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Hardware

Tokyo.Disney.Net 121

Posted by michael from the somebody-ping-Mickey,-he's-not-responding dept.
Steve Nakhla writes: "I came across this article detailing how the Walt Disney Company is using ONLY gigabit ethernet in its new Japanese park, Tokyo DisneySeas. Previously, a combination of ethernet, ATM, and others were utilizied to create the network backbone in Walt Disney World and Disneyland. It's an interesting look at how the "magic" is created. For example, using CobraNet's technology, they are able to stream audio out to speakers with no loss of sound quality, while keeping the control rooms in a centralized location remote to the area."
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Tokyo.Disney.Net More

Tokyo.Disney.Net

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  • ping mickey... (Score:1)

    by Anonymous Coward
    somebody-ping-Mickey,-he's-not-responding dept.

    Sorry, but that was one of the funniest of the department lines in a long while.... Thanks guys, you've made a overworked man's day a bit brighter!
  • I don't think the actual car would crash because of NT. But there would be problems on the assembly line. And since NT is controlling the rides directly (as opposed to your lame auto manufacturing comparison) and not directly controlling cars, then it's likely something could happen to a person, rather just a pre-assembled car.

  • Around a year ago I remember reading an article on /. about a beowulf cluster where 10b2 was used to keep costs down.

  • It is nice to have money.

    It'a also nice that they're using fiber for the long network runs.

    Since you can upgrade either end, and keep the same fiber runs, and scale up the bandwidth that way, it stays somewhat ahead of the curve. Granted, that's theoretical, but it shouldn't be too far off. We don't know how to get a faster medium than fiber anyway.

  • Large-scale water parks are going under (no pun intended) at the rate of about one per month here in Japan.

    Last month it was one called "Sea Gaia". All of them are economic misadventures, and any could be the poster child for Japan's current "bad investment" crisis.

    I'm glad Disney is using good technology, but I give the park a 5% chance of making any money.

  • ...Both are a ripoff of Mary Shelly's "Frankenstein".
  • From the article:

    "First, the entire park runs at 30 frames per second,..."

    The park is just a huge 3D movie. That is pretty awesome.

    But 30 FPS is lame! If they had a GeForce 3 and a 1.33 Athlon, they should be able to get it up to 100 FPS, even during busy parades!

    kabloie
  • The amusing thing about WestWorld is that it is basically a Jurassic Park ripoff. Resort dependent on scary new technology goes awry, killing guests. Except, of course, WestWorld way predates Jurassic Park. The really, really amusing part... Michael Crichton wrote WestWorld. Basically, Jurassic Park was a rip-off of his own work, cast with a new villain (genetics instead of robotics) and better special effects, but otherwise nothing more than a remake. BTW, I strongly recommend WestWorld to those who haven't seen it- pretty solid film. FutureWorld... don't waste two hours of your life.
    ~luge
  • Well, sure... the overall "technology does scary things" theme is a Frankenstein motif. The specifics, though (particularly the theme-park/ leisure->terror transition) are reasonably unique to his work.
  • Disney is using Level Control System's "Matrix3" audio processing engine to achieve their sound automation. Sound control doesn't get better than the Matrix3.

    Website at [LCS Audio] [lcsaudio.com].

    I can probably answer a number of questions about the sound system, if anyone is curious. If I can't answer them directly, I can get the info in fairly short order.

    --
  • As long as you're gonna nitpick, the rest of us might as well nitpick, too. VLAN's are not secure 100% of the time. If you can flood, crack, etc the switch and make it reboot, you can then use your closetful of hacking tools to gain access to any port. VLAN information is saved and read from memory, but not the ROM. If it was ROM, then it could be read as part of the bios as it boots, but instead it is read as a configuration file after (while) the machine is coming up. So if you can write a tool to make use of that split microsecond after the switch is up and before the VLAN's are set, you can have access to whatever you want.
  • Itchy and Scratchy Land?

    Westworld.

  • Tyler Durden for President!

    You've been breaking Rules One and Two again, haven't you?

  • That brings up an interesting point -- just how much of that is completely automated, and how much is manual? (attraction controls, etc.)

