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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!
Medical equipment: I confirm. My cousin is an engineer for General Electric, Medical section. As far as I know he services cardiac echography equipment. From what he told me, they all run Windows. Of course, this isn't life threatening, but I do know he's hardware guy and it wouldn't be the first time he calls me for a software problem in his job.
While not in this case, a BSOD may mean real "D" these days in a hospital.... Sad, but true...
Ahhh...the great dumpster continuum. Many a free computer will be found there. -- sowth (748135)
No Outlook for Mac.. ;) ...though they do have a mail/schedule/calendar app...
Michael J. Ryan - tracker1.info
Most plants are running on PLCs, but their user interfaces HMI are pretty much all running some form of Windows. Common ones include Proficy iFIX (by GE), RSView (Rockwell), and WonderWare InTouch (Wonderware) on either Windows XP, Windows 2000/2003 or some form of Windows Embedded.
It is actually incredibly difficult to find mature HMI software that is available for Linux.
Titus Barik
Funny you say that, since it was used on the Aegis... If i remember right they now use bluecat linux.
I've seen quite a few... every ticket machine at Melbourne Airport one day was going through a BSOD-reboot loop, placed quite a workload on the human employees. I really don't understand how any company who's done a tiny bit of research could think Windows is an appropriate platform for something that should really be running a custom embedded system like a cut-down *nix.
Yes there is, it's called Entourage. It comes with Office for the Mac. What you can't get for mac is Access...
We don't believe in radical loony monotheistic religions from the middle east -- we're Christians.
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.
Why do I still use Windows? Well its so I can get my little 32-bit Ski-Free fix. What is that you say? SkiFree works fine via Wine?
dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/hda1
A good chunk of the Command and Control systems on most modern (or most recently refitted) naval vessels in the United States' inventory run on Windows technology.
It kinda gives me the shivers knowing that one of our ships could be sunk by an "inbound" because the point defense system is suffering a BSOD...
"Another problem with overbloated systems running simple tasks is the huge draw of electricity. How much power could we save (and, therefore, money) by using bloated systems less for simple things?"
That is one of the big wins for running VMware ESX. You can consolidate 20 servers onto one machine. Obviously the real # varies. But you can take racks of old machines and retire the hardware and run the systems virtually on one host. It increases the load on that one host, but is a net gain in power and cooling savings over running all the extra machines.
However I do fear that because of virtualization that Win NT 4 will still be running 100+ years from now in a VM.
it doesn't even indicate what version of Windows the system he's talking about uses - there IS an embedded version of Windows available for such tasks, you know.
I presume you mean Windows CE?
I'm on a team that (among other things) makes BSPs for Windows CE. Did you know that every single driver in CE5 runs in user mode? Ayup. They're simple DLL files that device.exe launches and runs as threads. Just at a slightly higher priority than Pocket Word.
Think about that a moment.
The drivers crash just like programs too. They just...bail. Suddenly the device the DLL is providing an interface to is simply gone. They don't run in supervisor mode, so they are susceptible to every single thing that can crash a regular program.
They're starting to fix this in CE6, but naturally Microsoft's solution is...to do both!
In typical MS fashion, they are fixing a clusterfuck by mixing it with what they should have been doing in the first place, thereby making an even larger clusterfuck.
Weaselmancer
rediculous.
Database is definitely the way to go with that many lines of CSV. But he's already got Office so why not just Access? If you're going to go Microsoft, go all the way.
If we install anything on that machine, it would void the warranty. If we send it to them, it will take a week to get back to us. Its one of those devices we just can't do without even for a single day :( It works fine when sampling time is a few milliseconds at 10K samples/sec or so, but 200MHz for 3 seconds wasn't something they envisioned
Face your daemons!
windows CE on those price guns, but the thing is, they all act like thin clients and use software thats actually running on a unix server.
>I presume you mean Windows CE?
No, he means Embedded Windows, like Windows XP Embedded: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/embedded/products/whichproduct/default.mspx.
(What scares me is that you work on embedded systems and have never heard of it. I've never even touched embedded systems work and I know about it.)
I'm an SQAE (Although that should be a little "E" if an E at all) currently working on a medical project; a $75,000 per unit LASIK device. It runs CE. Now, I hadn't thought of this until now (why such an expensive machine would run Windows, especially one for eye surgery). I looked for my geek card, to you know, turn it in, but I couldn't find it. Seems I lost it a long time ago.
