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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."
I can't see this improving their opinion of Microsoft much.
In fairness to Microsoft, blue screens are normally due to bad hardware drivers. Whatever that thing actually was, it certainly wasn't a normal monitor and I'll bet the drivers are rather specific. And the less people use them, the fewer bugs are found.
Cheers,
Ian
All computers crash - I've made Linux, BSD, OSX, and Solaris machines kernel panic. Hell, I've witnessed a newer zSeries mainframe crash.
The fact that it happened at an inopportune moment is unfortunate, but that's life.
Really, how big a deal is this? It's not uncommon to get a BSOD from time to time, and the number and power of the computing resources involved was probably pushing the limit. I'm not surprised and I don't think it's a big deal. The NBC people were practically falling all over themselves to find a flaw in the opening ceremonies, and if this is the biggest thing that surfaces, they went off flawlessly, imho. Who really cares about one little BSOD in such a huge spectacle, really?
.. pa-ra-bo-la, pa-ra-bo-la, 2 pi R, 2 pi R, where's your latus rectum, where's your latus rectum, 2 pi R
Be realistic for a second please, you think on show as grand as the opening ceremonies only had one glitch? Seriously?
There is no such thing as a show this big without multiple (read a lot) of glitches. They are covered up well, quickly fixed, or not noticed, but they are there. This one was just in the open for everyone to see.
Gone!
In fairness to Microsoft, blue screens are normally due to bad hardware drivers. Whatever that thing actually was, it certainly wasn't a normal monitor and I'll bet the drivers are rather specific. And the less people use them, the fewer bugs are found.
Cheers,
Ian
Jeez. MS apologists always trot out that one. Making bad engineering acceptable will probably be Bill Gates' largest "contribution" to society.
In fairness to software engineering, if the "bad" hardware driver can crash the system, then the system is not ready for production and has more than a few show-stopping (no pun intended) bugs. Take a look at basic kernel or micro-kernel design principles and stop spreading the view that catastrophically bad design is acceptable.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
The BSOD is just the icing on the cake of this story. The real interesting bit is the fact that Vista lost out again to the superiority of XP,...
If your windows XP crashes more then once in a blue moon you got serious issues with your hardware and/or device drivers. NT never had stability issues provided that hardware and drivers were sound.
___
No power in the 'verse can stop me
...It's not uncommon to get a BSOD from time to time.
And unless you do something about it, like vote with your wallet, you are simply helping Bill and his minions make bad engineering acceptable.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
err, it's quite unlikely the RoC government will punish anyone for mishaps at the Beijing Games...
What's the motivation to write better hardware drivers if any time the system blue screens, people will just blame the OS anyway?
Bartscht's Law of Model Railroading:
The number of problems is directly proportional to the number of spectators.
-fb Everything not expressly forbidden is now mandatory.
The problem isn't the hardware, it's the drivers. I know at least some root kits will install themselves as a driver in order to get at the kernel's internals.
http://www.mhall119.com
Could be, but I recall at some point the default was changed to reboot... maybe with XP SP2? It had to be changed because every newbie I help with endless reboot problems always has reboot checked and they never even heard of that setting.
They could've used Red Flag Linux for free. Was it not up to the task, period?
-- "I never gave these stories much credence." - HAL 9000
I wouldn't be surprised if Microsoft didn't view this as a great piece of PR. They've been trying to convince everyone that XP is old and busted and Vista is the hot newness. They want people switching to Vista, not sticking with XP. Now an Olympic official has gone on the record as saying that Vista wasn't good enough/stable enough for the opening ceremonies so they were going to use XP instead. They use XP, and they get a BSOD. Now Microsoft can just nod and sagely say "XP was a great OS for it's time, but as everyone knows it still has some bugs in it. If only they'd used the new and improved Vista OS then they could have avoided that unfortunate bit of unpleasantness."
It doesn't matter if using Vista would have cost twice as much, taken three times as long to set up and resulted in four times as many errors during the opening ceremony. What people saw fail was XP, and that's what Microsoft will stress.
This Space Intentionally Left Blank
FYI: the scheduler is part of the OS kernel which decides which process/thread to run next. Good luck porting that to Windows. :-)
The point is, the idea that it's a "design flaw" that NTFS might leave the disk in a bad state after failure is mistaken. This fact is a fundemental truth: if you lose buffered writes, the disk is not guaranteed to be kosher. That's why chkdsk (windows) and fsck (*nix) exist in the first place. So the fact that the community hasn't written a fsck for NTFS is not Microsoft's fault; the burden is on the developers who want to provide NTFS support.
A better analogy: suppose Microsoft implemented ext2 in Windows, but not fsck. Is it Linux's fault that you can't use volumes from a hard drive that Linux did not mount properly?
To be clear: I'm the AC that posted the parent, but not the AC before that. :-) So the scheduler analogy wasn't mine.
Question, though, about this notion of creating intentional obstacles for third party implementations... You don't think the complexity in NTFS merely grows out of engineering problems MS had in developing it, or maybe says something about filesystems in general? When they started in the earliest days of NT (1993ish?) I don't think they were thinking about how to screw over Linux. Likewise, over the years of maintenance and features added since then I think they'd probably focus more attention on hacking it enough to make it work at all, especially with the legacy baggage it has.
I believe I read in a blog about strange designs in MS... Where it's not necessarily that they're purposefully trying to design cryptic file formats and obfuscate them, so much as maintain strange conventions that were optimized for 1993 machines and get carried over from release to release.
Now, what you say about being more open, I do think that's a fair point and applies. But, as for motives, and attributing MS's actions in 1993 to their current attitude towards open source... I'm not sure that's the first explanation I would think of for that.