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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!
We have a 350MHz spectroscope in our lab that has embedded XP. Now if we go for few seconds of RF sampling, it writes Time vs Signal values as a CSV file. Now the funny thing is you can't open files with more than 65000 rows in excel and since the spectroscope itself has nothing but windows applications, none of them is capable of displaying the saved samples. You have to transfer the sample data to another computer and open them through Labview or Matlab or some such tool. Why would a spectroscope costing nearly $30,000 be running Windows.
Face your daemons!
Yep, The prison where I worked as a guard for a while changed their control center from mechanical switches to a PC running XP. I worked the control center a lot and the "upgrade" sucked. You had to page thru several screens to see all the doors and the touch screen was too sensitive. You could open 2 doors or the wrong door by accident. The interlock system was suppose to prevent that by requiring you to use both hands to open doors, but it proved to be impossible to use so it was disabled. the OS was always crashing (likely the shitty program) and you had to wait for the system to reboot before you could open doors without the keys.
In Phoenix we have a power company called APS. In some of the gas stations there are kiosks that allow you to pay your bill using Cash. I was walking through a circle K the other day, and to my horror i saw this:
link
Sorry about the shitty image quality...I took it using my crackberry.
Yes, that is a dialog box politely informing you that you have been Trojaned.
NewslilySocial News. No lolcats allowed.
Also, a few months ago I stopped at a bank machine to withdraw some cash.
So I entered my PIN and withdrawal amount. While waiting for the magic money machine to do its thing, I idly tapped my fingers in random patterns on the touch screen.
Suddenly, a standard Windows XP taskbar and Start button appeared.
Being curious, I tapped the Start button. Kinda freaked me out when a complete Start Menu appeared. Everything was there, including Internet Explorer, Outlook Express, and Windows Media Player.
I can't believe that neither the ATM machine manufacturer nor the bank put any effort into building a custom, stripped-down image to run the bank's cash machines...
When drinking one night with a former roller coaster technician who had decided to get into the less stressful job of datacenter ops, I found out something terrifying about a famous (and, it should be said, injury/fatality-free as far as I know) catch & release roller coaster.
The coaster is designed such that the train car is loaded at a station. Then a tractor mechanism pulls it backward, up to the top of a steep incline. Once at the top, the mechanism releases the car, and the train goes rocketing through the station, through a series of tight loops and twists, and then coasts up an identical steep incline on the other end. There another mechanism catches the car, drags it all the way to the top, and then lets go, sending the car back through the series of loops and twists in reverse. The car decelerates up the incline back on the original side, is caught once again, and returned gently to the station for boarding.
All of these catch mechanisms need to know the velocity and weight of the train car in order to properly catch and decelerate it without hurting any of the occupants. Those values will change with every load of passengers, due to people's varying weights and their distribution around the car, so they have to be calculated on the fly.
The software that does this, the engineer swore to me, runs on...
Windows 3.11.
This knowledge made future rides on that particular coaster a hell of a lot more scary.
Even Jesus hates listening to Creed.
I'm sure that lathe could be controlled by Linux or QNX running on the same hardware. It amazes me to see the horrendous job that companies who make perfectly good machine tools do on their control software. They wouldn't make the lathe's chassis out of cardboard, why would they build their control systems on windows?
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
I can confirm this as well. I was in the Massachusetts General Hospital laying in an fMRI tube because I was participating in a psychology study (and getting compensated financially). After a few minutes of inactivity I wondered when things would start happening - they soon extricated me from the tube. Turns out the cause of the problem was that the Siemens machine running Embedded Windows (as proven by a prominently-affixed license sticker) had locked up while I was entubed, and they had to reboot. After that it worked fine, and the fMRI went off without a hitch.
As a relatively less scary story, the last bottle-making company I worked for (was bought out by Silgan Plastics) had these expensive plastic moulding machines bought at a high price from Italy. I was called in because the maintenance guy had been instructed to replace a PCI nic and couldn't do it. I opened the cabinet and lo and behold, there's an XP desktop sitting there with cheap Dell keyboard and mouse. The harddisk and motherboard had been bolted onto the metallic plates (no real case).
I had worked for over a year as the only IT guy without knowing there were hoards of Windows desktops on the factory floor, with expensive maintenance contracts that brought in people to work on them.
"Give orange me give eat orange me eat orange give me eat orange give me you." -Nim Chimpsky
I used to work in a semiconductor fab (memory specifically). The original fab was all unix based on our end. Some of the machines ran windows, though. When a new factory was built, for some reason, management decided it would be a good idea to start from scratch on the system that controlled the manufacturing process. Rather than use our proven, stable, and known unix based system we created a new system from scratch which ran on windows.