    Fascinating... I guess that is one of those things you don't normally think about. (the number of folks involved, as well as the technology behind it)

    Jethro
  • Noting the "do it right" verses "do it super cheap" is important. As it stands, the design to do it right with ethernet is definitely higher than just throwing in a braindead wiring infrastructure. But there design probably costs less than an poorly designed ATM system or some other proprietary system. My point is, there are things that can be done with ethernet that people usually look to other solutions for because they do not spend the up front time thinking the problem through.I can think of many instances when people (IT and Management) jump because something sounds like the powerful (expensive) solution and ignore the well thought out solution.It is like saying, "We are going to use CISCO for our network backbone." People will start saying "Amen," just because it is CISCO. They never consider the long term cost (I am not putting CISCO down in this case, I am just using them as a bigname). The great thing regarding the Tokyo Disney setup is that the solution they chose will mostlikely be a good template when they upgrade later (assuming they documented their design and reasoning).
  • If ATM != proprietary, show me the standard that works with mixed vender's hardware. Besides, that was not what I ment with that sentance. Maybe I should have reversed the order for clarity (poorly designed proprietary system or ATM). ATM is a standard, which from what I have seen, has not really standardized enough to be what it was billed to be. The campus I am on decided at one point that the backbone had to be ATM, it was the only solution. Actually, it was not the only solution. There was a far cheaper solution with 100 which would have worked better than the ATM fiasco that happened. In the end, the ATM has been replaced by 100 and GIG. I would be the first to guess that the ATM failure was in part due to people with too little knowledge saying yes to what they thought was the gorilla that could handle the problem, only they could not handle the gorilla.
  • Forgive me - I'm still bitter; I recently took the kids to see "Walt Disney on Ice" and it was just a bunch of people in costumes, skating around.
    Ol' Walt's brain was nowhere to be seen...
    The kids were _so_ disappointed...

    Jim in Tokyo

  • Well, with equipment like Extreme Networks, Foundry networks, etc you will be able to swap out your old 1Gbit GBICs for new 10Gbit GBICs relatively soon.

    Yummy... G4 driven switching routers with 480Gbit backplanes.

    what's that spanking sound? oh, that's right. It's cisco getting whooped :P
  • 1.) 802.11b isn't all that fast, although in Japan they can take it faster than 11 mbit (there are 22mbit cards, and Harris has a 54mbit card on the way. 802.11a I believe, for that one.)

    2.) even with using something like triple-DES, etc I can't imagine that your wireless network would be anywhere as secure as a hardwired fibre setup. Can't you see the little japanese script kiddies sitting outside the fence, trying to hack in to the wireless network with their super-cool-released-only-in-japan laptops?

    3.) number 2 would be fun to bring your palmtop/handheld with you! hehe.
  • forget rides at disneyland, how about the US Navy's AEGIS cruisers being controlled by NT? it's a reality now :)
  • using NxGbit ethernet to seriously overprovision as well as using good QoS features can get you pretty close to ATM levels of service.

    My employer streams television feed over ethernet for many locations, and we haven't had any problems with delivery or performance. as you said, it's all about carefully engineering your solutions, and not relying on cisco^H^H^H^H^H proprietary protocols to do the work for you.

    Firewire has yet to impress me; I'm not sure where the future of that product is going, if there is one. since apple decided to jack up the licensing costs on the firewire technology, most manufacturers aren't adding firewire due to the roughly 1 USD it adds per board. that's a lot for a manufacturer to spend on something (compared to an open standard w/o licensing fees.)

    a working digital ubiquitous device interconnect probably won't happen for a while, sadly. god forbid the consumer get something cool and cheap that works :)

  • light (Score:1)

    by No-op ( 19111 )
    interestingly, light runs through glass fibre at about 1/2 the speed of light in a vaccuum. so while it's still insanely fast, and the speed of light, that's an arbitrary number based on the materials involved! :)
  • EXACTLY! i think it's because they don't get enough vitamin C. I don't know about you, but I could eat that Vitamin C all day long...
  • That is dependent on the type of equipment you use- most of the large switches I deal with apply VLAN configuration etc before any interfaces become active. I agree though that air gap networking is your best bet for security, for sure.

    there is a difference between the Extreme networks equipment disney is using there and a catalyst 3500 series or what have you- a large, large price/performance/quality difference!
  • I know that they still have a lot of SCO based systems, or something like that, but the USS Yorktown did run aground due to a NT systems failure that disabled the engine control system or something like that. I'd dig up a link but that involves work, and we all know that IT professionals never work, right? those long nights @ nonovertime salaried pay are only things that happen to other people :P
  • Cool, someone with actual practical experience and knowledge. wish there were more people like you on slashdot!
  • along those same lines, i wonder if the optical switching people have considered using diamond for their products, as it slows light down by 2.5x ... that would mean i could glue together leftover bits and save on that engagement ring, right?
  • you could (god knows why) put hotel network devices on the same network infrastructure if you desired. that's what VLANs are for. a port based (layer 2) VLAN has no ability to speak to other layer 2 VLANs on the same switch unless you have it configured to do so (inter-VLAN routing on all the higher end switching routers.)

    as long as you're content with the segmentation capabilities of your switching equipment, there's no security faults with this approach.

    that being said, it's still kind of a bad idea. I'm sure they've got some tie-ins there, of course.

