Linux at work
For those of you who don’t know me… You may be surprised to find out that I actually have a real Job.
I’m a dealer. No - not the drug kind, I work in a casino. Gala Casino in Birmingham in fact.
Anyway - today - I’m sitting there, dealing a game of roulette, when all of a sudden, the “winning number display” crashes. Leaving an xterm on screen.
Considering that most of our electronic gaming equipment is supplied by the same manufacturer, I’d assume that they’re all running Linux… Which means - that, at work - I’m surrounded by Linux.
I’m actually surprised by the quality of how everything is linked in together, including the “table top” display (a big table which shows a 3D rendering of the roulette wheel). These are all linked to Smart Card Cash terminals… it’s pretty amazing how linux is being used. I’m happy to see it being used in a way other than just for servers. Rock on ACE systems!
September 9th, 2006 at 8:57 am
Do you have some photos?
September 9th, 2006 at 9:59 am
“the “winning number display” crashes. Leaving an xterm on screen.”
Nice to know that the company who made it (ACE systems, was it?) have many talented developers. What did they do, copy code from Ark, Enlightenment and Warsow (The most unstable GNU/Linux software I know of)?
Still, better than using proprietary software.
September 10th, 2006 at 12:08 am
Casinos move a lot of money so they must be quite sure about what OS manages their systems, right?
September 10th, 2006 at 4:00 am
About 2 years ago I did a project in Las Vegas for a major maker of slot machines.
They do extensive testing and have very long product cycles. At that time they were making new games with everything from NT4 to W2K to XP and Linux.
I am sure that they are using far more Linux and probably no more NT4 today. The key is that even as alate as 2004 they were still using NT4 and there was no clear pattern between the type of game (slot, video Poker, other) and the core OS.
As we all know from the customer side they just take our money and don’t care.
September 15th, 2006 at 2:38 pm
Frank, no, for security reasons, I dont. However, it was using bash 2.90b
DaBlade - no idea - but resetting the computer, the machine server and the sensors fixes it
koke, hey dude! hows things? lol … havent heard from you since I lost you in customs at heathrow! - And hey - they dont just use linux … just this provider of systems does.
Mark - I’m not too sure about the slots… but I know the main systems in the casino use some sort of windows based system (EndX only runs on that!) but yeah - it’s nice to see linux