The Sydney Morning Herald has a great piece on a computer malfunction that showed up during the 2008 Olympic opening ceremony in Beijing. The dreaded “Blue Screen of Death” (BSOD), familiar to Windows XP users, was projected on the stadium ceiling when one of the display computers crashed. Here’s one of the images:
It seems that Lenovo (the PC supplier for the games) chose Windows XP instead fo Vista. From the article:
Lenovo chairman, Yang Yuanqing, was quoted as saying that because of the complexity of the IT functions at the Games, it was decided to not use the the more recent operating system. “If it’s not stable, it could have some problems,” he said.
Ironically, former Microsoft CEO Bill Gates was in the crowd (he can run but he can’t hide). 
Gizmodo has some more images and links to the incident.
The SDTimes has an article up about a new operating system Microsoft is working on called “Midori”. It is based on their “Singularity” OS, with everything being written in managed code then natively compiled. Rumor has it that this is the follow-on to the Windows platform… we’ll see if it ever materializes commercially. SDTimes bases the article on some internal documents they got access to, which may be why we haven’t seen this level of detail before (see the entry in Wikipedia). From the article:
According to the documentation, Midori will be built with an asynchronous-only architecture that is built for task concurrency and parallel use of local and distributed resources, with a distributed component-based and data-driven application model, and dynamic management of power and other resources.
The Midori documents foresee applications running across a multitude of topologies, ranging from client-server and multi-tier deployments to peer-to-peer at the edge, and in the cloud data center. Those topologies form a heterogeneous mesh where capabilities can exist at separate places.
In order to efficiently distribute applications across nodes, Midori will introduce a higher-level application model that abstracts the details of physical machines and processors. The model will be consistent for both the distributed and local concurrency layers, and it is internally known as Asynchronous Promise Architecture.
…operating system services, such as storage, would either be provided to the applications by the OS or be discovered across a trusted distributed environment.
TechUser has a great article about possible reasons Microsoft would be interested in purchasing Yahoo’s paid-search business (click HERE for the back story). For those of you new to the subject, paid-search is where advertisers bid against each other to get better/more frequent placement of their ads next to search results (think Google AdWords). This is big business. Believe it or not, it’s what drives Google… search, Gmail, Google Docs, etc all revolve around their ad business.
The afore mentioned article puts forth a compelling argument that Microsoft is only interested in the infamous ‘361 patent held by Yahoo. This is the patent on the whole idea of paid-search. Apparently, Yahoo has been dening Microsoft a good licensing deal on the patent, so Microsoft is retaliating. From the article:
Microsoft is still chafing under Yahoo’s influence and is desperate for unfettered access to the ‘361 patent. It is quite possible that the size of the royalties Microsoft is paying to Yahoo are forcing Microsoft to neglect its paid search operations in order to minimize payments to Yahoo, and to minimize the size of an eventual settlement with Yahoo.
Microsoft is completely aware of the ludicrousness of its attempts to buy Yahoo’s paid-search assets and Microsoft’s earlier acquisition bid seems to have been an attempt to soften up Yahoo’s opposition to a paid-search asset acquisition.
The entire theory is interesting. Click HERE to read the full article.
Micrsoft recently released a teaser video showing a future product called Surface. The estimated price will be $10,000 USD. Watch the teaser video and then watch the parody on it to see why this is kinda silly. Enjoy!!
(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)
… and the parody (warning: mild language)
(requires Adobe Flash plugin… click HERE to watch it on YouTube)
