- Wednesday, 25 November 2009
- INQ Mobile
- RSS
It was not caveated [TurnVerbsIntoNounsWatch] - John Reid, UK Health Minister
Bill Gates loved the fake Olympics fireworks
THESE DAYS image is everything. Truth doesn't matter any more in the age of short attention spans. If in doubt, you should ask Bill Gates, or the Chinese Olympic Commitee in charge of Fake Fireworks, or the US government, or a certain presidential candidate hopeful, once presented as 'father of the year', or "us" the all-powerful news media.
This brings some interesting thoughts about image, perception, and the quality of this IT world we are immersed in. Just as the news broke out that the Chinese organisers aired fake computer-generated fireworks during the Olympics opening ceremony and that the little girl that sang was actually lip-syncing, we learn that his holiness Bill Gates himself praised China for the "fantastically managed" Olympics.
Of course, it all depends on what he meant by "managing". The third definition of the word at Dictionary.com reads "to dominate or influence (a person) by tact, flattery, or artifice." Of course, Bill Gates' juggernaut corporation Microsoft is full of experts at "managing". They "managed" to convince everybody at the time that Windows 3.x over MS-DOS was much better and worth using instead of Unix, Apple's OS, or IBM's own 32-bit OS/2 2.0. IBM, in turn "managed" to convince a bunch of us that it was really committed long-term about beating Microsoft and the future of its OS.
Back to Microsoft, it "managed" to convince the U.S. government that a break-up wasn't necessary after the DOJ-Microsoft trial, the one that ended in a ruling against the firm. A ruling achieved in part after Microsoft presented an edited - in other words, fake - videotape wherein it tried to prove that if you separated Windows 98 from Internet Explorer the system would become unstable, slower and would potentially crash. It was soon found that Microsoft's video was heavily edited and showed different desktops from different machines.
Speaking of lies and fakes, much earlier the firm also succeeded in including a fake error message in the Windows 3.1 beta which, when ran under Digital Research's DR-DOS instead of Microsoft's MS-DOS, produced a discouraging message. This was the infamous "AARD Code", named after Aaron Reynolds, one of the Vole's programmers. In the words of Microsoft's Brad Silverberg: "What the [user] is supposed to do is feel uncomfortable, and when he has bugs, suspect that the problem is DR-DOS and then go out to buy MS-DOS".
Nine years ago, a Microsoft programmer allegedly masqueraded as an independent computer consultant in order to discredit America Online's AIM instant messenger. There is even a term to describe this kind of behaviour - very common in the tech world - Astroturfing.
Much earlier, in the middle of the DOJ investigation, Microsoft was caught red-handed when it contracted a PR firm to write phoney letters in support of the corporation, and the whole affair was discovered because the PR firm used the names of dead people to sign the Pro-Microsoft letters. See the article titled "Microsoft's Lobbying backfires: even 'the dead' write in support of the firm".
But this article is not about trashing poor old Bill Gates ... first because he isn't poor, and nor is he old, for that matter. This article is about believing, and about our perceptions. An article from OpEdNews for instance tells us that "fake photos helped lead U.S. to invade Iraq". Surely some mistake.
So as you see, in a sense, everything is related, from the fake Chinese fireworks to the fake IT fireworks and ending in the fake reality often presented by the media. In a cosmic scale, it all makes sense.
But that's not all, when it comes to IT and fakes. Last year, an Australian writer said that a Microsoft employee offered to pay him if he edited some articles about Microsoft products on the Whackypedia on-line encyclopaedia.
I repeat: this article isn't about bashing Microsoft. Really. The point is that this whole industry is built on images, half-truths, and gullible users. For instance: when you read from the IT press that a certain CPU has a given number of cores, a certain amount of internal cache memory and the like, you have to trust what you read.
Three years ago, the U.S. government caught red-handed and fined a firm which sold bogus, fake, totally useless anti-spyware software products. These pieces of software displayed nice animations, lit up your hard drive LED, perhaps made some noises, and actually told you it performed some important cleaning operation. And users believed it.
