London Wires Up For 2012 Olympic Games

alphadogg writes "While London's massive Olympic park is still very much a frenetic construction site, IT engineers are fine-tuning the equipment that will be used to transmit scores, let athletes send e-mail, and broadcast high-definition video of the Games. The Olympic Games are set to kick off on July 27 next year and will be followed by the Paralympic Games. Test athletic events are already under way, which are being used to evaluate the resiliency of high-speed data networks costing millions of pounds. Acer has a large role in the 2012 Olympics and will provide much of the IT hardware, including 11,500 desktops running Windows 7; 1,100 laptops; 900 servers, and other parts including SAN storage systems, touchscreen monitors and standard monitors."

Comments

The TOC's location is a soft secret

[caluml]

The TOC's location is a soft secret, and organizers did not want its exact location to be published for security reasons.

Wow. I contracted in Canary Wharf for 3 months this year, and I'm fairly sure I could guess where it is. That's got to be the softest secret ever.

Re:The TOC's location is a soft secret

[Anonymous Coward]

Whoa whoa whoa careful there! You're not supposed to know, notice, or comment. Head down, mouth shut, there's a good little citizen. Or else.

Re:The TOC's location is a soft secret

[caluml]

What are you talking about datacentres for?

In a skyscraper in London's Canary Wharf financial district, Olympic organizers opened a Technology Operations Center (TOC) last month and that act as mission control for monitoring the health of Olympic IT systems. The TOC's location is a soft secret, and organizers did not want its exact location to be published for security reasons.

Re:The TOC's location is a soft secret

[Anonymous Coward]

Next to Torchwood!

Acer?

[dutchwhizzman]

I wonder how much of the equipment will be broken and out of support before the opening ceremony.

Re:Acer?

[AmiMoJo]

That is completely wrong.

You have a statutory warranty of two years. If a product beaks within that period it is up the shop to prove that you mistreated it, otherwise they must honour the warranty and replace or repair it. Even failure due to normal wear and tear is covered as the product must be designed to last two years of normal use.

After the two year warranty period the Sale of Goods Act gives you additional protection. It states that goods must last a "reasonable length of time". For example a laptop is usually expected to last five or six years of normal use. If it fails during that time because of a manufacturing defect, bad design or poor workmanship you are entitled to a partial refund or replacement. The refund will normally be based on the amount of time you have been able to use it for, so if your laptop died after 3 years you would be entitled to 2/5ths or 3/6ths of the purchase price.

Retailers are not keen for this stuff to become common knowledge, and some even try to slyly abuse it. John Lewis is a good example, they proudly proclaim that everything has a two year warranty as if it were some kind of special benefit they offer, when in fact it is the legal minimum.

Is is just me or is the olympics getting worse and

[anss123]

worse every year?

I'm probably just getting old, but today's Olympics seem less personal than what went before. It's always getting bigger, the athletes are less and less like the everyday folk, and even the big ones are pretty much forgotten after 2-3 years.

But I'm just a geek so I'm probably just not getting it.

And none of it will support IPv6!

[Anonymous Coward]

The organisers of the London Olympics have announced that they will not offer IPv6 connectivity to or for the games.

Watch Yes Minister...

[syousef]

I'm curious about how they won the contract. Surely a vendor bidding to use open source software would have made a lower bid.

Did the request for bids even allow for open source?

I could explain it to you buy I suggest you watch "Yes Minister" and "Yes Prime Minister" instead. It would be quicker and more entertaining. Only downside is it's slightly out of date. Politicians and bureaucrats have had 30 years to improve on their incompetence, and use technology to aid it.

Re:Windows 7? Why not Ubuntu?

[wadeal]

Why would it have anything to do with Open Source?? Oh look I'm on Slashdot, Microsoft are evil, Open Source bitch bitch bitch.

A bunch of accountants sat around and said "We need a bunch of computers", they then rang computer vendors who gave them prices, and they chose the cheapest and most reputable (I know it's Acer and that sounds dumb).

