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!
Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
What, you mean other than as a desktop OS?
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.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
Management OTOH are complete fucking idiots, they'll always go with the inferior solution from the hardworking salesman. One day we'll have managers who'll think, "this salesman is working harder than the others because he knows his product isn't as good"
In my experience management tends to go for the product that has the best clicky-pends and coffee mugs and complimentary dinners. That being said, the same management is in a sealed off part of the building with high security locks and a separate parking area with a security guard and barbed wire fencing. I wonder what they know that they don't want us to know.
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.
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?
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.
Re:DeepFreeze DeepSchmeeze (Score:4, Insightful)
Indeed, but I've found few of these applications that didn't have better written counterparts.
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.
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, Insightful)
Regardless of what else I may do, I am certainly not a Windows expert.
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.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
It's simple, really.
So simple that nobody does it, for reasons unknown to anyone.
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.
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:4, Insightful)
But that's not Microsoft's/Windows' fault.
It's the games developers' fault.
OK, maybe early versions of Windows didn't encourage strict setting of access permissions - and that has allowed bad games developers to get away with it for too long. Versions of Windows for the past 8 years or so are much better at this, but Microsoft are really between a rock and a hard place with it. With Vista, they've started essentially FORCING people not to run with admin rights all the time (with UAC etc), because the gentle encouragement since W2k hasn't worked, but lots of people moan about that. So, what are they to do?
AFAIAA, all the Windows applications made by Microsoft will run with the appropriate level of user permissions. The problem is with everyone else's applications.
The only reason Linux is 'more secure' than Windows is because all the dumb Windows users are using Windows. If they all moved over to Linux, there'd be millions of Linux boxes logged in as root all the time, with thousands of viruses being written for Linux, Linux based botnets etc etc.
A lot of the reasons people state for why 'Linux rules' are primarily BECAUSE it's not widely used. If you want Linux to keep its good rep, don't encourage average home users to use it!
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: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.
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:5, Funny)
That's just to keep you from stealing their clicky-pens.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
best clicky-pends and coffee mugs and complimentary dinners :)
I think you mean hookers and blow
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.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Insightful)
Why is a computer necessary? A plastic sign would do just as well.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Funny)
A plastic sign would do just as well.
That was my first thought too. Next thing you know, they'll try to invent a way to put Windows in a pen so that it would write upside down in space
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
If you want, I'll let you borrow my pencil.
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: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
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Informative)
I am a Korean, who also uses Ubuntu on a daily basis. Maybe I can answer this question.
To get the Korean people use Linux, some things must be solved first.
1) A good localization team which can catch up all the changes
2) ActiveX-free site designing practices
It seems that 2) is somewhat getting better, since I find that many webpages that didn't render properly starts to get rendered quite well on Firefox. Although there still are many websites that doesn't properly run without ActiveX, it isn't that serious in many cases. I guess it is because people are suddenly figuring out that ActiveX is insecure, unreliable, and may cause a whole lot of portability problems (surprise, surprise). Now, they try to implement them using Flash or plain Javascript.
Now, what remains is when doing anything related to banking or shopping, since the Korean government requires all financial transactions to use their own way of digital signatures, which requires additional libraries. AFAIK, there is no regulation which limits its implementation to be in ActiveX, but the only problem is that nobody implements it in anything else. I believe there is a Java implementation which ran as an applet, but is seriously outdated since most people stuck with Windows anyway.
Actually, I think the localization problem is more serious. Although many applications are well localized, it's still hard to find every newest distribution to be fully localized (I'm not even talking about beta versions). And it may cause problems, even if the number of non-localized messages is small.
Combining it with a lack of cheap Linux programmers (also caused by the lack of localization, since the cheap workforce isn't so good at English anyway), I don't think we in Korea would see some serious Linux usage over here.
ps : the mad cow demonstration isn't actually against United States - it's against the Korean government which didn't even try to do any negotiation at all - they simply threw the towel, even giving up their right to have any power to protect themselves in case of an outbreak of mad cow disease or whatsoever. Now suddenly, the government figured out that people actually did care about public health. (surprise, surprise).
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Funny)
Microsoft actually bought South Korea in the late 90s.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:5, Informative)
Where did you get that idea?
Australia has never recorded [csiro.au] a case of BSE or vCJD and is one of a handful of countries recognised as having a negligible BSE risk by the World Organisation for Animal Health.
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...
Because it makes economic sense, lemming (Score:4, Insightful)
Because, while it might offend your sense of only using the _perfect_ match for the job, the Real World is still driven by money. A cheaper mis-match that works, beats an expensive solution that uses the minimal computer and OS imaginable, just to make a point.
