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Olympic Committee Chooses XP Over Vista
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Aug 15, 2007 06:53 AM
from the if-it's-not-as-broken dept.
from the if-it's-not-as-broken dept.
Vinit writes "The popularity of Windows XP is still making things difficult for Vista. Now Vista has again suffered a major setback, with Lenovo (Olympic 2008' official sponsor) installing XP on it's machines to run the Olympic Games' vital PC-related tasks. Vista will only be used in internet lounges set up for athletes to use during the games."
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Video Surveillance Identifies Threat Patterns 132 comments
Ponca City, We Love You writes "When the 2008 Olympic Games kick off in Beijing next year, organizers will be using a sophisticated computer system to scan video images of city streets looking for everything from troublemakers to terrorists. The IBM system, called the Smart Surveillance System, uses analytic tools to index digital video recordings and then issue real-time alerts when certain patterns are detected. It can be used to warn security guards when someone has entered a secure area or keep track of cars coming in and out of a parking lot. The system can also search through old event data to find patterns that can be used to enable new security strategies and identify potential vulnerabilities. IBM is also developing a similar surveillance system for lower Manhattan, but has not yet begun deploying that project. "Physical security and IT security are starting to come together," says Julie Donahue, vice president of security and privacy services with IBM. "A lot of the guys I'm meeting on the IT side are just starting to get involved on the physical side.""
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Hmm (Score:4, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Don't worry, Vista will supplant XP over time.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except even Etch isn't that old. Infact, as a "stable release" it is *very new*. I only upgraded a box from Woody (to etch) only... yesterday.
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:2)
Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
Parent
It is a natural decision. (Score:4, Informative)
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
I just started a new job and they gave me an HP laptop, which, when opened, had a nice shiny Vista logo on it. Horrified, I turned it on, only to see the reassuring opening stating I was running XP Professional. I breathed a very heavy sigh of relief. Vista is not making it into general use because companies have spent years getting all their systems converted to XP and now want to get some mileage out of it before they switch. Besides, no one wants to risk their IT department on it until they've seen what
Re:It is a natural decision. (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
No it isn't. If that's all you want to do, get Linux - you'll be able to keep 100+ browser windows open at once accross as many virtual desktops you want, and aren't nearly as open to worms. No need to pay for any antivirus/firewall software either.
It's Probably Just (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:It's Probably Just (Score:5, Insightful)
And let's put it this way to the person who posted this story, you do realize that the largest sporting committee in the world choses Windows over Linux.
Doesn't that just make you steam, eh?
Parent
Re:It's Probably Just (Score:4, Insightful)
The Olympics is all about product placement and sponsorship. It is a place where the elite can toot their money horn of supremacy.
Linux will NEVER be in the Olympics, unless it can pass the physical and drug tests. Even then, I'm sure the sponsors will find a way to disqualify it. Nothing personal, just business.
Parent
Marketing has trumped reason at Lenovo. (Score:3, Interesting)
Vista is horrible, but Lenovo's CEO wants the upgrade treadmill to work. Athletes will have to put up with it and the public will be lead to believe Vista is what makes the Olympics work. If it's really going to work, the servers are going to use gnu/linux, BSD or something else that really does the job. I'm surprised that they admitted anything was not M$'s latest and greatest. The 2008 Olympics are going down in history like 1936, a zenith of the fake and evil.
The strategy is ultimately futile and da
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Indeed (Score:3, Insightful)
Not ready for prime time. (Score:3, Informative)
I wouldn't blame the popularity of XP as much as I would blame the god-awfulness of Vista. At our organization, there are so many problems we've identified with Vista on our enterprise that we've declared a moratorium on its rollout...probably until SP1 is released (which, considering how late Vista was to begin with, could take a while).
In the meantime, I now get to blow Vista off all the new systems we purchase and replace it with XP. As if I didn't have enough work to keep me busy...
Re:Not ready for prime time. (Score:4, Funny)
Apparently not. You still have time to sit around and post on Slashdot... Not that I have any room to talk, I'm just saying...
