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BSOD Makes Appearance at Olympic Opening Ceremonies
Whiteox writes "A BSOD was projected onto the roof of the National Stadium during the grand finale to the four-hour spectacular at the Olympics. Lenovo chairman Yang Yuanqing chose to go with XP instead of Vista because of the complexity of the IT functions at the Games. His comment on Vista? 'If it's not stable, it could have some problems,' he said. Evidently Bill Gates attended the opening ceremony, so he must have witnessed it."
Just a heads-up... the ROC initials usually refer to the Republic of China, which is the government in control of Taiwan. The Chinese mainland is controlled by the People's Republic of China, initials PRC. This is a really, really big distiction.
I have seen the future, and it is inconvenient.
I believe most of the projections were handled by HighEnd Systems DL2s and DL3s. Essentially a projector on a moving yoke, with a few extra features. Each DL2 or DL3 has its own built-in media server running Win XP Embedded.
Even if the built-in media server fell over (which is what this looked like), there is still DMX control over the unit. Pan, tilt, focus and more importantly beam blanking and projector power are still controllable. It would have been easy to shut the faulty unit down and still carry on with the show (and yes, I do work with this kind of gear).
On this scale of event, they would have had multiple operators dedicated to watching over particular areas in case of such a fault. It looks like someone wasn't paying attention.
You were doing something wrong with your Windows box then. I have almost never (either with my own machines or at work) seen a BSOD that wasn't caused by faulty hardware. It happens, but it's something that happens maybe once every couple of years per computer.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
and now, with Vista, display drivers are back to being in user-mode:
At a technical level, WDDM display drivers have two components, a kernel mode driver (KMD) that is very streamlined, and a user-mode driver that does most of the intense computations. With this model, most of the code is moved out of kernel mode. That is, the kernel mode piece is now solely responsible for lower-level functionality and the user mode piece takes on heavier functionality such as facilitating the translation from higher-level API constructs to direct GPU commands while maintaining application compatibility. This greatly reduces the chance of a fatal blue screen and most graphics driver-related problems result in at worst one application being affected.
This has actually been proposed a number of times (without the personal attacks), but rejected for two reasons:
The latter problem is more important. Problem is, kernel mode code can do *anything*, including write to other modules' memory space. So if a driver "baddisplay.sys" accidentally wrote to an uninitialized pointer that just happened to point to the memory space of "goodprinter.sys", but didn't fail as a result (remember, no real memory protection in kernel mode), and "goodprinter.sys" later reads the screwed up memory and fails, it will look like a problem in "goodprinter.sys", even though "goodprinter.sys" behaved correctly (dying when faced with an irrecoverable error).
This is why the "Problem Reports and Solutions" only provides information after conferring with MS. When it gives you an answer, it's because someone at MS took a look at your crash dump (or someone else's dump which exhibited the same problem), figured out the actual cause of the crash, and linked the crash and solution together. If it blamed the module automatically, you'd spend time harassing a perfectly innocent printer manufacturer, and MS would need to hire even more lawyers.
(Disclaimer: Former MS employee, this is only what I was told)
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print