For everyone blaming China...
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.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