Parent
Re:Not ready for prime time. (Score:4, Informative)
Does he know what he's talking about? I have no idea. But I'd say he's in a better position to have the correct information than most of us, who are merely guessing.
Parent
It Isn't The Popularity of XP (Score:5, Insightful)
Just about every day there are stories of how it can't do something important, or has some kind of security flaw, or won't work with this or that hardware, or needs even more system resources to even run.
What is making XP "popular" is that it doesn't have the problems Vista does. It is no advantage to XP. It's that Vista has so many faults. This isn't unlike the Microsoft even versions of DOS that sucked too.
MS fighting this (Score:2, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Now the big question is... (Score:2)
It's funny (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Shades of gray, not black and white.
Also, different people posting means different opinions, etc. There are over a million accounts here now.
Did XP suck this bad? (Score:3, Insightful)
I don't remember the transition from 2000 to XP being this difficult. There were a few bumps, the usual driver follies but nothing like the problems plaguing Vista. I don't remember companies going with 2000 because XP caused so many problems.
If memory serves the transition from 2K to XP was actually pleasant...at least by comparison.
Having said that I don't doubt MSFT will get Vista straightened out. My beef with MSFT products is not with the quality (although some of you could argue that quite comp
Re:Did XP suck this bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most individuals and smaller companies went directly from Windows 98 or ME to Windows XP.
Parent
Love is mutually exclusive with Windows (Score:3, Interesting)
Re: (Score:2)
Doesn't make a difference (Score:3, Interesting)
The same happens with detergents- that's why Unilever and Proctor&Gamble produce a multitude of detergents. If a sufficiently large group of people have a choice between 3 detergents of the same price & quality, and 2 are Unilever, it is likely that around 2/3 of the sold detergent will be Unilever.
In this case, anything non-MS was out of the picture, so why would they complain?
Is anybody surprised? (Score:5, Insightful)
Is anybody surprised at that? Would you do things differently?
When you have to look after everything from press accreditation to publishing results, from scheduling to putting up the correct names of competitors, and doing it all in a multitude of languages and to the tightest of schedules, what would Windows Vista bring to the party that Windows XP wouldn't?
To use a car analogy, Windows XP has been around the block, been put through its paces, had its engine tuned and is humming nicely, whilst Windows Vista has barely had more than its tyres kicked in the dealer's forecourt. If you were taking a 5,000 mile road trip across a continent, which would you go with?
Why anybody would be surprised at this decision, or even see it as a failing of Windows Vista, is beyond me. If you're going to go with a Microsoft OS, then common sense makes Windows XP the obvious choice.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
what would Windows Vista bring to the party that Windows XP wouldn't?
And what does Vista bring to the party, in general, that Windows XP doesn't? Pro-Microsoft people tend to suggest that the benefits of Vista include increased stability, performance, and security-- Many of the "under the hood" changes to Vista were in favor of those aims. Wouldn't the Olympics want those things?
It seems to me that the problem with Vista, in general, is that it doesn't bring anything new to the party that most people w
In somewhat related news... (Score:5, Informative)
"A power user will be able to solve most of the problems that Vista confronts him with, however the average consumer will run into serious trouble. The [operating] system contains so many mistakes that we want to investigate this in detail."
Furthermore, the article notes that "The consumentenbond dislikes the fact that new computers are delivered with the Vista operating system by default".
Yup, Vista seems to be doing great...
My 1st BSOD (Score:2)
Reality check time for Linux fans. (Score:3, Interesting)
I don't know what would be a reasonable expectation for Linux market share at consumer level in the year 2010. 3%? 6%? 12%?
vista can still get into the olympics... (Score:3, Funny)
Major setback (Score:5, Insightful)
Come on, really? Complete sensationalist bullshit. Why don't we keep it up and refer to these meaningless events as "the final nail in the coffin" or ones that "spell doom" or "darken the horizon" for Vista. In case you hadn't noticed, the money's all going to the same place.
link is to a parasitic blog instead of the source (Score:5, Informative)
http://www.pclaunches.com/software/olympic_commit
which just regurgitates the story from
http://www.networkworld.com/news/2007/080807-vist
Why not link directly to the source instead of some blogger collecting Adsense? Network World has got advertising too, of course, but at least they earned it by doing the work and researching a story instead of just plagiarising it like a Picquepaille.