Machines are cheap, people are very expensive. So if you need another half a gigabyte to run Windows there, but you can use existing skills and libraries to make that app, you might actually save millions in the process.
Yeah, you could program most stuff on DOS. And put up with incompatible and glitchy graphics libraries just to have that arrow cursor and some minimal widgets for your app. You could write your own interrupt-based thread simulation, 'cause DOS didn't come with any support for that. And write your own spinlock semaphores at that, and wonder why your app deadlocks. You could still do your own pointer arithmetic to put up with 16 bit addressing in a world of gigabyte-sized data sets, and do your own shitty XMS/EMS block copying just to address more than 640 KB. You could even reimplement most of the network protocols and half the other libraries, because nobody else ported those libraries to DOS. Etc.
Yeah, you could do that, just to willy-wave about your app not needing a full-featured OS at all.
Unfortunately, all that costs money and time. Money and time for your programmers to learn those old, quirky, half-arsed libraries instead of using something they already know and their IDE already supports better. Money and time to debug all the bugs you've introduced in the process. Etc.
And if you think that your reinventing the wheel will be more robust than Windows in the process, well, I can tell you that you might be in for a surprise. Most of the people who rant about how MS should be shot at dawn for having bugs, write far far far worse and less secure code, and some can't or shouldn't write code at all. Which isn't supposed to mean that MS writes good code, but, well, mostly think George Carlin's "Just think of how stupid the average person is, and then realize half of them are even dumber." It applies to programmers too, and doubly so to those who get hired just because they're the cheapest retrained burger flippers and someone thinks that's a cost cutting measure. About two thirds don't even know the language they're supposed to program in, according to one study.
At any rate, if any company did that kind of waste of money just for some fucked-up jihad against MS, I hope the shareholders nail the management to a cross. Because that's certainly a breach of the fiduciary responsibility to make money for the shareholders. Companies are there to make money, not to fight OCPD-nerd crusades.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
Being a manager is hard enough without gitch religious trolls twitching their flaming tech tongues in a business vacuum.
There are bad managers / administrative departments out there. Lots of them. They are as good as the facts and information they receive, sure, but they are also as good as their intelligence and integrity. Someone once asked me "why are our admins so freakin' stupid and incompetent?" to which I answered "because if they weren't they wouldn't be working here for wages but at successful company X with its expanding markets and sweet result driven bonuses."
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
>Management OTOH are complete fucking idiots
Management is always somebody else, isn't it?
You never get promoted and that's somebody else's failure.
Re:Obligatory... (Score:4, Insightful)
Until you have to lay someone off, you can eat a dick. You don't know what the fuck you're talking about.
Good management will make decisions that don't negatively affect the productivity and profitability of their department while keeping their staff happy AND employed.
I happen to think my team members' livelihoods are more important than my opportunity to appear ingenious. If that makes me look like a fucking idiot to you, fine - I DON'T ANSWER TO YOUR SUBORDINATE ASS. The people I DO answer to fully understand why I made the decisions I made, and they approve.
I can't afford to move my team over to Linux without having either alternate placement for my existing windows based team, or adequate funding and time to make them productive on the new systems - so it ain't happening.
Only a truly shitty manager would think it was worth it to release a team of productive, honest employees to implement a system that is only "better" in a debatable sense.
Medical equipment (Score:4, Informative)
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...
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.
Re:Medical equipment (Score:4, Informative)
Well, I certainly hope so. From what I hear those machines are indeed standalone. However, you just need one doctor with a laptop that is infected connecting directly to such a machine and mayhem ensues. Are they allowed to do that? Probably not.... Will they do it? Probably yes... :-(
Also note I was marked Overrated, just for confirming the article by personal experience. *sigh*
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Informative)
Well, I certainly hope so. From what I hear those machines are indeed standalone. However, you just need one doctor with a laptop that is infected connecting directly to such a machine and mayhem ensues. Are they allowed to do that? Probably not.... Will they do it? Probably yes... :-(
You would be surprised how much medical equipment is connected to the internet. My mother is a CT tech who works the night shift (in the USA). Rather than have a radiologist at each hospital all night to interpret the scans, they have one radiologist receive all the scans from all the hospitals in their group over the internet. The CT scan system is online: it takes the scans, stores them digitally, and then transfers the files to wherever they need to go.
