Giant BSOD at Olympic Opening Ceremony!

[gunug]

This blog is showing a photographs of a giant BSOD which was part of the opening ceremonies but, was edited out of the coverage NBC showed:

http://rivercoolcool.spaces.live.com/blog/...!1570.entry

As much as I'd like to blame the "Lenovo" hardware I'm much more likely to blame Microsoft!  This is a website with another picture that shows the guy who was running in space in front of the BSOD:

http://cache.gizmodo.com/assets/images/giz..._nest_main2.jpg

[sandyman]

I guess you'll just have to blame the hardware

 From The Register , "From the pictures, it looks like the bugcheck code is 0x000000f4, a.k.a. KERNEL_INPAGE_ERROR. The typical (read: only) cause for this is bad hardware, most likely hard drive, RAM or PSU."

And the relevant Microsoft Knowledge Base article


Sandy

[MamaMoose]

What the heck is a BSOD and what exactly are you talking about?

MamaMoose

[krissel]

Blue Screen Of Death.

It's the equivalent of a kernel panic type message that Apple uses but relates to software as well as hardware problems on Windows machines.


Actually some of the comments indicate that it is some other type of message thrown up and not technically a BSOD.

Apparently the computerized images used in the background at the opening ceremonies had one section that was inoperable and for a few hours the 'BSOD' image was visible on a section of the giant screen that circled the stadium.

Here are the relevant images:

In this one, look at the very top of the image for the printing on a blue background.

[attachment=1022:BSOD_ceremony.jpeg]

In this one you can see the Chinese gymnast who 'walked' the circumference of the arena in front of the 'BSOD'.

[attachment=1023:bsod_nest_main2.jpg]

[gunug]

There is an informal "interest group" out there in cyberspace that delights in finding examples of the BSOD on big jumbotron displays and things like that.  It's a getting back at Microsoft thing!  Sandy: I didn't see the Register stuff (thanks) but if you read further down in their thread you see that someone thinks is was all Windows Embedded systems:

QUOTE

Very little of the mission critical gear at the opening ceremony was Chinese designed. Which perhaps says something, but it's true. None of the lighting gear was - all US/European lights, and console (Compulite Vectors, I believe, but don't quote me on that). Ditto for the media servers. For a ceremony like this, you want gear that's tried and tested and proven.

Does nobody actually read the article? It's *XP Embedded*. Anyone who think this crash comes out of pirating doesn't understand how the media and lighting gear used at these types of events works. XP Embedded is pretty solid, rock solid compared to its desktop equivalents. It's likely it was a media server crash, which is pretty rare, and - to be fair - about as likely to happen on an XP embedded based machine as a Linux based one.

A crash like this is a serious issue - when I have an XP embedded console crash on me (and it's happened...but I've had Linux based consoles crash just as frequently, or rather, infrequently), I'm on the phone straight to the engineers who built it. These are 'mission critical' applications where failure can be at best horribly inconvenient, and at worst disastrous. For example, lighting control for the opening ceremony would have involved backup several consoles running in parallel to account for potential failure. The same for the main video feeds, and I imagine this happened because it was deemed of less importance and thus not requiring a concurrent backup server.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/08/13/ol...death/comments/

[sandyman]

Quite amusing, the BSOD screensaver

Sandy