My Top Ten Worst Uses for Windows post earlier this week caused somewhat of a firestorm of reaction. It is worth pointing out that for the most part I am not really criticizing Windows just the use of a bloated OS for simple or mission critical tasks.
From the many comments here and on Digg I have aggregated other stupid uses for Windows:
11. Air traffic control radar. Chris S. relates: I think I can top everyone's story here...The US Air Traffic Control system handles thousands of flights a day. Much of the technology is still 1970's radar scopes though the FAA has been upgrading them facility by facility within the past 10 years or so. Even the radio communications (while still RF) are controlled through computer switches so that they can be routed to other facilities etc.
So what's powering the radios of one of the busiest airspaces in the country? Windows...The server crashed in 2004 preventing air traffic controllers from communicating with the 800 aircraft in the area for 3 hours. Servers are typically rebooted every 50 days to prevent "data overload" but they had missed a cycle causing the downtime.
As a pilot and software engineer, this scares the crap out of me! Full story here....
http://www.techworld.com/opsys/news/index.cfm?NewsID=2275
12. Fork lift trucks. From Jorgen: I work in a storage facility, and we have 98 on our forklifts for order sheets. It crashes all the time, and there is nothing funnier than seeing a truck stand still with a BSOD.
13. In flight entertainment systems on Lufthansa and Air Canada. Anon comments: Oh, you haven't seen anything yet...imagine an ENTIRE plane filled with windose? Air Canada flights I have been on recently, the entertainment systems didn't work at all. On one flight, they shut down the movie halfway through the film, and it wouldn't restart! On a flight from Japan to Vancouver, the systems didn't work at all, and from Vancouver to Toronto, a different AC flight, they weren't working either! All Windoze based. In fact, it happens so often, that they give out cards for discounts on your next flight to attempt to appease customers. Why do I say that it happens often? Because the cards are PREPRINTED, stating that "We're sorry our entertainment systems weren't working today...etc."
14. British nuclear submarines. Marvel comments: British subs started running the windows based SMCS-NG in 2004 after all the people that opposed the use of such an unstable operating on NUCLEAR subs where kicked off the deciding committee:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Trafalgar_class_submarine
15. PBX systems. Comment from Jeff: What is really scary is that now Microsoft is moving past just controlling legacy PBX's and positioning themselves as a complete Unified Communications solution with their OCS product. Try taking down corporate dial tone every Patch Tuesday!
16. Connecting flight monitors at Frankfurt and Heathrow's airports. Nageeb says: I snapped a picture at Terminal 1 Heathrow of a bank of flight info monitors (bank of 3 in the old "temporary smoking section" before they banned it completely) who had BSOD'ed. (Blue Screen of Death) It was classic.
17. Nurse stations in a hospital. One reader comments: I also got the chance to ip scan pretty much the entire hospital which means that I could fiddle around enough to find that these carts were IP based (I suppose that was a 'dur' moment) but what was even better was that the hospital registered pretty much everything in DNS. So if I wanted a floor 7 (my floor) nurse cart, I had it. And with a little testing before too long I found that they were running an SMS service.
18. Sprint PCS 2G data center. Anon writes: I used to be second level technical support for Sprint PCS, and they used Windows to run the 2G data application (3Com modem bank, to be simple). I also managed 3G later, which ran on a Sun Netra server. So I had a couple hundred Windows and a couple hundred Solaris 8 boxes. Guess which ones I got constant calls about? It was so silly that if a switch tech decided to turn on the screen saver, it would almost instantly lock the server. So when I got the call at 2am that 2G data was down, my first question was, "Did someone turn on the screen saver?"
19. Narcotics safe. One reader says: I work in a medical environment. We recently updated our Pyxis (an electronic safe for holding narcotics and other medicines). Prior to the update, I needed to reboot it about weekly. On boot, it was loading INI files.
Shudder ...
20. Subway ticket dispensers. Chris Snyder states: This is right up there with ticket scanners and ATMS... the Metrocard machines that dispense subway fares in NYC run Windows.
Interestingly, they are very well engineered, as you don't see blue screens very often. The only reason I know is that I saw one reboot once!
Ten more, that's all I can handle today. Keep 'em coming though. I will continue to compile a list.
About Stiennon
Richard Stiennon is a security industry analyst. He is currently consulting, speaking and writing on all manner of security topics for IT-Harvest, the IT research firm he founded to cover the security space. He was most recently chief marketing officer for Fortinet. He has served stints at PricewaterhouseCoopers, Gartner, and Webroot Software.
The opinions expressed in this Weblog are those of the writer and may not represent the opinions of Network World.
