Windows XP crashes out of Olympics?
Microsoft takes Blue Medal of disgrace
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Microsoft's Silverlight browser plug in might be in contention for PR gold for its streaming of Olympics 2008 content online, but Windows is letting Team Redmond down badly.
The global audience tuned into Beijing's National Stadium got to see Microsoft's dirty laundry aired in public during the opening festivities: the Blue Screen of Death on massive Olympian-sized monitors, as systems tasked with running the coordinated visual spectacle and reportedly powered by Windows XP Embedded apparently crashed.
Those viewers include, of course, Bill Gates.
One sharp-eyed observer caught and posted the pictures (below) to his blog here.
Blue Screen of Death takes Olympic podium?
Windows was out for about an hour, just enough time for the athlete carrying the Olympic flame to be caught by the eyes of the world passing in front of the screen en-route to lighting the main stadium torch.
If the pictures are to be believed, then the crash will be embarrassing for Microsoft, which is trying hard to have Windows taken seriously against Linux in China - particularly Red Flag Linux.®
COMMENTS
Fake
The article has two shots of the projection, the second one was rotated by 90 degrees, so unless the projector is spinning, I call a fake.
@ac: Where oh where has my OS/2 gone?
To eCS ("eComStation"), alive and well and stable and available from www.mensys.com. Try it.
Funny location for a projector
According to the Beeb's coverage, the images on the inside lip of the roof aren't projected, they're from plasma screens.
The BSOD is sitting on the inside of the roof, where nobody should be looking. The rest of the stadium doesn't have anything projected there.
Given the lack of keystoning on that image, the projector must have been directly under the roof. It would have been interesting to see pictures of what was in that area of the stands - as I'm sure the authorities wouldn't have allowed someone to saunter into the stadium weilding a laptop and data projector.
So either someone's been doing some very clever fakery, or someone in the general vicinity of the stand tilted the projector upwards when the OS crashed.
The alien because someone, sooner or later, will come up with a conspiracy theory...
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