BSOD Strikes During Beijing Olympic Games Opening Ceremony?

Published on August 11th, 2008

Posted by Gasparrini in General

Found here.

16 users responded in " BSOD Strikes During Beijing Olympic Games Opening Ceremony? "

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# 1 Personality said, on August 11th, 2008 at 5:06 am

I watched that and I don’t remember seeing a screen there.

# 2 moss said, on August 11th, 2008 at 5:24 am

I reviewed my HD recording and couldn’t find it. Photoshop, dude.

In fact, it’s date-stamped 09.08 - when the event took place on 08.08. Probably some anti-MSoft fanboy who’s pissed off because you can’t download from the NBC sites unless you download Silverlight, first.

# 3 Improbus said, on August 11th, 2008 at 5:28 am

To bad, that would have been an OLYMPIC FAIL instead of an EPIC FAIL.

# 4 Magnus Patris said, on August 11th, 2008 at 5:57 am

Regarding the time stamp; by the time the torch was lit, it was near/after midnight in Beijing, hence 09.08.2008. Most of the world outside of the US formats the date as day.month.year.

# 5 GregAllen said, on August 11th, 2008 at 6:18 am

Since the Chinese are likely using a pirated version of the software, it’s not that surprising.

# 6 Gasparrini said, on August 11th, 2008 at 6:26 am

#5, Lenovo is the official IT provider of the Chinese Olympic games, so I doubt that.

# 7 B. Dog said, on August 11th, 2008 at 7:14 am

Gee, I missed that. I did think the helicopter view of the fireworks in the shape of footprints leading to the stadium was cheesy. The video was faked, or so they say.

http://tinyurl.com/5k6dz8

# 8 Rob Runner said, on August 11th, 2008 at 7:23 am

“Windows Genuine Advantage failed to authenticate your copy of Windows. Please contact Microsoft to resolve this issue.”

# 9 hahaha said, on August 11th, 2008 at 7:25 am

The faked footprints have been confirmed by Chinese sources. (They really happened, but it was decided that there was no proper vantage point to film the entire sequence by helicoptor, so the computer generated version was created for those watching on video)

# 10 kanjy said, on August 11th, 2008 at 11:26 am

LOL. Yeah, right. What would there be a projection there for?

# 11 Halcyon1024 said, on August 11th, 2008 at 6:56 pm

Not a very convincing photoshop, but it made my day, one way or another. Also, why would China be using pirated Windows when there are more stable (and still free) alternatives? The Olympics are the pride of all China; nobody wants to repeat Bill Gates’s press-conference BSOD.

The projection makes sense, though. As expensive as projectors are, I bet making an array of projectors (behind the screen) is far cheaper than putting up a bunch of flat panels, or whatever, without any discernible difference in detail.

Kudos to whoever decided to fake the footprints, too. The effect’s more important than the reality, isn’t it? Until the actual events, or course.

# 12 loserblog said, on August 11th, 2008 at 10:02 pm

NBC the Olympic Games opening ceremony download

4.9G HDTV
seed Download address

http://www.loserblog.cn/article/618.htm

# 13 briane said, on August 12th, 2008 at 6:07 am

Hard to fall for the English XP Bluescreen.

That space wasn’t even projected into in the opening ceremony.

It would have been incredible for a projector to have enough power (light) to overcome the Yellow lights in that area. Not to mention to be zoomed to such odd extents in the first place.

I find it highly suspicious, but to be completely within the realm of photoshop fakes.

I reviewed the HD Broadcast from NBC, I didn’t see anything in that area of the birds nest.

- Brian

# 14 ouchthathurtagain said, on August 12th, 2008 at 9:38 am

The BSOD is a Stop 0×000000F4, but that is all I could make out for sure. That means a critical process or thread terminated. Normally this happens from a user initialed action, like using pskill.exe on a critical process. It can be caused by a hardware failure or a bad driver, but normally it is user initiated. Keep in mind these critical processes and threads execute millions of hours everyday without issue, so that makes a Microsoft bug unlikely, not impossible but unlikely. If this is on XP and if there was a bug then it probably has been fixed and they should have updated their system. So the most likely cause for this BSOD is user action.

As for if the picture is fake or not, I’m assuming it is real. I can’t figure out where the projector is but who knows. Seems a little strange.

# 15 Gasparrini said, on August 12th, 2008 at 9:53 pm

Gizmodo has more pictures of the BSOD:

http://tinyurl.com/6gwcy3

# 16 kayrol76dec said, on August 12th, 2008 at 10:36 pm

Amazing pictures!
But, it should not be happen on the biggest ceremony in the world. Should not be happen again.