    While I appreciate humourous comments quite a bit, technically clueless comments drive me bonkers.

    I'm sure somewhere there's someone like Dug Song laughing at my pathetic ass anyhow :)

  • That's a very cool possibility. I remember a while back I'd read Bill Gates' book, and he had a chapter of the then being built much hyped ultra-wired house. He said he was installing something where you'd wear a smal electronic pin, which would locate you in the house to the central computer. Then you'd get your phone calls transfered to the right place, have the music you want to hear follow you around, etc.

    I found the idea great, but I don't know what happened to it. Now however, all technologies are here for Disney to do that. They should really consider it.
  • Warning:

    These boxes are from Extreme Networks

    Kick Ass networking

    Do you want some 10 gig ethernet soon?

    http://www.extremenetworks.com
  • Except for this one. "In Disney's case, it makes extensive use of Extreme Network's Black Diamond Gigabit Ethernet network switches with about 45 separate dual runs of fiber from the central control area to outlying buildings."
  • >The really, really amusing part... Michael
    >Crichton wrote WestWorld. Basically, Jurassic
    >Park was a rip-off of his own work, cast with a
    >new villain

    The even more amusing part? He's done this before...

    A while ago (not bothering to check the exact details right now), there was a text adventure w/limited graphics game I had written by Crichton called "Amazon" -- but the plot was almost exactly that of the the book "Congo", 'cept for the change in locale and character names.

    --craig

  • Off Site Control Room (Score:5)

    by Flounder ( 42112 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2001 @10:20AM (#314761)
    This is probably the best thing they could do. Imagine being a support tech in that datacenter, with the hum of the equipment being drowned out by It's a Small World in Japanese. Gives me seizures just thinking about it.
  • I was at "DollyWorld" the first month or so that Dolly Parton owned it. It used to be "Silver Dollar City." For those of you not from the southern U.S., it's a theme park. Anyway, Dolly Parton songs were being radiated continuously from the park's hidden sound systems.

    Dolly had a new water ride installed. When they fired it up the first time, it knocked out power for the whole park. Which caused the music to go silent. Which caused everyone to cheer :)

    - - - - -
  • How would you synchronize the audio clocks on
    all the speakers?

    Its one thing if it sounds like crap at a
    park, but inside...
  • Could be wrong, but I you'd have to go down to "Cup&String Net" to find cabling that *doesn't* run at the speed of light. As a practical matter, bandwidth has little to do with speed of transmission.
  • In space reliability is absolutely key. So space applications tend to use very old and thus very proven technologies.
  • http://us.imdb.com/Title?0070909 [imdb.com] - WestWorld
    http://us.imdb.com/Title?0074559 [imdb.com] - FutureWorld (The sequel.)

    ------------
    CitizenC
  • Ethernet only eh?

    With a laptop and a packet sniffer, you too can 0wn the rides and play your favorite MP3's as you ride the attractions!

    Did I read the article right? They are going to hook up the guest rooms to the same ethernet network that controls the lights, sound and rides?

  • This isn't about Disney saying "W3r3 1337 d00dz" because they have gigabit ethernet, but the fact by carefully designing their network they are getting realtime constraints on ethernet performance only previously available on ATM and other more expensive networks.

    The multi-channel audio stuff they talk about is stuff the phone company has been doing for years, but the PC industry has never managed to do sucessfully, which is why high-bandwidth streaming doesn't work even over a fast LAN if there is a moderate amount of traffic.

    Firewire is supposed to solve this in the consumer market by vastly over-provisioning bandwidth, but there is only so far that approach scales.
  • (does anyone use 10B2 anymore?)

    Dosen't the International space station use 10B2?

    Yeah, page 14 http://www.spaceref.com/iss/computer/iss.poc.pdf

    So what you are saying is that Disney has better tech than the International Space Station. Ok, I believe that.

