The Very Worst Uses of Windows 816
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!
Re:WARNING (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Plants (Score:2, Interesting)
Don't forget Emerson's DeltaV [easydeltav.com], whose user interface is built using Visual Basic. Seriously Scaaary.
I've seen two operator workstations crash during a major oil refinery process upset. Luckily they had three redundant workstations for the operator to switch between...
Manufacturing controls (Score:1, Interesting)
We've got a huge lathe that runs something like windows NT. Funny thing is that it takes twice as long to boot and WAY longer to shut down, AND has less functionality than much older systems. I don't know about the machine control drivers, but I could write an interface that would do 10x as much on linux.
And then there's the worry that $500,000 worth of hardware could be completely fucked by a worm or just stupid windows crap. WTF!
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.
Re:WARNING (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you thought about playing dumb and reporting that as a bug to their tech support?
Or... is installing MySQL out of the question? I hate to ask it, but a script to dump data into the MySQL database would be kind of handy. Still, querying and inspecting rf data should be a requirement on a spectroscope.
And btw, what I wouldnt do for even a 10MHz 16bit 'scope.
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.
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...
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.
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Interesting)
ATMs - I can confirm this one (Score:2, Interesting)
So, I tried to take money out of the ATM in the office to buy my ticket. In the middle of my transaction, the application crashed, taking the OS with it (or vice versa). After a couple minutes watching the Windows automated boot process, the machine came back up to the "enter your card" prompt.
But it still had my card!
Fortunately, I didn't need my bank card for the rest of my trip, and my friend was able to get out enough cash separately. However, if I had been traveling alone, I wouldn't have been able to take the bus trip.
And I had to call my bank back home to cancel the card and request a replacement.
Never got that card back. Fortunately, no one ever used it to take my money, either.
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.
Manufacturing controls - have seen in action (Score:3, Interesting)
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.
The scariest moment of my life... (Score:5, Interesting)
How About the Video Rental Machines at Kroger? (Score:2, Interesting)
These things started showing up in the Krogers around here about one or two years ago. They're sort of like soda dispensing machines, but you rent DVD films from them instead. You run through a selection of video case covers via the touchscreen (which lead to a description of the film if need be) before making your selection and swiping your debit card. The machine then takes about ten minutes and a bunch of horrendously loud noise before spitting out one DVD.
The thing is, they run Windows XP Home. I've seen the things randomly reboot (and repeat) many of times while standing in the nearby checkout lanes. One day there was merely a constant blue screen of death. Yep.
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.
One word: Accountability (Score:2, Interesting)
All these suggestions (Use Linux! Install *BSD! Solaris FTW!) are all well and good, but if/when the system goes down, to whom do you go for support? Hardware caused a crash? Try and track down the kid in a basement that wrote the driver you're using. Some core functionality in the kernel caused a hard lock? Update to the latest kernel and hope for the best (Oh, and have to recompile your whole system while you're at it).
With Windows, if something goes wrong, you can contact the hardware manufacturer (If it's hardware/driver-related) or Microsoft if it's software related. And if they won't help, you can sue them. You can't say the same about *nix, where the prevailing attitude seems to be "It don't work, you're on your own to find a fix".
Sure, you can go through a "Supported" linux vendor, like RedHat, but they're not guaranteeing the software, just the "Service" they provide.
While Windows may be a swiss cheese of security holes, they are legally actionable security holes, which is more than can be said for *nix
Re:CnC on Aegis Radar Cruisers (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
The Intel Home TeleHealth Guide Runs On XP (Score:3, Interesting)
-- and of course nothing whatever can go wrong with a *nix based platform used in the same environment.
There is also the small natter of FDA approval:
The 8-pound in-home gadget connects caregivers and patients outside of hospitals or clinic settings. It manages vital-sign collection, patient reminders, educational content, and motivational messages. The device has a 40GB hard drive. Information collected by the device is sent to the health care professional, and from there, physician and doctor can engage in video conferencing to discuss health issues. Doctors monitor and remotely care for their patients via an online interface using software called the Intel Health Care Management Suite. It currently runs on Windows XP only.
