note, Nathan… You might want to check whether you can reproduce the crashing issue with your site. The steps?
1) In the Internet Explorer 7-zone your site is in (Internet zone, most likely), change the “Run ActiveX controls and plug-ins” to “prompt”. Open up one of your comment pages, and reject ActiveX controls to be used when the message box pops up.
This should do the trick to kill IE - it’ll use up all your CPU power until you either kill the thread or the process.
I already had a friend confirm the crash WITH ActiveX, and I sent in some automatic error reports. For me, it only takes a while for your site to display if I keep ActiveX activated, but it doesn’t actually crash. Let’s hope we’ll get a patch soon. (I hope it doesn’t allow for remote code execution…?)
Comment by Tim | 2/8/2007
Dude, corny. Corny, but hilarious
Blues-creenofdeath. Amazing.
I tried to use your method to kill the browser, but it didn’t work in IE7 on Vista. Are you only seeing it on XP? Is it hanging at the loading of a particular plugin? Do you need to be making a comment for there to be a problem, or does it happen on all article pages?
Let me know what you find out. Obviously, I want to fix any problems fast.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | 2/8/2007
Hm, last night I tried to reproduce the issue on another computer (XP MCE 2002 SP2, sounds like a code name, doesn’t it?
), and it crashed again. The install was much closer to the defaults than my computer is - I messed with everything to make it work *just* the way I want it to.
However, all of a sudden, I can no longer reproduce the issue on my own computer. How very unexpected, especially since the coComment bar is gone as well…
Oh, and I also no longer get any ActiveX prompts. My guess is that was caused by coComment using the ActiveX control for XMLHTTP requests (no longer necessary in IE7, btw).
I’ll let you know next time something strange happens… *goes back to look what caused the last issue I’d been having on this site, and whether it might’ve been coComment*
Comment by Tim | 2/9/2007
Yeah, I spoke with someone at Microsoft last night, and we figured out it was the CoComment plugin that was causing the site to hang. I disabled it for now, till I find out what was at fault.
Comment by Nathan Weinberg | 2/9/2007