I left the company in march 06. Not long before I left, though, sometime in February, management pulled everyone together to yell and scream because that windows based factory had already gone over it's allotted downtime for the entire year.
We even saw the virus scenario mentioned in the article. It infected the terminals the people in the actual factory used and all of the tools which were controlled by windows computers. All production had to be stopped while we ran around to every terminal and tool in the factory, rebooted with a clean boot floppy, cleaned the virus, and then booted the thing back up.
... well ok, not quite, but still! There's an ATM at my school which embodies the mother of all WTFs in my oppinion. It's a DIEBOLD ATM with a _headphone jack_ which usually displays the Windows XP login screen with a big error message saying that the bank domain is not available! If you think I'm making this up I wish to present to you... the evidence: http://www.dumpt.com/img/viewer.php?file=wmbbbwi8otsxgqlmi93u.jpg
You don't think enough... therefore you better not be!
Most of those applications shouldn't be running Windows, or any other full featured OS, anyways.
One of the big problems with MS is the tendency to want to squeeze the same type of desktop into any environment whether or not it makes sense.
If the only thing the computer needs to do is show an arrow, I'm really not sure why Windows is necessary, MS-DOS could do that efficiently, especially if it never needs to change arrow types. Back when I used DOS still, most of the time when it froze it would continue showing the last image. If showing one image is the only requirement, then DOS can still crash and do the job.
One could also go with something like damn small linux as well. But for several of those applications a stripped down OS of virtually any sort is going to be a better choice, even if it is just a stripped down version of Windows.
That blunder in systems design cost lives. A great many lives. Totally needlessly. Don't imagine it can't happen to the US navy, because if they rely on unstable software on mission critical systems, it will.
Another non-Microsoft example of why software should be treated with a bit more care was the Boeing 767 that "landed" at Heathrow after all onboard computers shut down in flight. The pilots were damn good and damn lucky, but luck aside, why the hell were there no backup computer systems or failover strategies? Why did the pilots have to "fly" with no engines, no instrumentation and very nearly no controls?
But when you combine this kind of insanely poor systems design with Microsoft's unreliability and long boot times, you have something that is asking for trouble. Problem is, if you ask for trouble nicely enough, trouble is happy to oblige.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
I live in Korea, where every computer runs Windows, no matter how minimal the need. POS terminal in large supermarkets, airport arrival/departure information screens, ATMs, monitors which loop the same video in full-screen all day, every day.
Korea spends a lot of its time being nationalistic (just look at the anti-U.S. mad cow demonstrations happening now), yet they send I-don't-know-how-many-billions of dollars to the U.S. for Windows XP every year. My Samsung hard drives even used to come with an OEM version of XP.
Put identity in the browser.
I worked on an X Ray system that run Windows 2000. There was actually an earlier Linux version but the customers wanted Windows for some reason. I'm not sure why, installing applications on a X Ray system seems to me to be incredibly unwise.
But it wasn't as bad a decision as you think. The actually X ray and display was essentially a separate machine. There was a PCI bus driven by the Windows box but everything was set up so that if the Windows side crashed the X Ray would continue to work. There was a dedicated monitor and the UI could be handled either with a mouse or with dedicated buttons. One of the tests was that you could continue to use the system while Windows rebooted from a BSOD. Or failed to reboot actually, we'd overwrite the MBR and the dereference a null pointer in kernel mode WinDbg which would trash the machine irrevocably.
Essentially all desktop stuff is crap compared to well designed embedded systems. Embedded systems, at least good ones, don't call malloc except at initialization to avoid memory fragmentation. The code is much simpler - the X ray system would initialize the hardware and then sit in a loop waiting for commands from the hard keys. Code coverage was 100%, and the actual code was tiny, only a few 10s of kilobytes. The embedded system didn't have a filesystem and didn't do any dynamic loading - an image was booted from flash and that was it. The hardware was absolutley sealed, unlike in a desktop environment where people can install a $5 webcam with buggy drivers. There was even a hardkey to disable UI events from Windows - from Windows POV the UI device would be unplugged, just in case the Windows UI application went apeshit and overloaded the embedded side with bogus UI events. People worked out worst case interrupt latency and used vxWorks, a very light weight OS. All the critical stuff worked in this environment or was in hardware.
Essentially the Windows PC was a glorified Human Interface device but everything was set up so the hard buttons were a more convenient system anyway. So people actually doing X Rays would use those. The point of all this was that we couldn't prove the desktop stuff was reliable so we worked on the assumption that it wasn't.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
But if you want a system where the idea is to minimize the cost of installing and maintaining terminals, maximize the portability of people's computer setups, and give people enough freedom to play without crippling everyone else's system, then go for a thin client model using Linux or BSD.
