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The Very Worst Uses of Windows
Posted by
timothy
on Thu Jul 10, 2008 07:14 PM
from the you-seem-to-be-attaching-an-iron-lung dept.
from the you-seem-to-be-attaching-an-iron-lung dept.
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!
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Why Do We Have To Restart Routers? 936 comments
jaypaulw writes "I've owned a WRT54G, some cheap D-Link home Wi-Fi/firewall/routers, and now an Apple Airport Extreme (100/10 ethernet ports). In the context of the discussion about the worst uses of Windows — installation in places where an embedded device is superior — I've gotten to wondering why it's necessary to reboot these devices so frequently, like every few days. It seems like routers, purpose-built with an embedded OS, should be the most stable devices on my network."
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There can be only ONE (Score:5, Funny)
Mac OS X?
Re:There can be only ONE (Score:5, Insightful)
What you can't get for mac is Access...
What can an app written in VBScript+Access do that an app written in Python+SQLite can't?
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Re:There can be only ONE (Score:5, Funny)
Draw derisive laughter from knowledgeable peers?
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Plants (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Re:Plants (Score:5, Funny)
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Public BSODs (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Public BSODs (Score:5, Insightful)
Because the CEO pushed to be a microsoft partner and is too stupid to understand what his engineers are telling him.
It happens a LOT.
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Power draw (Score:5, Insightful)
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?
An obvious observation, but I thought I'd make it.
how about prison doors? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Cell block 1138 (n/t) (Score:5, Funny)
(n/t)
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The worst i've seen (Score:5, Interesting)
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 [imageshack.us]
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.
CnC on Aegis Radar Cruisers (Score:5, Informative)
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...
My favorite was... (Score:5, Funny)
Windows for Warships
Bank Machines (Score:5, Interesting)
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...
Re:Bank Machines (Score:5, Funny)
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Roller Coaster controls (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Roller Coaster controls (Score:5, Funny)
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Might not be so crazy (Score:5, Insightful)
Windows 3.11 wasn't a truly multitasking operating system, so that, if an application was doing something in between Windows messages, it genuinely owned the whole machine. If you are doing a near real time system, you probably don't want to lose a time slot in the middle of a roller coaster ride so that some other daemon could fire off and do something else. So yeah, Windows 3.11 might actually work rather well, so long as the application wasn't trying to allocate too many resource handles.
Actually, I wonder why MS wouldn't release a non-preemptive Windows, just for this purpose. It would be a lot more reliable for some applications.
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The scariest moment of my life... (Score:5, Interesting)
Poor Quality Writing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
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...
While I agree this is questionable, I don't think they are connected to the internets (at least I hope not). So, the whole virus/worm fear is probably irrational.
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Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Funny)
Human wishes to start breathing. Cancel/Allow?
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Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
Sue them for what? Microsoft makes no guarantees. Read your license agreement.
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Are you trolling or just stupid? (Score:5, Insightful)
With Linux there is no accountability.
I don't know if you're a troll or an idiot, but the end result is the same. This is utter and complete bullshit.
My company wouldn't have several dozen fully-paid-up RHEL server licenses if we weren't damn sure who was accountable. We'd slap CentOS or something similar up and save a few bucks.
And if Linux isn't good enough for you, you go with something solid and reliable like Solaris or maybe AIX or possibly (depending on the application) a stripped-down high-reliablility embedded OS. You don't go with some rinky-dink toy like Windows. That's bordering on negligence right there. You can't sue Lego if you rebuild your car's chassis using their plastic bricks, and then get in a auto accident and discover you have no crumple zone. It's not Lego's fault you tried to do something insanely stupid. Using Windows for any sort of critical app where people's lives may be at risk is nearly as stupid and negligent as driving around with nothing but small plastic bricks between you and the SUV in the next lane.
(This story so obviously needed a car analogy.) :)
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Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Funny)
I know.
It's bad enough when I try to order a pizza online.
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Re:WARNING (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:WARNING (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Cars? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's worse for use as a desktop OS than some of the other examples in that list. Building controls, manufacturing controls and SCADA networks are, for instance, examples where Windows is actually passable. Why? A very controlled environment and lack of Internet connectivity. The main source of memory leaks and degradation over time is third-party sources, whether applications or drivers. Windows still has a significant number of inherent security flaws, but in these applications the systems should not be connected to the general Internet. This makes it a lot more difficult for an attacker to access the system.
The control over installed third-party systems and lack of external systems connectivity means that Windows tends to be a lot more stable in these environments than on an average desktop PC. The greatly reduces the potential for the jokes about "viruses" and "Trojans" on these systems the author joked about. It's not necessarily the best tool, as a custom Unix or Linux OS can provide much better general uptime and the ability to potentially fix any issues yourself, but it can be an adequate tool.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't expect people to just up and leave software that they're familiar with. I reference college students where I work. We have two rooms, similarly laid out. One room has HP DC7600s, the other Intel iMacs. People chose the room with the HPs showing the typical Windows screensaver over the Macs (which dual boot!) - why? Because it's friggin familiar. And you can't change that by saying the software is crap, because there isn't a usable alternative that appeals to the masses.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
You can't expect people to just up and leave software that they're familiar with.