They supposedly have a firewall and a VPN, but their IT department is not so bright, so I wouldn't count on them to be able to configure it correctly. I have heard tales of spyware infections of the CT scan terminal due to employee web surfing, and an employee who was (incorrectly) accused of viewing porn sites on the job.
Even when medical equipment is not directly connected to the internet, you can be pretty sure that patient records are stored on internet-connected machines (for things like sharing records between hospitals in the same system, etc.). It may not be directly life-threatening, but it certainly is a huge privacy concern.
Re:Medical equipment (Score:4, Informative)
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.
There are several monitoring devices that transmit wirelessly from the procedure rooms to control rooms. We use wireless network to transmit blood pressure and heart rate information from MRI scanning room to the control computer. The control computer is connected to the centralized medical records server which is "supposed to be" super secure. But if it is broken into, you can pretty much control the communication with monitoring devices. Hope it doesn't happen.
Re:Medical equipment (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Medical equipment (Score:4, Informative)
Nothing is "not connected to the internet", not if it has an IP address
What?
Did you know that DHCP servers hand out IP addresses?
Did you know that you can have a DHCP server on a LAN?
Did you know that you can have a LAN that's not connected to the internets?
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Medical equipment (Score:4, Insightful)
yes, but you make decisions based on available information, provided by that monitor.
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Insightful)
Sue them for what? Microsoft makes no guarantees. Read your license agreement.
Re:Medical equipment (Score:4, Insightful)
Many organizations buy into the luster of colorful brochures, happy sales reps, and the idea of the universality of Windows. They just assume there's a guarantee too.
Besides, Linux is a fad, and you know it's made by hackers, and hackers are evil, and it's a variant of UNIX, but it might be illegal too so you'll get in trouble with SCO or Novell or HP or somebody for using it, and besides no two Unixen are the same, etc. etc. etc.
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.) :)
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Funny)
Human wishes to start breathing. Cancel/Allow?
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Funny)
This child process has performed an illegal operation and will be shut down.
Come on, if you go that way do it right:
This child process has performed an illegal operation. Retry, ignore, or abort?
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Funny)
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Medical equipment (Score:4, Informative)
You don't leave patients in MRI's any longer than necessary. Unless you like being shoved in a sewer pipe and having dwarfs with hammers bang on it (the sound of an MRI firing), it gets pretty scarey in there. And the staff can't chat with you easily when you're in there and they have to stay outside fixing things.
Also, this is a patient. If something goes wrong, you don't want them _stuck_ in the MRI and have to cart medical equipment in, especially anything electronic like an EKG or a defibrillator, while they're near the magnets. It's much safer to wheel them out so that they know you care more about them than about the equipment.
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.
Re:Medical equipment (Score:4, Funny)
Similarly, I believe an MRI machine at my local hospital runs Windows.
While getting an MRI of my knee after an injury, the tech gave me a pair of headphones to listen to music from a CD I brought in, which was piped in from the control room along with audio from the technician ("almost done, dolly, just one more scan")
About halfway through the second track, the music abruptly switchd to the "BUHBUHBUHBUHBUHBUHBUHBUHBUHNNNNNN" sound of Windows freaking out, followed by silence, and then by the Windows startup sound. The MRI seemed to keep running, but at least the communications were using Windows.
Re:Medical equipment (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:Medical equipment (Score:5, Funny)
I know.
It's bad enough when I try to order a pizza online.
There can be only ONE (Score:5, Funny)
Mac OS X?
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
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?
Re:There can be only ONE (Score:5, Funny)
Draw derisive laughter from knowledgeable peers?
Re:There can be only ONE (Score:4, Insightful)
What can an app written in VBScript+Access do that an app written in Python+SQLite can't?
Execute without a complete rewrite?
Three flavors of Python GUI (Score:4, Informative)
I've never done a GUI in Python
There are several GUI frameworks for Python. You could try either Tkinter or wxPython if you want a GUI app that runs on the local machine. Or read on:
All of my Access replacements in recent memory have been web projects.
And you can make web projects with Apache mod_python.
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)
Re:Plants (Score:4, Informative)
Misleading slightly (Score:4, Insightful)
I'm all for having a "lol" at stupidly overcomplicated systems being used for the most mundane of tasks, but this article is a little sketchy on some of the details.
For example, one line states "Why not program some stripped down embedded system for that task?" when it doesn't even indicate what version of Windows the system he's talking about uses - there IS an embedded version of Windows available for such tasks, you know.
The article is still a good read, though, but I'd take what it's saying with a pinch of salt and don't just immediately start bashing Microsoft, after all it's not their fault if a sysadmin makes a stupid design choice or 10.
