For those who do not have an idea what I am talking about, let me tell you about the best part of this year’s Olympics opening ceremony. When Chinese athlete, Li was coming down after lighting the olympic torch, nearly everyone noticed the biggest Blue Screen of Death ever, projected on the stadium’s roof. According to the news sites, it was there for nearly an hour, but was noticed only when a broadcast camera showed up its image. Few of the viewers in stadium has also capture pictures of same. Since then, every where in any technical forums, discussion is going on, about the same. Everyone is blaming Microsoft for the fault. But is it seriously an issue that should be dealt by Microsoft only. Lets check out.
The first point made by those criticizers is that why didn’t they used Linux, or Mac, instead of Windows. The obvious reason is the simplicity offered by Windows, over other operating systems, which is an advantage when there are so many of peripherals connected.
Next question obviously is why only XP, and not Windows Vista. For that, Olympic organizers committee said, that after so much of negative reviews of Vista, they didn’t felt like it will be worth going. Even Microsoft is against using XP, as it definitely is outdated, by today’s standard. Although Vista is resource hungry, but being far more stable now, it should have been the choice for opening ceremony.
Are we sure that XP version used in Beijing was not pirated, as China is well known for its piracy only? For that question, the answer is No, XP wasn’t pirated as it would not have been possible to use this many peripherals with normal XP, so the XP used should have been the one for Embedded Systems, which is by far not yet pirated.
Techies also asked, why it doesn’t restarted automatically in case of Fatal error, as in case of normal PC usage. Obvious answer is that XP version used was for Embedded Systems, so the user should be quite aware of basics of troubleshooting, hence showing up the troubleshooting information is necessary.
So, the fault definitely was not from Microsoft side, as they have shipped the right thing to the olympics committee. The fault definitely lies in some other hands. The fault must have been from drivers. But which driver actually failed, is not yet known. One reason as stated by some techies is that display drivers cause this kind of errors, most commonly, as they run in kernel mode. That’s why they should have used Linux or Mac. But still Linux or Mac would have failed in that case, the only difference is the information shown on the screen would have been replaced by some stupid animation, or the system would have simply restarted.
Restarting seems a good option here, as the Olympics committee officials just needed to run those projectors and LCD’s, they are not supposed to debug. But should Microsoft have provided the patch to simply restart the system, in case of failure, or a new OS for that matter. Obviously No. They are not supposed to write a new patch specifically for an event. May be Olympic committee should have asked them for that patch.
And why not some one saw that screen for nearly an hour, and restarted the system. That’s a human fault obviously, from organizer’s end. Even though the system didn’t restarted automatically, some one should have taken care of that. And then, its because of faulty drivers and not because of XP’s architecture. So, why is everyone blaming Microsoft for something they don’t even have any relation with. May be this is the price that Microsoft is paying for being the best in OS market.
Share
On August 12, 2008 Microsoft celebrates 10th anniversary of 