Thats not the only coaster to boast windows, AIR at Alton Towers is one i know for sure uses a windows platform (the screens are visible from the platform, and was of windows 2000 flavour by the looks of it)
Also Cyberspace Mountain at Disney Quest, a 'create your own track' coaster simulater, runs on Win95
I know there are loads more, but i remember the AIR one more specifically cause it stalled on the rise out of the station, just after the track switch (there are 2 loading stations and the track switches between each). it was running again in about 5mins but if it set a train running or suddenly pulled the seat into 'flying' position (or dropped em for that matter), that could be a potential killer.
BUT!! heres the thing, these systems are kept in close loop, no internet or wireless connections, if only a operater was dumb enough to put a floppy/mem stick in could they get infected, that is why nearly all known accident on coasters are from either stupid people going in zones they shouldnt or mechanical failure, not a running system failure.
Win 3.11 is safe, as long as its kept solo.
Link about Windows for Warships being used in the UK http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/02/26/windows_boxes_at_sea/
They're Windows XP Embedded running on Radiant POS touchscreen terminals. Yes, the managers have the keyboards locked up in the back. Sure, those terminals have USB connectors under the screen so you could use anything you want, but the terminals are running under a least-privileged user. No they are not rebooted daily to avoid memory leaks, but the main server at the theatre that drives all the box and concession terminals monitors them all and can reboot them remotely at any time if necessary. The software on there (RTMS by Radiant) is quite small and efficient, and the 'terminals' are really just all-in-one desktop PCs running XP.
And yes, each AMC theatre is on the VPN which is corporate wide.
Came here to say this...
I've got a windows 2k3 machine that has been up for the last year and a half (I have owned it for a year and a half).
I have never really understood the "omg windows is t3h evil!" bullshit. Use whatever tool is most appropriate for the job. I use windows on my laptops because i need it to just work....I have putty and openvpn when i need to get back in and work.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
I've never done a GUI in Python
There are several GUI frameworks for Python. You could try either Tkinter or wxPython if you want a GUI app that runs on the local machine. Or read on:
All of my Access replacements in recent memory have been web projects.
And you can make web projects with Apache mod_python.
I've worked with army aviation systems under lynxos and it was a part of the system that generated fewer WTF's than several of the other flavors involved.
In theory that works, but in practice the device manager is not always successful in cleanly unloading and reloading stream interface drivers.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
While that sounds good it doesn't wash. It depends what you are setting up to do. If you want a permissive, bug ridden system where most of your company's bandwidth is used for P2P and every three months your clients call you to tell you their computer has slowed to a crawl, go ahead and use Windows.
This is hyperbole or ignorance.
In controlled environments, modern versions of Windows don't have these performance problems.
The Toaster was used by everyone without a budget because it was very very close to full broadcast quality and you could afford to get one. The later Toasters maybe were broadcast quality, but by then there were other affordable choices. The Prevue guide used to use Amigas (with just a genlock, though) to display the program guide.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
After all Windows has a number of advantages when it comes to being a system that interfaces with the user. However often the hardware itself isn't directly controlled by the Windows system, but by another embedded device that runs whatever it needs to (and doesn't need to interact with the user).
I've seen this sort of thing quite often. We have a spectrophotometre (I think that's the right term) and there are three components: The measurement unit itself, the controller computer, the Windows PC. The unit is, of course, where you put your samples and what does all the actual measurement. However it is a very complicated device, that has lots of things to control. Well the PC you are on doesn't do that directly for a number of reasons. It instead connects to a specially modified PC (has a bunch of proprietary cards in it and such) that runs just the control software on some RTOS (not sure which). That controller then actually interfaces with the hardware.
In this way you have a nice GUI program that you can easily get data and pictures to programs you need to work on them in, or across the network, but the unit is still controlled with the complex hardware and software it needs.
Sensible way of doing things, really. Windows has good tools for GUI programming and such that make it very easy, and is a platform on which many apps run. Why not develop the user interface component on that, and only do the code that needs to be realtime on the embedded platform? Also a way to increase security of the embedded system. Rather than having to worry about all sorts of local attacks (like buffer overflows and such) you only accept input from a port that is connected to another computer and just sanitize data there. There's no complex access to the system, as there is with a GUI, and as such less anyone can screw up.
I think it had something to do with the government deciding not to wait for SSL security to become viable, forcing all banks etc. to run activeX components for security.
This created a de-facto monopoly, since people could not do without the government and bank websites (which now required windows to work properly), and before you know it, everything runs windows because 'everybody uses windows anyway'.