Even this wasn't new. Thirteen years ago a software product dubbed Softram made headlines when it was discovered that it did nothing to improve your system's performance, despite promises on the contrary. In the Whackypedia's own words: "In July 1996, Developers Syncronys settled charges brought by the Federal Trade Commission of "false and misleading" claims in relation to the capability of the software. The product was rated the third "Worst Tech Product of All Time" by PC World in 2006".
But lies and technology are not restricted to software where you can be tricked by bells and whistles, the hardware world is full of trickery, spin and exaggerations. Very few people will dissect hardware with an electronic microscope, to see if a listed hardware feature actually is present in silicon or if it's actually just a nice drawing on a flowchart drawn by the marketing guys at the firm but actually emulated in software.
"We", the all-powerful media, in turn, often take the word of company execs, who trust the engineers, who might, gee, be actually emulating certain features in software until the manufacturing guys get the process right or the bugs ironed out. Modern CPUs are full of errata, that is, software workarounds for hardware bugs.
Back to the point: there's a sharp contrast between this image of continuous improvement and perfection, and the user's belief in that image when compared to the sad truth of buggy software, patched hardware - via firmware and BIOS workarounds - and lousy quality controls ending with exploding batteries and the like. But this is nothing new, this has been going on for years. The MOS 6502 CPU which was present in the legendary Commodore 64 computers was chock- full of bugs, some later fixed in subsequent revisions.
Arthur C. Clarke once said: "Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic". And this brings my argument into a full circle: if you want to believe, you will believe. You will believe that Vista SP1 fixes all major bugs and makes the super soaraway OS almost perfect. You will also believe that playing with the Wii is actually better than going out and playing under the sun.
You will also believe Vista is actually better than XP which was also an " improvement" over Win2K which was an "improvement" over NT4, when in fact some benchmarks showed Win2k to be up to 50 per cent slower than NT4, and XP in turn significantly slower than Win2k.
Finally, if you want to believe, you will also believe the optimistic FOSS world claims that only by being open source, the software will "automagically" fix itself, and that someone will eventually - read: sooner rather than later - fix that bug that is plaguing your software and which you found six months ago but which - oh boy - remains unpatched. Or you will believe that Steve Jobs is the Messiah instead of just another Bill Gates wannabe.
Perhaps we all want to believe. Perhaps we believe because deep inside we can't handle the truth about the truly imperfect, bug-ridden, and invasive nature of our IT world driven by evil corporations, lazy programmers, inept users, and babbling tech writers. Or in the words of that famous R.E.M. song: "If you believe, they put a man on the moon, man on the moon."
Now if you excuse us, this scribbler has to exchange his tinfoil hat, because as Intel's Andy Grove once said: "only the paranoid survive". And if you are thinking that this long tirade was only written as a filler and is actually just a delivery means to masquerade the little adverts that populate this page, you are dead wrong, sir. Trust us. Nobody would lie to you. Oh, and the "Matrix" doesn't exist. µ
L'INQs
Humour: Chinese
president revealed as a Lip-Syncing Fake
Share this:
ShareBusiness Intelligence Software
Customer Relationship Management (CRM)
Enterprise Accounting Software
Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP)
Enterprise Systems Management
you are relating olympics fireworks with MIcrosoft.i think you dont have anyother work.would you plaese give me any proof that microsoft prepared video to escape from US govenment.dont just write your own stories in internet.just try to learn from Microsoft.
You couldn't read two lines in that article without tripping over some Microsoft bashing to be honest. Its funny you never mentioned Apple, who are THE BEST in the business in terms of creating an 'Image'. 

