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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
*tongue firmly planted in cheek*
You're talking about BillG's asscheek, right? : p
This guy's the limit!
... 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
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
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.
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.
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?
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
Ah! Keeping it in mint condition, I see.
You know, there is a difference between trolling and pointing out the flaws in your reasoning. Just saying.
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
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
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
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;