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Windows and the King
Though not entirely critical to the public except for fast food goers, I worked at a Burger King that ran all of the cash registers with (unpatched) Windows NT. The register program was supposed to execute at boot (though it often just locked up and took a number of reboots before it would work). The timeclock ran off of it also, and seemed to have a habit of taking hours away off of pay checks.
What is bad about the PCs is they were running in a relatively new BK (only about 4 years old now); the computers were probably recycled from a store that closed. They caused so many problems, I always wondered why they didn't just replace them.
The only Windows on airplanes should be ones you look through
This could be an urban myth, but I thought it was a whitebox PC serving Windows inflight entertainment that was root caused to have overheated and caught fire to be the cause of a major airline crash. Yikes!
Is the OS guilty?
There are lots of scenarios where a machine hangs, but not all are due to Operating System, but to Applications. A buggy application can stress system memory, end unexpectly, leave configuration or data files corrupted and never launch again until entire OS reinstallation. So, in those cases is the OS guilty? I have seen this situation in Windows, Linux and Solaris OSs. Countersense, well proven software can work for months without rebooting.
Of course, application developers will always blame OS before admit that its product is not perfect, even multi-million applications.
Yes
The OS should be catching those misbehaving applications and dealing with them. It should be robust enough to actually deal with an app that "stresses system memory" (whatever that means), or at least just deny it requests when it asks for too much. When that app dies unexpectedly, the OS should let the user know, give it a quiet burial, and go calmly about its business.
An app that corrupts its data files...I should be able to delete the folder where I installed it, reinstall it, and get on with my life.
I can understand video drivers taking down an OS, because they pretty much have to run in kernel space. There is no excuse for an application having access to the enough of the inner workings of an OS to actually require a reboot.
In Windows' defense, it's improved immensely over the years. I only have to reboot my XP box once every couple of weeks. Ish.
And Linux never crash?
Delta uses Linux for their inflight entertainment system. Two months ago on a Delta flight from South Africa to Atlanta, I had to get up repeatedly to ask the flight attendents to reboot the system because it would just freeze. Each time you had to watch the movie again from the start.
Don't always blame the OS when an application is crashing. Add the same functionality to Linux as you have with Windows and it would probably have the same issues. Remember, Linux developers are not per definition more clever than Windows developers.
Best advice is, use the right tool for the job and stop blaming the OS when the application was badly written.
Windows TCO vs Linux ... Unqualified vs Qualified
Has MS ever encouraged best practices for developers? The claim to management is that it is so dummed down that anyone can run the system. What is the purpose of Visual Basic if not to open the door to unqualified programmers? Or NT server - "if you can install windows xp you can install nt/w2k3 server.
How about the assumption that the user will have full administrator rights. Or all the bugs in IE including allowing business to push pop-ups to end users as an advertising opportunity. Ms is all about low standards and the myth that the leads to lower Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) when it actually causes higher costs in the long run.
-Mrbios
Agree
The whole security issue with Windows is a result of the ability of applications to corrupt memory after all. An OS should be robust enough to resist crappy *and* malicious software apps.
detecting bad behaviour?
It's not that simple though. How do you know if an application is misbehaving? Certainly, when a program does something stupid and dies, the system shouldn't need a reboot.
However, what if it doesn't die? What if a program simply requests more and more memory (e.g. in C, something like...
while(1) malloc(65536 * sizeof(char));) - do we just let that continue until the heap is exhausted (and how do we define our heap? It'll be virtually mapped so that programs can use ridiculous amounts of memory).In effect, how do we distinguish between an obvious hog which is (in this case) purposely misbehaving, and say, an expensive simulation like genetic modelling or weather forecasting or 3D computer games? What about a program that constantly writes to the hard disk until it runs out of space?
There's no real way of automatically detecting these problems and distinguishing them from genuine programs which really need lots of resources.
However, you're spot on that operating systems shouldn't die when an application crashes. There's no excuse for that!
Hospital code blue paging system
Fresh out of university one of my first IT contracts was with a group of private hospitals, testing PC's for Y2K compliance (yeah I know...) One of the group's biggest hospitals had a small MS-DOS based machine which ran a simple application managing the locally connected pagers which the doctors carried in case of a "code blue" or other medical emergency.
The DOS machine failed the silly test and had to be replaced. With Windows running on every other machine on their network it was no big thing to guess what it would be replaced with.
So what should be used as an SO instead?!
I get that you don't like Windows very much.
I am not a fan either. But I am very tired of Blogs or stories or other crap, putting down MS & Windows.
So, don’t give me problems or other stupid comments, give solutions.
What operating system should be used instead?
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