With the ability to hook up to wired and wireless monitors, such as glucose or blood pressure gauges, a caregiver can schedule times to remotely measure vital signs, or patients can check their own. The encrypted information is sent to a remote database, as long as the device connected to the Internet via broadband.
The Intel Health Guide PHS6000 received FDA clearance to enter the market after years of development and research, including pilot studies in the United Kingdom and the U.S. Intel said it expects the product to be commercially available from health care providers by late 2008 or early 2009 Intel's in-home health device gets FDA nod [cnet.com] [July 10. 2008], Intel Health News [intel.com]
The purpose of the device is to support home care for the chronically ill. Home care is cheaper. Patients tend to remain more active, engaged and independent.
Seriously? Server OS. (Score:2, Interesting)
Why the hell would you want to hammer a single-user constrained, GUI-centric "operating system" square peg into a server OS round hole?
There's a reason why Windows still doesn't scale, and there's a reason why running multiple virtual Windows servers that don't fuck with each other is common.
Re:Medical equipment (Score:2, Interesting)
Except that a BSOD on both WinXP and Win2000 are not that hard to cause
If you stay away from flakey video card drivers, I would dispute this fact. I use Windows as my primary OS and have seen very few BSODs. This is from XP, Vista, or Server 2008. The NT line has always been as stable as any Linux setup I've put together.
Re:There can be only ONE (Score:3, Interesting)
What can an app written in VBScript+Access do that an app written in Python+SQLite can't?
Please the jackass that made me write it :)
Actually, Python+SQLite wouldn't handle the GUI aspect. I've never done a GUI in Python - is there something approaching Access+VBA in the Python world for building a GUI? (Reports, entry screens, etc)
All of my Access replacements in recent memory have been web projects.
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.
Re:Ho ho ho! *snort* (Score:2, Interesting)
I agree, and what a whinger!
No, I wouldn't use Windows for major process control, but yes for HMI. In don't know anyone serious in process control who would use windows for the actual control of plant, though for limited IO such products do exist Heck, we're firmly in the "safety interlocks must also be hard-wired" camp.
However, the article's description of SCADA as a protocol demonstrates a negligible understanding of that whole industry. It's like calling "word processing" a protocol.
In terms of some of the trivial applications, sure it's overkill on the hardware and OS side, but hey, I can develop a VB app to display a green arrow in about 1 minute. The licence costs for XP Embedded are almost nothing, and there's hundreds of hardware options available off the shelf in all form factors, including small fanless boards with solid state drives. The time it'd take me to find or assemble some other platform to make it happen would far outweigh any saving in equipment & OS cost. Sure, someone else could do the same with Linux in 1 minute with known equipment. Good on 'em! No skin off my nose.
If deployment is 10,000 units then yes each dollar on equipment counts, but by then the installation costs will far exceed the hardware so that'd become the main consideration in choice of platform.
Just this night (Score:3, Interesting)
I was in a Macys (long story) and ran across a price scanner. These are little gadgets with the SKU reader to tell you the price of an item, but they also had a card-reader tacked on to tell you the remaining balance.
I walked past one and saw this: http://img55.imageshack.us/my.php?image=0710082036ib1.jpg [imageshack.us]
Yes, a Windows XP desktop. The taskbar was barely visible, but off to the bottom. Internet Explorer, Recycle Bin, and My Computer were there.
This got me thinking. Why would people use such a complicated system with so many parts and so much bloat... to look up a SKU?
The best answer I can come up with is that store maintainers want to keep this data in one format. I can imagine that the server has a SQL table of the names/SKUs/prices/sales/etc, and the registers can run querys against it. It would be easiest to make your devices query the same database - no glue necessary.
Still, wouldn't some form of Linux be more suitable? The kernel can be stripped down to remove everything not necessary (all mouse and keyboard input, sound, all other network adapters and graphics cards), while still allowing the same functionality.
So I understand why they did it. I still cringe when I think the power that thing must have... just for its simplistic function.
It's not the OS (Score:3, Interesting)
People aspiring to be locked-in... Including CEOs that want "gold reseller status" and Engineers get XX Certified and turn into little self-serving XX salespeople.
The amount of crap that is spoken about support contracts for commercial products. Supported, my ass - hours on the phone talking to someone who knows less than you do, it's more like psycology; "you know the answer - I just have to bring it out of you"...