    -Joe

  • But.. but! It's Ultramodern!

    -----

  • Firewire is supposed to solve this in the consumer market by vastly over-provisioning bandwidth, but there is only so far that approach scales.

    FireWire is about a lot more than overprovisioning bandwidth. For instance it has an isochronous mode so that 2 devices on a FireWire bus can get a guaranteed slice of the bandwidth. Theres a lot more to FireWire that you should check into if you want to sound semi-informed.
  • Are you implying that coax does not run at the speed of light? What speed does it run at? The speed of sound?
  • True they do, however, what I never understood was why do companies wire the hard way? If you are going to be wiring and rewiring, build excellent infastructure like wide conduit, so you can have small bots simply pull out the old lines and lay the new ones whenever you need to upgrade (or repair). Save a lot of money in the long run.
  • LOL (for real!). Dude, if I had points I would. In real live my constant string of bad jokes makes people scorn me, but in slashdot land it's a whole other story.

    ---

  • should be good... (Score:5)

    by cheezus ( 95036 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2001 @10:18AM (#314775) Homepage
    ... so long as they don't do a mickey mouse job.

    ---

  • >...while keeping the control rooms in a centralized location remote to the area. I wonder if you can hax0r / spoof / redirect this and be able to stream whatever random content you wanted on to disney's speakers. Hmmmmm....
    ____________________
    Remember, not all /. users hate Windows or think Microsoft is out to get them!
  • ..is to implement 802.11 (or some similar wireless networking) all round the park - then provide online maps, info, streaming video, and maybe have the ability to order food/drink/mechandise and have it brought to you, all from a wireless equipped palmtop device.

    oh, and it'd be cool to be able to check email too ;P
  • Imagine a Beowulf cluster of these!

  • Why do you post as AC then?
    --

  • Good idea. (Score:5)

    by SpanishInquisition ( 127269 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2001 @10:20AM (#314780) Homepage Journal
    while keeping the control rooms in a centralized location remote to the area

    That way the owners can escape easily when all the robots have a malfunction and start killing everyone.
    --
  • I love this quote

    Noonan says the Tokyo DisneySea park is using 48-kHz sampling at 24-bit resolution, while older parks had only 18-bit resolution on their audio systems. CD sound quality typically uses 16-bit resolution and a 44.1-kHz sampling rate.

    GREAT! DisneySea sounds BETTER than riding in an ELEVATOR!

  • Not all the network applications are fun and games, however. The Disney network makes extensive use of standard protocols, including SNMP. "Our lighting-control systems make use of SNMP for higher-level reporting, which we developed ourselves because we didn't want to deal with a bunch of proprietary lighting-control protocols from different vendors," he says.
    Another use for MRTG and Cricket! "Helps you tell when the lights burn out."

    Seriously though, this is a pretty nifty setup they have.

  • but in a production inviroment, I don't see tubes of nothing buried underground for data transfer. as fragile as fiber is, I'd wager that a big (or little) tube O' nothin' would be a little difficult to manage. :)
  • light does not go around a coax loop... electricity does however... coax runs at the speed of the electric waves that travel through it

    So I guess I was implying that coax doesn't run at the speed of light.
  • When the need to upgrade to terabyte network speed, they will just replace the end nodes, or bond multiple fiber together with Gbit devices (No one buries just one strand in the ground anymore... )

    Fiber (glass) run at the speed of light... I hope that's fast enough, because it's going to be hard to pass that up in a production enviroment any time soon. :)
  • If thats the case then China really dosen't need to worry about the destroyers that the U.S. is thinking about selling to Taiwan.
  • "How many cars are out there that were made by NT? Do they ever crash?"

    Err, yes?

  • ... I can't believe that AYB has become an acronym.

    *sigh*

  • '"We have 48-port edge devices and most of them are full. Some are 10 megabit, some are 100 megabit out from the hubs," '

    This will be a wonderful blueprint for the Sysadmins who are looking to upgrade their systems from 10BT/10B2 networks (does anyone use 10B2 anymore?) and are looking for a system that can handle the bandwidth that the modern 'net uses. Streaming media, stock tickers, realtime quotes, CNN on-line, and a hundred other things that are bandwidth-sucking and the bane of sysadmins everywhere.

    If this works out like it should, we can then go to management and get the upgrade to gigabit as new pieces are required. This is a mix already and a high-availability system so it should be a cinch to handle the needs of a typical office network.