Ho ho ho! *snort* (Score:3, Informative)
it doesn't even indicate what version of Windows the system he's talking about uses - there IS an embedded version of Windows available for such tasks, you know.
I presume you mean Windows CE?
I'm on a team that (among other things) makes BSPs for Windows CE. Did you know that every single driver in CE5 runs in user mode? Ayup. They're simple DLL files that device.exe launches and runs as threads. Just at a slightly higher priority than Pocket Word.
Think about that a moment.
The drivers crash just like programs too. They just...bail. Suddenly the device the DLL is providing an interface to is simply gone. They don't run in supervisor mode, so they are sus
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.)
Re:Ho ho ho! *snort* (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
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.
Diebold Windows CE (Visual Basic for Applications) (Score:3, Insightful)
I nominate the Diebold Windows CE (Visual Basic for Applications) voting machines to the list.
After all, Diebold could have done worse and used Windows XP, or Windows Vista (not that it was out at the time), but I still nominate Diebold to the list for having chosen VBA (not that there is anything wrong with VBA, VBA has its uses -- it's just that it's really a poor choice for making supposedly secure and transparent voting machines).
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)
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...
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.
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:4, Funny)
Did you see your cellphone in "My Bluetooth Places"?
Re:Bank Machines (Score:5, Funny)
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)
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.
I would assert criminal negligence (Score:4, Insightful)
I have no reservations about it. Given the constant stream of complaints that Bill Gates himself had about the quality and stability of Windows, I'd say it is pretty safe to assume that Microsoft is WELL aware of problems with Windows. And for Microsoft to actively push their OS as a platform upon which important, significant and even critical systems and services are run without disclosing the KNOWN risks of using Windows under such circumstances is criminal negligence or even worse.
Once again, resorting to the old "car analogy", if an auto manufacturer were caught pushing their dressed-up SUVs as actual ATVs, I think it's safe to say that various consumer protection agencies and possibly the department of justice might get involved.
How does Microsoft get away with this? Simple -- they are the only game in town and as such is typically viewed as "the best we have." To complain that the best is not good enough would be considered by most to be a wasted effort.
"Critical Mass"
Microsoft achieved it and now most tech people know only Microsoft Windows and will deploy only Microsoft Windows for any given task.
It's good that some people like the NYSE has found Windows lacking and that better alternatives exist for their specialized tasks.
I don't think anyone will argue that Windows on the desktop is acceptable for a lot of people, especially those people who don't have people like me to help them use other systems. If they are on their own, trying to use Linux or even MacOS might leave them out in the cold or under rather EXPENSIVE support costs. (A lone user can barely throw a stone without hitting someone who can deftly advise them to reboot and reinstall.)
But to put Windows in SPECIALIZED applications and devices makes no sense. "Compatibility" isn't an issue there. "Usability" isn't an issue there. "Stability" and "reliability" are often the most important considerations with cost as a third or fourth. (I don't have a second most important consideration, but I'm pretty sure the fifth is "profit!!")
Local TV Access Station.. (Score:4, Funny)
The scariest moment of my life... (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:The scariest moment of my life... (Score:4, Insightful)
It's a DIEBOLD ATM with a _headphone jack_
The headphone jack is an assistive device. It's sometimes called a "talking ATM". The idea is that a blind person can be prompted through the screens. (Notice the braille dots near the jack.)
But yeah, the domain not available thing is funny.
Poor Quality Writing (Score:5, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
System crash.
Launch Air Bag? Abort/Retry/Cancel
Re:Cars? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:WARNING (Score:5, Interesting)
Re: (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.
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.
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
Comment removed (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:SERVER WARS (Score:4, Funny)
After all these years I am willing to admit that Microsoft has won the desktop and server wars.
i beg to differ...
It is all just a clever ruse to lul Microsoft into confidence. All these systems are in fact UNIX sleeper agents, that will awaken all across the world at a given time. At the same time, Redmond will have put it's recently received 30 feet tall ceremonial gift windows logo in an unmonitored storage room when suddenly hundreds of ninjas emerge from it, swiftly overcoming any resistance.
Re:One word: Accountability (Score:4, Insightful)
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"
Read a EULA lately, there is a line voiding Microsoft of any responsibility. *nix, plenty of paid for support out there, Novell (SuSe), Canonical (Ubuntu), Red Hat (think this one is obvious) and those are just distributions. A lot of the bigger more important packages have commercial backing and support. I should mod you flame bait, but never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity.
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.