anyway back to the Olympics, I think it was a good idea to computer generate the first part since it wwould have been a waste of Fireworks (since the people were in the nest anyway).

The replacing the little girl thing was... harsh ... but very chinese!
Best article I have ever read.
Why in heaven are all you Inquirer 'hacks' (oh, such a cool word!) so bitter and sad?

I used to read the Inq daily. Can't take it anymore so check in once a week Monday morning. Right now I just dropped in to look if you had info on one specific rumor but only see junk articles such as this one.

You used to have inside leads getting exclusive insights. Now it looks like your sources had enough of the opinionated abuse. There is nothing to be found here that is not written up better on other sites.

Maybe I'll just go ahead and drop you from the Monday morning read. Thanks for the insights you used to give. Now you are history.
Here's the quote from Gates (since the long-winded Fernando chose not to give it): 

"I've had a wonderful trip this week. I started off by having a chance to go to the Olympic Games' opening ceremony, and see a lot of those games, which were fantastically managed," he told a packed audience in Hong Kong."

Put in context, Billy said that many of the games were well managed, and had no actual comment on the opening ceremony. Come on, Inq, there's plenty of legit things you can attack Gates for without having to invent it!
To me the Olympics is full of sports that I find boring to watch. Some are exciting to take part in, but most are quite dull as a tv show.

When it comes to London soon it will cost at least £1bil/day ($2bil/day). And it's not even exciting.

There are too many drug users, and very little effort is put in catching them. The Chinese 110m hurdler didn't take part in international competitions this year, is that so he could avoid drug testing?

Why aren't all top athletes blood tested each month with a blood sample kept for up to 75 years. There should also be contracts and criminal penalties for any drug taking or other cheating.

If I want to watch a bunch of drug users running around I can watch a holiday show about clubbing in Ibiza.
pradeep, read the article, just just the first couple of lines.

Good article, and don't be down on the 6502, some of those bugs were great ways of confusing computer science teachers at school, who didn't know about them.

All this chitter-chatter, fritter-fratter, chitter-chatter bout
Shmackta, shmatta, shmatta -- I cant give it away on Shaftesbury avenue
This towns been wearing taters (Battered, Battered)
People dressed in Burberry
Directing traffic
Some kind of fashion
Uh-huh, this towns full of money grabbers
Go ahead, bite the Piccadilly, dont mind the Trafalgar, huh
Shadoobie
And Look at me!
I'm just phoning it in.
Does it matter?

You've got:
Paul Hales
and Demerjian, 
Tony Dennis
Nebosja
Novakovic
and don't forget Nick Farrell, 
Thats what makes our town the best
Stewart Meagher, 
To live in this town you must be tough, tough, tough, tough, tough
Paul Taylor, 
Egan Orion, 
Sylvie Barak
Flatter, flatter, flatter, flatter, flatter, flatter, flatter
Emma Hughes
Mark Ballard
success, success, success, success
Aharon Etengoff 
Wily Ferret
Fernando Cassia
Pile it up, pile it high on the platter
William Shatner
Eva Glass, half empty
Drashek
et. al the chips
Party up! Party high on the fly by
Hu Jintao 
Draught Kingfisher
My brain's been battered, splattered all over Haymarket



The 6502 was used in the Vic20. The 6510 was used in the c64. The big difference being the 6510 could address additional memory.

I can't believe all the stuff that got removed from your article. Man, the censors are getting worse, they even killed the pics of the booth babes. ;-)

Love the article.
Bill was there in person, he saw the REAL fireworks, not the fake ones. The fake ones were only on TV, which were faked to look like the real thing anyway.
Must be a slow news day for you guys to actually spend some portion of you one and only life and its limited time span to come up with the meaningless dribble.
China did a wonderful job... Everyone praised it...

Once, westerners have realized that they can't come up with similar show in London, they started coming up with lame excuses i.e. "Only communist Party can spend this much on opening ceremony, democracy doesn't have this much liberty to spend on sports events." and "All was fake." or even "Free Tibet" Stuff...

Whatever they say and no matter how much their hearts burn, truth is that China did an excellent job and they are going to win the olympics...

Rest is lams excuses, rants and jealousy...
Shurely you meant "Shurely some mistake."
by the time I finished reading the "article" I forgot what it was all about in the first place.

they used windows after all, for some reason I thought they would have used a specially flavor of linux made by them or something like of that sort.
and to think about it, has someone zoomed in and see what caused the BSoD? I can bet it's more of hardware failure.
"You will also believe that playing with the Wii is actually better than going out and playing under the sun."

Well, actually Fernando, using the Wii IS better for me. I am susceptable to skin melanomas, so being in the sun for hours a day isn't really an option.