The accountants don't know the difference between Windows and Linux, if they were asked what Operating System to use I'm certain they'd of answered the one everybody already knows how to use. Not "Oh well fuck Open Source, so we'll go Microsoft cos we're evil".

Re:Windows 7? Why not Ubuntu?

[dominux]

no, open source software won't do a lower bid because it doesn't come with a sponsorship deal in excess of the cost of it. This is the most commercially motivated games ever, with really really strict sponsorship deals for everything. You will be eating at McDonalds, the official food partner, if you want chocolate it will come from Cadbury the official snack partner, if you want to buy something to wear it will be Adidas, the official clothing partner, if you want to drive a car it will be a BMW, the official transport partner. If you want to pay for anything you won't be using anything but a Visa card because all the shops will be "proud to only accept Visa". Oh, and if you want to make a call on your mobile, I hope you are on O2 because the other networks are not allowed to put up towers to get enough signal to the venue.

Waste of money

[Wowsers]

Will probably be seen as a troll for these comments, but this is what it feels like to those that actually pay the taxes in the UK (not the freeloaders who back the "games").

When you add in all the costs of all the bits that are counted as someone else's budget for building for the Olympics, £20bn will have been wasted on a two week event. The 2012 legacy will be massive debt for the taxpayers to pay off, while "sponsors" laugh all the way to the bank.

Who does the "games" benefit? The politicians who love to grandstand with someone else's money, the construction industry who are big donors to the political parties, and the athletes who love bumming off others taxes and sponsorship instead of getting a job.

The TV companies have already promised saturation garbage coverage in the UK of the "games".

The taxpayers are sick of it.

Re:Waste of money

[hipp5]

and the athletes who love bumming off others taxes and sponsorship instead of getting a job.

Most athletes, at least here in Canada, do have a job. Being an Olympic athlete does not pay. Well, the government does pay you a tiny bit. But if you want to live above the poverty line and be able to afford your training you need to have a job here. Or you become really lucky and land a sponsorship, but I don't see how that's "not having a job" -- someone is paying you money, and you give them a service (advertising recognition) in return.

Re:Waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

If the advertisers, retailers, networks, etc etc who are supposed to make great profits and contribute to the "massive local tax revenue" that's supposed to benefit the local economy would actually pay the billions in investment rather than sticking it to the taxpayers with the help of the Olympic committee and the acquiescence of the local government, then I'm sure the taxpayers might be a bit happier with the situation. As it stands, almost every initiative of business and government is ultimately billed to the taxpayers in some form and the money used primarily to line the pockets of the rich.

Re:Waste of money

[AmiMoJo]

If you do it right the Olympics can be a net gain. Tourism, free advertising worldwide, infrastructure that provides jobs and long term benefits...

In fact a major part of our bid was getting the cost down and benefits up after China's almost unlimited budget. Maybe we are getting it wrong but people could at least try to get past the Daily Mail hatefest and blame games, and try to make the most of it.

Re:Waste of money

[Anonymous Coward]

I'm involved in the tourism industry outside of London.

Unfortunately, tourism here won't benefit much from the games. Most of the games venues are already tourist traps (e.g. London), and thus would have been booked to near capacity anyway. If you've ever tried to get a late hotel or restaurant reservation in London in August, you will know it's already pretty busy. You could argue that games-goers will spend more per night than other tourists, but I haven't seen any evidence for that. If London etc are busier than normal, then businesses will struggle with overcapacity. A restaurant can only service so many covers per hour; having a queue of people waiting to be seated doesn't count for much, and taking on extra staff / overtime will hurt quality, reputation and margins.

Additionally, because of the perception that the whole country is going to be crammed, advance bookings are way down in the rest of the UK, as people are worried that airports and accommodation are going to be crowded. If only.

London already has the best public transport infrastructure in the UK, and is one of the most well known cities in the world, and now we're spending tens of billions of pounds on the one city that really doesn't need it. It's actually far from the best place to hold an event for people in the UK - it's not centrally located, and is relatively hard to get to by car. Public transport is very good, but the money they have spent improving it just for the games could have built a brand new metro system in any other city. There is a strong perception that London was chosen because that's where the people making the decision are, rather than the national interest.

