The Very Worst Uses of Windows

bigplrbear writes "I found an interesting article revealing the many places that Microsoft products reside, and what they're used for, ranging from elevators to ticket scanners." From the article: "Thanks to VMWare Windows is spreading throughout the datacenter. And, of course, there is only one operating system to use if you are dependent on Microsoft apps like Outlook, Word, and Excel. While I have joined the chorus of security folks who rail against the Microsoft Monoculture I still cannot believe some of the uses for Windows. Some of them are just downright silly, some you may claim are criminally negligent." Note: I'm making no claim of criminal negligence!

Comments

Re:WARNING

[Firehed]

Well that would be great if Access was a database. We all know it's really just an Excel sheet with some crappy input validation.

Re:The alternatives suck harder

[toadlife]

If you have more than a month uptime on a Windows system, you are not applying the patches correctly.

False. Patches that pose a realistic threat to servers are relatively rare. Most patches are local vulnerabilities like IE/ActiveX. If you are rebooting your servers every month just to install IE patches, you are a fucking moron.

I recently ran across a system at work (RedHat 5) that nobody bothered with because it always did it's job.

So what? There are plenty of documented cases of Win2k3 staying up for years at a time. You could have installed a Win2k3 server with IIS6 serving static and .asp web pages in 2003 with port 80 open on the local firewall and have it still be up today, with no externally exploitable security vulnerabilities.