And for fuck's sake "installing XP on it's machine".
"It's" == "It is". Possessive is "Its".
Fool me once... (Score:4, Informative)
The IOC was rather famously burned by widely-reported technological problems with IBM systems at the Atlanta games in 2006, with bugs that reported some athletes as being 7 or 8 meters tall. Near the end of the games, I recall there was a proclamation that the IOC would no longer adopt any technology that hadn't been in production for at least n years. This may simply be a case of Vista, being not even a year out of beta, not qualifying for consideration under this very conservative restraint.
Here's the thing - (Score:3, Insightful)
Vista is not something we need at the business-level.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
It really isn't that difficult. Don't have a go at other people for something you can't get right yourself, and as someone said before, it's not a spelling problem but a grammar problem.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
I'd love to moderate this up as "Funny", but I can't.
Re:Its not so difficult (Score:4, Funny)
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
If you look at old maps and the like you can see the origin of the possessive form of nouns.
For example, off the South East coast of Ireland is an area called St George's Channel (named presumably by the English after their lightweight pseudo-saint) - but if you look at older maps you will see it marked as 'St George his Channel' meaning the channel of Saint George. Shorten that and you end up with St George's Channel.
Likewise Bob his computer. The dog its bone etc. Obviously there's a problem
Re:Its not so difficult (Score:4, Informative)
Your speculative deduction is both logical and original, lacking only the minor detail of veracity. There are two common explanations for the usage you cite:
A) It was all a big mistake (technical term, "folk etymology") by Normans. The mess which is the usage of " 's " in English arises from the genitive case of Saxon, which was kinda-sorta adopted, but not consistently. So the fellow who wrote "St. George his Channel" on that map was a Norman who, completely confused by the Saxon name of the place as the locals pronounced it in their genitive case, wrote down the nearest sense he could make of it the way he spoke the language.
B) It was a deliberate attempt to disambiguate. Take the phrase "the King of England's forests". Grammatically, this is ambiguous, as it could mean either "the King of the forests of England" or "the forests of the King of England", and is only parseable because we know that forests and non-forests do not have separate Kings. (A good example of the kind of thing that bedevils natural language AI researchers.) This problem was more vexing in medieval times, when the name of a geographical region, "England" here, could mean either "the lands of the region of England" or "the political ruler of England", so "England's ships" for instance could mean either "the merchant marine crewed by Englishmen" or "the navy of the King of England", which could vary your meaning enormously. "England his ships", on the other hand, unambiguously means the King's navy, and was deliberately adopted for that reason. As the conflation of a region with its ruler died out as a grammatical construct, so did the need for this disambiguation, and thus the possessive case was readopted universally.
Take your pick.
Parent
Mod parent down... (was Re:Its not so difficult) (Score:3, Informative)
You obviously didn't scroll down to the part of the page where it clearly says:
Don't use apostrophes for possessive pronouns or for noun plurals.
No, it's not. Just read the very page you liked to refer. Or just ask your English Grammar teacher
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Except...what's this?
Apostrophes should not be used with possessive pronouns because possessive pronouns already show possession -- they don't need an apostrophe. His, her, its, my, yours, ours are all possessive pronouns.
Stability and Marketing are Issues, not Training. (Score:3, Insightful)
No point retraining the support people on Vista when I'm sure all the officials and athletes are still using XP.
No one cares about wasting user time, this is all about marketing and boosting Vista. Lenovo says Vista is too buggy to use and the athletes will have to put up with it anyway [mobilemag.com]:
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
And don't regale me on the puniness of the system that you run Linux on - nobody cares, let alone consumers. It's the nature of humans to always want more out of what they buy.
Anyhow
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)