Just got back from a week in Istanbul - on the way out we were on an A330 
- real nice plan - every seat had a personal video player in the seat 
ahead of it.

the player had:
games - single player and multiple player (trivia game)
movies - about 10 or so recent releases/documentry etc..
music - 10 or so different genre and the ability to make play lists.
email - wasn't working
SMS - no idea - I think instant messages to cell phones (?)
some other option that I can't remember now...

When I first tried the system the on screen menu was very  very slow... 
the controller of the system was about the size of the phones you'd 
usually see in the seats.  the contoler had buttons and a small joystick 
like deal for moving around the screen - it also could be held sideways 
for playing games.

Anyway, as people started using the system - more and more started to 
grumble - that's when I noticed that stewards were coming over and talking 
to the man sitting ahead of me..  He'd get up, be gone for a while then 
come back....  only to be interrupted again by a steward and the cycle 
would repeat itself...

Then about 10 minutes into Matrix 2, there's an announcement that they are 
restarting the video system and it'll take 20 minutes to come back!

whoa - that's one slow arse reboot ... about twenty minutes later the dude 
ahead of me comes back to hios seat and mumbles to his seat mate "that was 
me - sorry"...

systems came back and everything was peachy...  I finally flag the guy 
ahead of me (he was out of his seat 95 % of the trip I swear), and find 
out he's the "ride along" guy for testing the reaction to the new video 
system ...  Cool!

I comment on the 20 minute reboot - and then jump into trying to get more 
info out of him... he was kind of relucant, but parted with some info:


(not a lot made sense to me but here's what I jotted down ):

Token ring network
computers running linux (he had no idea what a distro or a kernel was...)
a disk array for video
a disk array for audio
no comment on the servers that the arrays are attache to
each seat has a 386 under it and a 486 per each seat row (486 "watches" 
the 386s in it's row)
1 M ram per seat (eh??)
at boot the seats get everything from the server.
games are actually downloaded localy before lplaying.
the multiplayer game is the most intensive app run - (??)
remote acces from main terminal to every single seat computer...

not much info - but nice to see linux running something like this...  I 
only had about 5 mintues taking to him and got the feeling he wasn't too 
up on the nuts and bolts of the system.... the rest of the time he was out 
helping "customers" figure the system out...

I tried a bunch of key combos - seeing if I could drop to a shell...  no 
dice... :(

next time I'm going to check out under my seat see if'n there's a serial 
port or some interface...:)


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