    DanH
    Cav Pilot's Reference Page [cavalrypilot.com]
  • How timely - I was just at Disney World Florida in March, and lo and behold look at what I came across in the aquarium at Epcot?... I about laughed myself silly...

    BSOD-1 [arcadecontrols.org], and BSOD-2 [arcadecontrols.org] ... Glad that wasn't running the monorail!

  • Re:Loop-the-loop on WinNT? No. (Score:3)

    by tabacco ( 145317 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2001 @02:03PM (#314791)
    Unless the ride includes on-train brakes (sort of unusual), NT can't possibly do a thing to the train in mid-loop. Roller Coasters are called that because that's what they do: coast. There's a big drop at the beginning of coasters to give the train sufficient momentum to make it through the rest of the ride aided/hindered only by gravity. Certain types of them, though, include trim brakes (usually Wild Mouse coasters, which don't have loops) to keep the train's speed in check on really tight turns. The worst that could happen here is an E-Stop, which would brake all the cars on the ride, causing minor annoyance but not a lot of actual trouble.
  • ...Disney, he's Warner Brothers. Get it straight, man.
  • There's no longer a $1 USD fee per port. That was long ago and only if you wanted to use the "Firewire" name.

    Firewire works GREAT for its current (intended) purposes. Here at work we have three G4 systems running Final Cut Pro, each connected to a DV deck. (Two are connected to DVcam decks, one is connected to a DVCPro dec). The 25mbit digital video data and all control signals go over that tiny cable. It's a dream to work with. We also have a few firewire-interfaced external CDRWs and external hard drives floating around. They're handy, but we're still mostly a SCSI shop.

    Firewire was more hyped than Java... but it sure does a good job. Last I checked there were no USB2.0 professional DV decks... and interfacing a DV deck through CCIR601 digital video and controlling through RS-232, while possbile, is A LOT more expensive (though uncompressed... but that costs again through additional disk space).

    Firewire doesn't wash my car or walk my dog, but it works. And that pays the bills and feeds the kids.
  • does anyone use 10B2 anymore?

    We do. Well, only in older builings as it's been in place for quite awhile. But it's still used and hasn't yet been upgraded. There's really no need right now as far as we can see. Secretaries and other such office workers that do little more with their computers than type letters, send print jobs, handle email and scheduling, and surf the web most likely don't need anything more than 10bit.

    Some folks like to upgrade for the sake of upgrading... I guess I'm not one of them. Especially when something already works and the upgrade process would actually be bothersome to all involved.

    So yes, many folks still use 10B2.
  • Sure, it sorta scares me. I think I'd rather see some hot failover systeming running on some embedded system. But I certainly wouldn't want to see it run on Linux. That's all we need, some wanker sysadmin locking up Splash Mountain and the Monorails to install kernel 2.4.723pre8. At least NT 4.0 SP6a is about the end of the line. And hey, you've got somone with deep pockets to sue should things go haywire!
  • Did anyone get the same idea I just had... how about a "themable" park that can actually be controlled (to a certain extent) by the guests themselves... It wouldn't have to be huge, just very customizable. Props, lighting, music, costumes could all be specified in advance or on the fly. I wonder what it would take to get Malda, AndOver, and some other folks to donate or lead such a project. I would love to have my own custom environement for a day (or at least provide some input).

    Gee Disney, WinNT and gigE, that's nice. How do you like our Linux setup with multiple gigE links, a room full of clusters, and actually LISTENING to our guests?!?!
  • I'm sure there's a good sized cluster in there somewhere to control all of it. Probably not some 512 node monster... maybe just a single rack of quad xeons or something.
  • more money = better stuff, right?

    And dude, GPS-controlled vehicles would scare the living shit outta me.
  • I'm not too wild about the idea of having a central control room. Say something happens, like a fire or a collapsing wall... and disables their primary network switch or servers. Then they're screwed. It doesn't sound like they have a fully redundant hot-failover control center on the other side of the park. Or even a redundant LAN in the event that the backplane of their primary switch were to fail. Shit happens and you have to be ready. Heck... three years from now a landscape guy might even be digging outside of the control center with a backhoe and cut the bundle of fiber. You've gotta be ready for anything. Not everyone is going to be 100% clued in and will know what to do in the event of a major problem. No beowulf cluster or mysql+php linux ramblings can solve that.
  • You don't even need 100BT. The only reason Disney is using 1000BT is because of the ungodly overhead of having so many different systems sharing the same LAN. That plus it'd be pretty silly to use last year's technology for something you want to last for at least 5.
  • 48-port gigabit backbone. And each of the ~45 wiring closets around the park have massive switches with your choice of blades. It can support all gigabit if they so desired, but are using 100BT and 10BT for many applications. 1000BT is not needed or (or even that much better than 100BT) for most things.