Not everyone in a sun-worshiping bronzed god or goddess like all you Argentineans. Some of us have to go through life as pasty white troglodytes.
We watched the opening ceremony on NBC (USA) at local primetime (about 12 hours after the fact). The NBC commentators at that time clearly mentioned that the footstep fireworks were CGI replicas of the difficult-to-video orginals. I don't know if the rebroadcast was a verbatim replay of the live original, but it appeared to be. If so, then this detail was also mentioned during the Live NBC broadcast to the USA.

In either case, hardly a scandal.

Word. Although, this is how humans work. Is there *really* an Utopia? We believe the *truth* could be a simple idea. Or that analyzing, arguably degenerate/conflicting, behavior is helpful or progressive. The incomprehensible amount of causes/effects to create us, phsycal beings with self-awareness, being physical-self with a community of others just the same. Questioning... surviving... looking for truth or absolution. We're not supreme, or absolute. We're "life" trying to survive. We dominate the world, work as a group... don't virus do the same on a much smaller level?

I say: Don't be a bitch. Love & Compassion, baby! 'cuase there isn't any truth -- accept your own comfort.

Satsuki
Matt
you know.. just so China came up with the best opening ceremony up to date, there is no need bashing and twisting the truth - THEY'VE DONE A FANTASTIC JOB. If you have issues with MSFT, go spend your appearent abundent time to write about them all you want. The bottom line is.. get a life and take a course in jounalism at your local community college.
I wouldn't say Bill Gates loved" the fakeness judging from the info and links offered and in this article.

But The point is, the government used this as a display of the "new face of the country", yet unfortunately, it used fake images to do it. 

This is saddening more in the symbolic sense. The government was taking so much pain, including faking and covering up, to paint a deceiving face of China. If it has accomplishments to show, why not just be truthful??? Not confident that the truths are good enough?

It is the fact that faking and covering up are typical practices of that GOVERNMENT that made these revelations more newsworthy and noteworthy. Yes, it cheats, by showing a false image. It always does! Trying to fool the unsuspected and trustful eyes inside and out of China. That's what's outrageous! 

And yes, it is very upsetting that the 7 year-old girl was told she was not pretty enough to be onstage. Sad for the other girl, and all kids, as well to be taught that a pretty face is all that matters. 

Not to say that, the 7 year old is lovely and charming in her on ways (What's wrong about a 7 year old having imperfectly lined teeth anyways?). And after all, it's a singing performance, and she has beautiful voice!

BTW, I don't agree with some articles regarding the issue blaming it to "the Chinese/China". It's the government. Remember the government controls everything there? Especially for an event like this. Or especially THIS event? 

The government doesn't represent "the Chinese", or China in that matter. 

Innocent Chinese people were/are decepted too. The more innocent, trustful you are, the more you are misled to believe...That's the true devil in the government's cheating and faking. The government is a shame to the Chinese people!
so the chinese fake the olympics like they fake gucci bags. nothing new there.

however, check this out, apparently, the girl too ugly to sing on tv has a fan site, http://www.ilovepeiji.com

funny how the world turns.
99.5 % fireworks are real, there is only one kind of the fireworks is fake!!! Study more before you write this article!!!!!!!!!
Mientras muchos de los comentarios del articulo fueron dedicados a comentar que tan estúpido es el autor, o porque habla mal de algunas empresas, personas o de las olimpiadas, nadie discute el mensaje de fondo.

¿Quien va a ganar actualmente? ¿el Marketing o la Razón ? El Marketing lo han manejado para hacernos creer que un montón de cosas de mala calidad que hemos comprado o apoyado son buenas y no debería ser así. La prensa escribe basado en sus intereses, las empresas defienden sus intereses, los distribuidores defienden a las empresas que representan y en el consumidor queda convencido de tal campaña de marketing y de la supuesta seriedad de la empresa.

Así que la decisión puede ir por dos caminos, 1) Confiar en uno mismo y creer lo que se le da la gana. 2) Simplemente basarnos en la idea de que "La Ignorancia es Felicidad".