I've been involved in the planning for (obviously much smaller scale) events in the past, and the general modus operandi for working out "leveraged value" (the amount of money spent by attendees not counting at the event) is to claim two bed nights (before and after) for every day a person is at an event, plus three restaurant meals (evening, lunch, evening). A bit of statistical tomfoolery, and you come up with a figure for something like £1000 per person per day ticket as the additional economic benefit. Working out the actual value is strongly discouraged by the organisers, who have probably claimed match funding based on their own over-generous assessment of the leverage.

Re:Windows 7? Why not Ubuntu?

[rbarreira]

I though you were joking at first but then I searched around and I found this:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/10394970

Re:Is is just me or is the olympics getting worse

[TheRaven64]

If you remember when the olympics wasn't an overhyped commercial extravaganza and was actually about amateur athletes from around the world competing, then you definitely are old.

in the usa will be able to get bbc feeds over NBC

[Joe_Dragon]

People don't want the story filled time delayed NBC crap they want live feeds but will you need to get a uk proxy or will NBC put up the same feeds on there web site.

Re:Television Coverage

[digitig]

Not where they are building the Olympic Village. Before work started on the village, the only thing that CCTV would have seen there would have been a bunch of kids coming in on dirt bikes and vandalising the cameras. Of course, it would then miss the kids leaving the area as deserted as it had been before.

I assume you know that most of the figures cited for the number of CCTV cameras in use in the UK are bogus, by the way. A newspaper counted the number of cameras in two fairly seedy London shopping streets, and extrapolated the number based on the total miles of road in England (including rural lanes), then Citogenesis took over and even the government started citing the inflated figure. Yes, there are about 1.85 million cameras, but the majority are "inside premises, rather than facing the street". Most of the time we are not being watched on the street -- but we are if we go into retail or other business premises.

Re:Is is just me or is the olympics getting worse

[timeOday]

Isn't that just modern life in general? Everything is an increasingly narrow specialized niche, and nothing is personal, "just business." Even Christmas is a reduced to a rabid frenzy of competitive shopping. We've debunked the old myths, but haven't found anything meaningful to replace them with.

Re:Is is just me or is the olympics getting worse

[NonUniqueNickname]

Not *that* old... I remember the Olympics of 1980 in Moscow and 1984 in Los Angeles. Those weren't "overhyped commercial extravaganza" at all. They were overhyped political extravaganzas.

Re:Is is just me or is the olympics getting worse

[anss123]

You have an Olympics every year?

It certainly does feel like it. Didn't China host the Olympics, like last year?

Re:Windows 7? Why not Ubuntu?

[stephanruby]

The Olympic Commission is an openly corrupt international organization which answers to no government. For the most part, governments let the commission do what it wants for fear that the Commission will blackball their country as a future host if they make too much troubles for them.

This isn't to say that corruption scandals regarding the Olympics, or any of the Olympic Commission members, don't come to light once in a while. It's just that you shouldn't expect that the bidding process will try to be fair, or even try to be government-like in anyway. Any bidding process for the Olympics will be completely opaque and directed by the Commission members themselves.

Furthermore, you can count on any value derived from the publicity of being a designated official vendor to the Olympics will be taken into account for any final bill.

Re:Television Coverage

[mjwx]

I assume you know that most of the figures cited for the number of CCTV cameras in use in the UK are bogus, by the way. A newspaper counted the number of cameras in two fairly seedy London shopping streets, and extrapolated the number based on the total miles of road in England (including rural lanes), then Citogenesis took over and even the government started citing the inflated figure. Yes, there are about 1.85 million cameras, but the majority are "inside premises, rather than facing the street". Most of the time we are not being watched on the street -- but we are if we go into retail or other business premises.

This

Basically, if someone went and took a count of how many security cameras were in one LA shopping mall, then multiplied that number by how many malls could fit in the footprint of LA, that's how many cameras are in LA. But of course we know that number would be bullshit.

Basically, the quoted number of cameras in London does not differentiate between private property and crown land and few would argue that private property owners dont have the right to monitor their own premises.