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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!
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.
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.
Linux puts most drivers in the kernel and a bad driver there can cause a panic, bringing the system down.
Most of the BSDs, AFAIK, have some drivers in the kernel and others in userland processes.
I'm not sure how it's architected in Mac OS X, but I've certainly seen kernel panics on my Mac Mini.
There may be an embedded OS which is less susceptible to being killed by a poor driver, but for something like this you probably wouldn't bother with an embedded OS because there's so much more in the way of off-the-shelf software available to do the job for Windows and Linux.
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.
I'm sorry, do you know of an operating system where talking to hardware cannot cause a panic? Even microkernels such as Mach are prone to these problems. ANY time you touch hardware there can be a problem if it's coded wrong. Even microkernels have to allow DMA for certain hardware, and bad DMA can bring down a whole system without even trying. There's a basic design flaw in how normal computers operate that requires this sort of behavior from kernels, which leads to bad drivers affecting them. If you can name one system ready for general purpose for which this isn't true I would love to hear about it.
If i had one dollar for every brain you dont have, i would have $1.
What's the motivation to write better hardware drivers if any time the system blue screens, people will just blame the OS anyway?
Jeez. MS apologists always trot out that one.
No, people who are reasonable and levelheaded always trot out that one.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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
While we're already off-topic, I've got to agree with the GP, my Windows box BSODs a few times a year (almost always hardware driver failures, particularly the video card). Running Linux on the same machine, I've yet to actually crash it, I've crashed X a few times, but never the OS.
Of course, if I count the times I've forced Windows to crash using the CrashOnCtrlScroll trick for fun...
I can count on the fingers of one hand the number of kernel panics I've seen on either my Linux box or my Mac Mini. My Windows machines however.....
I've actually had my Macbook Pro freeze more times in the last year than my Windows machine. In fact, it even hung once when I closed the lid and tried to fry itself with the backlight. That's funny about this is I've had the Macbook for about 4 months, whereas I've had the Windows machine all year.
I promise you this is a true story. Your mileage may vary, even if you're a Mac user.
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
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
Wrong. WRONG.
Yes, Linux (as a specific example) uses drivers directly in kernel mode. HOWEVER, those drivers are PART of the OS, distributed and supported WITH the OS, and are Open Source, along with the rest of the kernel. Redhat supports the whole thing.
If drivers are to be supplied "in kernel" this is REQUIRED for reliability. Take Solaris as an example. Source is supplied, along with a DDI layer.
If drivers are supported ONLY via a "DDK" (driver development kit), there must be an isolation between that part of the kernel that CANNOT be understood by the driver developer, and the driver. This was the primary issue with "unreliable" display drivers in the Windows 3.x days -- functionality MUST be implemented, but the reference was not documented, or incorrect.
Indeed, a lot of vendors took extreme steps to deal with this issue -- permanent staff at Microsoft, or (illegally) reverse engineering the support code (GDI).
Unfortunately, the promoted Windows driver development path is "Believe in the DDK, and go" without reference source. Of course, this IS prone to failure -- finally recognized in Vista. (but obvious to vendors since Windows 3.x).
The solution here? Go to a micro-kernel OS. Or, plant parts of device drivers into standard protected mode (user space). Both of which cause performance issues. Or keep part of your software team in Redmond.
Also, given that the interface and driving layer (what I would call a "driver") is under Microsoft's control, the test suites must come from Microsoft as well. If a "crash path" is then NOT exercised, that is ALSO Microsoft's problem. There should be no way for a higher level application to utilize anything OTHER than a tested path to the driver. If it can, the testing is useless, and "Microsoft Certification" is useless.
An analogy at the application layer - SUN has the "application guarantee". That consisted of a series of tools that collected API usage (and could be run by the customer). If an application passed, and then a later upgrade of Solaris BREAKS the application, it is SUN's problem. (SUN fixes the OS or Application).
Just another "Cubible(sic) Joe" 2 17 3061
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.
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