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!

There can be only ONE

And, of course, there is only one operating system to use if you are dependent on Microsoft apps like Outlook, Word, and Excel.

Mac OS X?

Re:There can be only ONE

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?

Plants

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

Yeah, but that's because photosynthesis software only runs on Windows

Public BSODs

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.

Power draw

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?

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.

The worst i've seen

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

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...

Windows for Warships

Bank Machines

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

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

Well duh, a roller coaster is supposed to scare the living hell out of you. A geek might not be overly impressed by experiencing the effects of gravity and inertia (and might even carry a chess board with glued-on pieces), but knowing that thing runs on Windows 3.11! The horror!

The scariest moment of my life...

... 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 [dumpt.com]

Re:Medical equipment

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.

Re:Medical equipment

During the birth of my first daughter, the fetal heart monitor was connected to a Windows box. Trust me, the last thing you want to see in the middle of a long, difficult and painful birth is a BSOD...especially when the doctor is desperately searching for a heartbeat.

Re:Medical equipment

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.

Re:Medical equipment

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.

Re:WARNING

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.

Re:WARNING

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.

Re:Cars?

Paper Clip: Do you mean Airbag?

Re:Obligatory...

And in my experience managers tend to go with the solution that the largest percentage of the population and staff use. Granted the trend towards Microsoft software is on the downside but they are still king of the hill. For now.

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.

Re:Obligatory...

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?

Re:Obligatory...

That's just to keep you from stealing their clicky-pens.

Re:Ho ho ho! *snort*

>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.)