According to cnet News article The Olympics run on Windows (XP) all the 6000 Acer PCs powering the Olympics are running Windows XP. Olympics tends to be conservative and they do not want to try out the latest in new technology. Technology to use should work and best if technology is kept out of the headlines.
XP is a proven platform. It runs well and its easy to tune so why wouldn’t you go with it if the newer features of Vista or Windows 7 are not critical. No enterprise in their right mind would make a complete shift to a new OS (Windows 7) in less than 6 months since its inception. There is too much testing involved. Too often in computer software products lots of (too much?) the testing is left to the end user…
In enterprise it’s a waste of time money and effort to fix something that isn’t broken. There are always more than enough things that are broken that need the focus. When XP can no longer do the job or the efficiency gain of an upgrade is more than the cost, then is it time to upgrade to something that works better in the given application. And that is not always a newer Windows version. For some people/applications that better solution could be Linux or Apple Mac OS X. Both of them are based on Unix technologies.
5 Comments
kb978380 says:
Hi there. recently because im a designer i was messing around with the font folder in the controll panel of windows xp. basically importing and backing them up to a portable hadr disk, during this process i started getting error messages ” cannot copy” “file not found” etc, then all the text in…
Christopher Urry says:
Hello just came across your blog and have been reading, do you also run another a pet related website that looks exactly like this one?
tomi says:
I do not run any pet related web site.
tomi says:
This blog uses a custom made theme.
Tomi Engdahl says:
Cyber-terrorists? Pah! Superhero protesters were a bigger threat to London Olympics
Seb Coe: Taxi drivers blocked from 2012-only lanes were also a bit testy
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2013/11/04/olympics_rsa_coe/
RSA Europe 2013 Protests from groups such as Fathers4Justice were more of a worry to London 2012 Olympic Games organisers than computer hackers, according to the former chairman of London 2012, Lord Sebastian Coe.
He said procedures put in place before the Games to guard its IT systems – including Wi-Fi networks in stadiums as well as the main Olympics website – had worked well.
In practice, risks from pressure groups and local political campaigners proved the biggest headache but precautions against all types of threat had to be prepared, he noted.
“You have to deliver the Games within an environment of security,” Coe said in response to questions about anti-aircraft missiles on tower blocks in East London and armed police on the street. “Protection has to be proportionate but I think we got the balance right.
“The threats of disruption came from everything from Fathers4Justice through to taxi drivers, angry they weren’t allowed into the Olympic lanes. That tended to be the level of the threat. Most of the challenges weren’t terrorists, cyber or otherwise,” said Coe, who was speaking at the RSA Conference Europe 2013
Earlier at the conference, BT security chief executive officer Mark Hughes said that no cyber attack had occurred during the Games, repeating previous statements by the telco giant. BT dealt with over 212 million cyber attacks on the official website during last year’s Olympic and Para-Olympic Games.
The only serious IT threat of any note came from concerns that power to the Olympic Stadium might be disrupted.
A recent documentary from BBC Radio 4 revealed that London Olympics officials were warned hours before the opening ceremony that the event might come under cyber-attack.
The security team had already run extensive tests on the electricity supply systems supporting the games long before the threat, which, based on the discovery of “attack tools and targeting information”,
In the event nothing happened.
“There was a potential for cyber-attack even though we didn’t suffer any incursion,” Coe said during a press conference ahead of the closing keynote speech. “We had systems in place to defend against attack and this might have even acted as a deterrent.”