Fearmongering over Intellectual property and licensing
FUDspreading over the supportability of one platform over another.
Insisting on a crappy GUI over a workable text UI at any cost. Heaven forbid the end user see text, much better he see a picture of a bleeding aardvark and a shoelace and try and figure out what that means...
OK - so I can blow a few Karma points in a rant every now and again, but really - it's not even Windows' fault - it is a competent OS in many ways as testified by how widely it really is deployed with no-one usually noticing.
It's the pseudo-professionality garbage-sphere that surrounds it that gets my goat.
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.
Mod Parent Funny (Score:3, Interesting)
Have you ever tried contacting MS support? Even the high end MSDN support? They're not bad per se, but there is zero procedure for what to do in a bug situation, either it can be fixed without a programmer, or you're SOL.
I disagree with the article. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:Plants (Score:1, Interesting)
i work for a very high end control and sensor company, i shuddered during the interview when they told me they write tons of code in c#, turns out the only code written windows systems deals with UI's. They wouldn't dream of writing critical code for a windows platform for anything critical, all the control systems run QNX or no OS...
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:2, Interesting)
Or the PC that I use for gaming that's sitting under my desk.
Or the development PCs on our isolated LAN at work.
Re:Medical equipment (Score:1, Interesting)
At the hospital where I work, our catheterization lab's monitoring equipment is all Windows based, right down to the fluoroscope, and most of it is TCP/IP based and living on the same network that the unit clerks use to surf www.freesmiliesifyouletmeinfectyourbox.com.
For those of you who don't know, the fluoroscope is what physicians use to watch the wire that they shove into your arteries during angioplasty, or the similar wire that they use to burn misbehaving parts of your heart muscle to death during radio frequency ablation. Thus, the BSOD could very well mean that a patient is now sitting on the table with a bunch of metal objects inside him/her, and no way to see them to get them out safely.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:2, Interesting)
Why did you miss this part of my reply?
Or the PC that I use for gaming that's sitting under my desk.
MTA NYC (Score:1, Interesting)
Has anyone witnessed a Metrocard vending machine being rebooted in NYC. It hosts Winnt. I have also seen Windows 2000 Desktops after the Flight Arrival/Departure Menu Crashed at the Airport in Tampa.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:1, Interesting)
Well, during my engineering education, I was once forced to work on a bomb disposal robot that ran Windows 98.
Thank heavens that I had to write code only for a separate microcontroller board and not that Windows 98 computer.
Re:Bank Machines (Score:3, Interesting)
Having worked for a very large and prominent ATM maker I can honestly tell you that they are not to blame. The company I worked for, lets call it A, said the to bank that they should use an embedded OS. The bank said no, they want Windows XP. So A said, OK if thats what you want. So we will take XP and strip it down and customize it. Again the bank said no. Quote "we want XP exactly like it is on our desktops"!!! Regardless to say the implementation is an absolute disaster. Don't blame the ATM manufacturer.
Library Catalogue (Score:3, Interesting)
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:3, Interesting)
I was going to mod you up, but instead, I decided to tell a related personal experience. In a job I had years ago my boss refused to adopt Linux for database servers because "you don't have anyone to blame when things go wrong with Linux"...
Re:Medical equipment (Score:3, Interesting)
Then EU companies should start selling those devices to US, because here devices does not run any common OS. Every software is checked very carefully that there ain't anykind problems. It is expensive but you need to trust the device what keeps living person a live and does not kill him because malfunction!
Re:Windows in a Nuclear Power plant. (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Netcraft !confirms it (Score:3, Interesting)
Solaris and those others, OTOH will happily run for months and years without requiring a reboot. I recently ran across a system at work (RedHat 5) that nobody bothered with because it always did it's job. When I had to go look to see what the problem was, imagine my surprise to find it running RH5. Everyone that knew the root password had either quit or forgot they knew it, it had been sitting there running for several years. Windows will NOT do that.
Accroding to Netcraft, the server out there with the longest uptime is fp002.crayfish.net, currently at 1817 days (~5 years) of uptime and counting; running -- Windows 2000.