I'm getting ready to do this at home. I'm starting with an IBM xSeries eserver 325, a dual Opteron 246. It was around $230 shipped with 2GB ECC DDR 333 RAM (added 2x512MB) and 120GB disk. It's a 1U server with dual-GigE. A console will cost you some money but it has a serial port. I got it from hypermicro.com. They have some dual-Xeons with 2GB RAM and (AFAICT) no disk for $20 more. I already have a Compaq IPAQ C500 Legacy-Free PC to use as one client, and have it netbooting LTSP from my P3 laptop as a test. I'm using all Ubuntu. I have little hope of being able to upgrade to dual opterons (there was however a successor to this system, the 326, which came with dual opterons) but the system will take 12GB of memory, which is enough to support many more people than will ever use the machine here.
Why do this at home? It frees me up to use the lowest-power systems with graphics capabilities that will suit my needs, and I only have one big system to upgrade. I'm actually contemplating putting Windows XP back on my laptop, because Linux is so poor at supporting its hardware correctly (mostly the Quadro FX1500, which gives me nonstop problems) and I still love to play games.
Since pretty much everything around here will netboot, all I need to do is include all the necessary drivers in the ltsp image and I'm set. The network block device support that lets you mount storage devices from the client on the server (automounted, even) is what finally made me decide it was worth doing.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
Give up, those bigots don't get it.
I used to do IT security stuff and whether it's Windows or Linux there's not a big difference in security from the technical POV.
Imagine if 90% of the desktop users in the world used Ubuntu/Suse as their desktop O/S and don't do the sort of thing you say you do for your windows box. You'd have the same problems all over again. There was at least one windows malware that spread via _requiring_ users to actually enter passwords to decrypt zipfiles and run the resulting executables. Requiring some user to (for example) run a malware perl program is nothing in comparison, and go figure the limits of what perl malware can do on a typical desktop machine, it can even google for new instructions and download them.
Whether it's Linux or OSX, if you run the "HAWT NUDE CHIXXXORZ" trojan your user account's info will be at risk, and the trojan would be able to spam/DDoS the world from your box, and do anything your user account can do (turn on the mike, cam etc).
In fact with Windows, sandboxing of programs (via software firewalls) is more common than with Desktop Linux where the isolation is more at a "per user" level. Server Linux has SELinux and AppArmor, but that's not desktop ready.
Probably not.
But I have to admit, that my old P166 with a fully patched Windows 95 ran quite well. If it had been possible to add USB support, I'd probably still be using it.
Guess I'm a victim of Windows burnout. I started out in 1995 genuinely liking Windows. But a decade of trying to keep that house of cards propped up and running on a hundred or so PCs soured me pretty thouroughly. I'm not wild about Linux, but I can live with it. And it is improving albeit not as quickly as I'd like. OTOH, I detest each new version of Windows more than the last. How can people possibly subject themselves to that thing? Do they spend their spare time -- assuming that they have any -- pounding thumbtacks into their foreheads?
***For the rest of us, the reboot/reinstall cycle is simpler.***
If you had told us in 1968 that in 2008, computer software would work so badly that periodic reinstalls would be a normal maintenance procedure, we'd have laughed at you. Silly us.
You can't see ANYTHING from a car, You've got to get out of the goddamned contraption and walk...Edward Abbey
I am not the OP and we all know Windows can be made to work and many of us know how to do it. Its often a culture problem though. As someone who inherited a network rather then built it I have a bunch of users who expect to be able to install software on their own PCs, users who think its ok to have 16 gigs of E-mail, and users who think they should be allowed to do basically anything they please. despite our ever increasing helpdesk staff and my assurances to management I could correct that problem without preventing anyone from doing actually business with company equipment, management supports the users having to much access and total freedom to cause me and the desktop support staff headaches.
I can only imagine the response I would get if I tried to do any filtering with my web accelerators, or tightened up the firewall enough to provide meaningful outbound protection. Hell it was a battle to lock the mail relays, because "Oh No's developers would need to create a request to get their machine permitted if they needed to test software they were working on to send mail."
It took us getting on the black hole list to convince management that I either had to take steps to STOP PCs from being hijacked or lock down where mail could come from.
Every copy of Solaris (and Java, as I recall) sternly tells you not to use it for critical medical equipment, nuke plants, missile guidence, all sorts of stuff.
Vintage computer games and RPG books available. Email me if you're interested.