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.
If you are running a class where you are developing software that runs on Windows, then use Windows. Fine. If you want to run a Windows Only App, and it won't run in Wine or there is no Mac equivalent, then no probs, you win, go for Microsoft.
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. For most people there is no 'familiarity' problem in clicking on an icon, doing stuff and then going 'File -> Save' then 'File - Quit' or finding a the little X in the top right corner.
And who ever said you had to use a mac?
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
The last person to use our lab equipment for P2P had his associated UNIX account probshelled for 6 months. 6 months of no e-mail, no internet, no lab access.
And for the record, our DeepFreeze'd machines along with hard-disk images results in one machine out of 50 going bad in about a 6 month period.
I don't know where you work, but those symptoms sound more indicative of user (or administrative) stupidity.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Informative)
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.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's simple, really.
So simple that nobody does it, for reasons unknown to anyone.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
I am taking no extraordinary measures in the day to day operation of my gaming PC.
I run as a limited user.
I patch Windows monthly.
I don't run software that claims to put "HAWT NUDE CHIXXXORZ" "RIGHT ON YOUR DESKTOP!".
It's simple, really.
Hate to be the one to break it to you... those are extraordinary measures.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Bullshit. Every single "problem" you listed there is indicative of incompetent administration, not the system. Where I work, we have upwards of 5,000 Windows XP desktops, 250 Windows 2003 servers, and a few Redhat Enterprise servers. We don't have any of the problems you listed. Re-imaging PCs is extremely rare because we don't let the users do anything TOO stupid, and the Cisco Catalyst switches prevent any traffic getting out except through our properly configured firewalls. If you're having the problems you list with a Windows network you run, you'd better quit and let a REAL admin take over.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
That's just to keep you from stealing their clicky-pens.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is a computer necessary? A plastic sign would do just as well.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
If you want, I'll let you borrow my pencil.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
I live in Korea, where every computer runs Windows,
(just look at the anti-U.S. mad cow demonstrations happening now)
You'll end up with mad cow one way or another. If we can't send the cows to you, we'll feed them to MS programmers. We've been doing it for years.
Denny Crane
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Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Agree that it is silly to deploy full OSes for anything like these examples from the article provide.
One thing to note is how many companies are STILL using Win9X based Windows for simple deployments, as most of the examples of the BSOD is the Win9X version. OS/2 is still used at a lot of terminal based installation from banks to cash registers, and not only sadly outdated but overkill and underkill at the same time when you consider the hardware it is running on that has been updated.
One thing the article misses is that there are 'small' and stable versions of Windows that would make a better replacement for most of these usage example. (One of the examples is talking about Windows Embedded but the author doesn't realize such a thing exists, as they are referencing the system as 'Windows' when it is a newer Windows Embedded system.
The funny thing is that Microsoft themselves would not support or endorse the usage of Windows (especially Win9X) in the examples given in the article. This is where ignorance of the developers/implementors is the problem, not Windows or Microsoft.
When you can get Windows Embedded or Windows CE for a tiny fraction of the cost, and use any development from 'regular' Windows on these OSes/Devices there is no reason to be deploying a full OS install on devices or device type applications.
I know everyone would like to yell Linux or (insert your favorite OS here) is the best OS to use in these circumstances, but there are times when Windows is the right choice, and does work better, just not a full installation that is poorly done.
As for NT memory leaks and the guy having to go out to reboot the system. That is a bit of hyperbole that is obvious if you know anything about NT or used it even during that timeframe.
1) Windows NT always has had a scheduler
2) NT also has always had a very good set of scripting abilities from a .cmd or DOS .bat file to even VB Basic applications that ran on it when it shipped and took a few seconds to write it to do whatever you needed. (Hence MS adding VB scripting to Windows later on, as this was all too common already for VB to be used more as a scripting tool than as an application development environment.)
So if this guy was going to a physical location to reboot a box, he is either really stupid, insane or lying. Pick one...
At the very least you could put a restart application in the Task Scheduler and have NT freaking reboot itself. Let alone that the chances are the person was using Win16 applications on NT (especially at this timeframe as Win32 development was not easy or widespread at the time.)
So if the application was Win16, just freaking reseting the subsystem would be a reboot for the application and this is without rebooting the entire OS because of the Win16 leak that was contained.
So ya, this part is made up, bad memories, or someone that was really young and stupid not knowing any better, and you can't blame that off to Microsoft, even if it makes them try to feel better about their work...
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Re:Ho ho ho! *snort* (Score:5, Informative)
>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 [microsoft.com].
(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.)
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