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Olympic Committee Chooses XP Over Vista
Posted by
samzenpus
on Wed Aug 15, 2007 07:53 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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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)
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Re:Hmm (Score:5, Interesting)
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It is a natural decision. (Score:4, Informative)
Re:It is a natural decision. (Score:5, Funny)
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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?
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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.
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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...
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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.
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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.
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.
Re:Did XP suck this bad? (Score:4, Insightful)
Most individuals and smaller companies went directly from Windows 98 or ME to Windows XP.
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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.
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...
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.
Re:Its not so difficult (Score:4, Funny)
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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.
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