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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 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.
... 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.
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;
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