It's actually so bad that most websites require multiple activeX components before they run, and they won't run at all on firefox or opera because most programmers don't care about proper coding, because all they 'need' is for it to run on iexplorer. The switch to newer versions of IE or to windows vista was a huge mess too, because nobody had bothered to code the components with the future in mind. My girlfriend couldn't online-bank for half a year because she ran vista.
The funniest thing is the korean free trade commision recently fined MS $32 billion for running a monopoly, which they themselves created, hah.
I remember a few months ago that a nuclear power plant was shut down due to a zero reading of the data files after a server reboot due to OS update. It didn't really matter which OS it was, just it was poorly designed for the way it handles critical data and no sense of fault tolerance if something should go wrong. Also, the person who allowed the reboot didn't test this scenario to make sure it wouldn't cause any problems. Can you say, "Whooops"? It doesn't give me a warm fuzzing feeling about it. Here is the link to the story: http://www.liquidmatrix.org/blog/2008/06/07/nuke-plant-shutdown-due-to-upgrade/
I am a Korean, who also uses Ubuntu on a daily basis. Maybe I can answer this question.
To get the Korean people use Linux, some things must be solved first.
1) A good localization team which can catch up all the changes
2) ActiveX-free site designing practices
It seems that 2) is somewhat getting better, since I find that many webpages that didn't render properly starts to get rendered quite well on Firefox. Although there still are many websites that doesn't properly run without ActiveX, it isn't that serious in many cases. I guess it is because people are suddenly figuring out that ActiveX is insecure, unreliable, and may cause a whole lot of portability problems (surprise, surprise). Now, they try to implement them using Flash or plain Javascript.
Now, what remains is when doing anything related to banking or shopping, since the Korean government requires all financial transactions to use their own way of digital signatures, which requires additional libraries. AFAIK, there is no regulation which limits its implementation to be in ActiveX, but the only problem is that nobody implements it in anything else. I believe there is a Java implementation which ran as an applet, but is seriously outdated since most people stuck with Windows anyway.
Actually, I think the localization problem is more serious. Although many applications are well localized, it's still hard to find every newest distribution to be fully localized (I'm not even talking about beta versions). And it may cause problems, even if the number of non-localized messages is small.
Combining it with a lack of cheap Linux programmers (also caused by the lack of localization, since the cheap workforce isn't so good at English anyway), I don't think we in Korea would see some serious Linux usage over here.
ps : the mad cow demonstration isn't actually against United States - it's against the Korean government which didn't even try to do any negotiation at all - they simply threw the towel, even giving up their right to have any power to protect themselves in case of an outbreak of mad cow disease or whatsoever. Now suddenly, the government figured out that people actually did care about public health. (surprise, surprise).
Where did you get that idea?
Australia has never recorded a case of BSE or vCJD and is one of a handful of countries recognised as having a negligible BSE risk by the World Organisation for Animal Health.
"I've got more toys than Teruhisa Kitahara."
I completely agree that Windows SCADA software is unreliable. Most of our clients spec Wonderware/Intouch because its unfortunately industry standard (at least in my industry). This is frustrating to me, because I want to promote a fully open source linux based SCADA but there aren't many options available. Especially the lack of any Alarm dialer applications (like SCADAlarm). Another problem with Linux based Open Source SCADA is the difficulty finding hardware drivers for the proprietary PLC's (AB, Modicon, etc) While there are some open source drivers available, they do not appear to be "mainstream" like many OPC servers (TOPServer) and appear to be beta software. One of the better Open Source SCADA programs that I've tested is PVBrowser. LinTouch looked really promising but development stopped a few years ago.
If you set the file system permissions correctly and keep all logins in the Users group, it is remarkably difficult to crack these systems.
That does suggest that you are lucky enough that all your Windows apps are happy running as a "normal" user. There is still plenty of Windows software around that insists on an Administrator account.
Cheers,
Toby Haynes
Anything I post is strictly my own thoughts and doesn't necessarily have anything to do with the opinions of IBM.
"Not to be rude, but when will the open source crowd realise that no legal department is going to let a firm go to linux until there is somebody they can sue if everything goes belly up"
Of course you are a troll, but...
I still have to see a corp installation that at boot up says "here's Linux booting". They all say "Here Comes Red Hat", or "That's Novell SUSE coming", or "welcome to Canonical's Ubuntu", or something like that.
Are you implying that Microsoft can be sued but Red Hat, Novell or Canonical can't?