    Notice there is **NO** mention of redundancy?!
  • poorly designed ATM system or some other proprietary system

    Hold the phone (literally)!! ATM is not proprietary. What color is the sky on the planet you're from? Just because Redhat doesn't ship with drivers for an ATM interface and you can't buy such a beast at Fry's doesn't mean that it's proprietary.
  • I make useful posts when I can. Though beware of my (blatent) trolls... makes Slashdot more fun.

    (wicked grin)
  • ... and are very strictly monitored. One screwup (go past an automated warning) and you're done.

    Check out the "Hidden Mickeys" website for LOTS of monorail info.
  • The Tokyo Disney (I don't recally the correct name off hand... everyone is using some incorrect variation) is doing quite well. It has actually been around longer than the ill-fated Euro Disney (which, amazingly, is still in operation). Tokyo Disney's sucess is probably best attributed to its management... it isn't run by Disney.
  • The article makes reference to transmitting audio over fast ethernet as well as gigabit ethernet. So, they're going with ethernet (gigabit, 100BaseTX, and 10BaseT), not ONLY gigabit ethernet. Right???
  • It's wonderful to have money, and to be able to design everything from scratch.

    But like everything that gets you ahead of the curve performance only for a little while. If not next year, then in 5 or ten years, it will be obsolete and they'll have to look at rebuilding the whole thing in terabyte network speeds. I imagine you'll be able to do interesting things with that kind of bandwidth. (3d movies, for example)

    Although you should not really get into the attitude of "If someone's doing it, it must be old" type of thinking.

    (I am reminded of the "keepup with the jone's" attitude you see sometimes in hardware ownership, etc.)

    Check out the Vinny the Vampire [eplugz.com] comic strip

  • Isin't that what college and university dorms are all about?

    "Unf unf! Look at all that pr0n I can download in 5 minutes!"
  • Great! The haunting repeatative song 'Its a small world after all' can follow you around the whole park, with no loss of sound quality.
  • It looks like the network in the new park is more advanced than the technology in the Future World part of EPCOT

    Presumably, since it opened in 1983?

  • Try this at home? (Score:3)

    by sulli ( 195030 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2001 @12:17PM (#314811) Journal
    Was I the only one intrigued by Disney's use of Ethernet to connect speakers to the audio server? Now admittedly they're using GigE most of the way, but wouldn't it be possible to create a series of cheap devices to connect speakers to a jukebox via FastE (or even better, 802.11) so one can have them all over the house?

    Just wondering if there's stuff in the market that's cheap and does this via ethernet. (Obviously the Enterprise Class QoS-Enabled Solutions described by the ITWorld writer aren't, but that's because they need to sell ads.)

  • There are several brands of off-the-shelf devices to stick high-quality audio over ethernet available, but all of them are, predictably, multi-thousand-dollar rackmount devices. The cheapest way to do multiple-channel realtime (or near-RT) audio over networks is using plain ol' computers -- and cheap ones at that.

    Last summer I saw a demo at an AES meeting of a multichannel audio transport system at the Banff Centre for the Arts that used a couple of computers running Linux, some cheap 8-channel audio cards, some custom software and a wicked fast campus network to do remote multichannel recording of things in the concert hall from the recording studio a couple blocks away. Neat stuff...

  • I used to work for the software company that wrote the Point of Sale system for Disney World in Florida. I pretty much handled all the Disney calls on the weekend for about a year and a half, and I got to know the network setup pretty well. They were doing some interesting stuff.

    To get a network connection out to a cart (that's what they called all the little stores all over the park), they would do just about anything. There were stores that had RF connections when cable couldn't be pulled to them. A routine call from one of those stores was, "Is the little dish next to the register plugged in? No? That's the problem." They built a new store on the opposite side of one of the lakes down there and ran fiber along the bottom of the lake for its network connection.

    And if any of the Disney IS staff from Orlando read this, I want to say that they did a great job handeling the poor software the company I worked for wrote. They were some of the best people I dealt with at that job.

  • With bandwidth like that... (Score:5)

    by JWhitlock ( 201845 ) <John-Whitlock&ieee,org> on Wednesday April 04, 2001 @10:40AM (#314814)
    When I was a kid, we didn't have cable at home. Half the fun of family vacations was watching cable TV - MTV, TNT, a movie playing all the time. We'd travel hundreds of miles, then me and my siblings would want to stay in the hotel room and watch TV.

    Now, when I go to Disney World with my kids ten years from now, they won't want to leave the hotel room. "But Dad, I have a latency of 0! ZERO!!!! I'm fragging all my friends back home! Who wants to ride stupid roller coasters, anyway."
  • Not for anything, but NT only runs the email, general file structure, training programs.. blah blah blah..

    The fire control, navigation systems, and other mission critical items are still stand alone entities, not microsoft related at all. the worst that could happen is some irritated boatswain can't play minesweeper. 'Course, who wants an irritated boatswain?

  • This is an excellent system, I just want to be there the day someone breaks into it and starts playing Godzilla on the speakers. Sadly, overseas Disney lands are not to popular are they?? It would be hilarious as hell if all the Japanese people heard the Godzilla noise and started running! HAHA!
  • And we all know that Disney wouldn't dream of paying people any less than the legal minimum wage ... :P
  • BTW: I used to work for disney. I once went to the underground cafeteria in the magic kingdom in orlando and saw the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life: Snow White sitting on her boyfriend's lap smoking a cigarette.

    Are you sure you weren't at Pleasure Island?
  • Hopefully they can hire that Japanese guy who translated zero wing so he can do a bang-up job for us English speakers:

    Park entrance sign: "How are you gentlemen !!"

    Techie Nerd 1: "What happen?"

    Techie Nerd 2: "Someone set up us the gigabit."

  • For example, using CobraNet's technology, they are able to stream audio out to speakers with no loss of sound quality, while keeping the control rooms in a centralized location remote to the area.

    ... to protect the workers in the control rooms from the rioting workers in costumes, who still haven't received their back pay.

  • Why are you worried? I read on the MS web page that NT is also used in manufacturing. How many cars are out there that were made by NT? Do they ever crash?
  • I was briefly pleased by the headline that some large company somewhere was using domain heirarchies properly, but really it's just a tech-oriented headline. Damn domain wasters.

    --
  • Wow, I never knew there was a sequel...I never saw Westworld until a few months ago...I always thought it was one of those horrid 70s monstrosities, but it's surprisingly lucid. It's so similar to "The Terminator", you'd think they ripped it off...oh, wait.

  • They've also incorporated CMU tech... (Score:5)

    by MeowMeow Jones ( 233640 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2001 @11:20AM (#314824)
    >finger waltdisneysbrain@tokyo.disney.net

    [tokyo.disney.net]
    [waltdisneysbrain@tokyo.disney.net

    Login name: waltdisneysbrain

    Plan:
    Current Temperature: 37 Kelvin
    Time until re-animation: 4763 days, 4 hours, 32 minutes, 12.27732323 seconds.

    Trolls throughout history:



  • That's fuckin' Goofy...

  • Um, chances are it's optical given the distance limitations of Gigabit Ethernet over copper. It might be the same physical network, but they did say it is switched so I can't imagine they won't have it VLAN'd all to hell to keep things separate, given the amount of nodes there might be a bit of excess broadcast traffic otherwise.
  • I got to work on a product used at TDS. The TDS system is massive.

    Cobranet is pretty cool. Check out http://www.peakaudio.com/

    The audio mixing is done by Level Control Systems. Check out http://www.lcsaudio.com/ - It transports audio over analog, cobranet, adat optical, redundant gigabit fibrechannel, and also has embedded linux for audio playback from scsi disks with raid. Scales to hundreds of audio channels in and out. Massive DSP processing, all done in floating point.

    And that just comprises a PART of tokyo disney seas!

    --jeff

  • No tomorrowland (Score:4)

    by infinite9 ( 319274 ) on Wednesday April 04, 2001 @11:58AM (#314839)
    It looks like the network in the new park is more advanced than the technology in the Future World part of EPCOT. BTW: I used to work for disney. I once went to the underground cafeteria in the magic kingdom in orlando and saw the funniest thing I've ever seen in my life: Snow White sitting on her boyfriend's lap smoking a cigarette.

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