Top 10 worst uses for Windows

[nihil]

I guess this falls into the category of forcing round pegs into square holes?


http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29644
http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/29836

Any more folks?

[gore]

A few years ago I posted on here asking which OS would people actually allow to run a machine that they needed to live with, and not many answered. If you recall, Tiger Shark replied which I was Hoping for, but he didn't say much about that at all, he more or less went on about how he wasn't going to stay on topic. Being that he was the Windows boy I was Hoping for an answer from him lol.

To add to your story, I know a long time ago in Germany they used Dialysis machines running UNIX, but not Windows.

[Cider]

6. Building controls

Listen, we all have enough trouble with heat, water, cooling, and electrical outages. Why make them worse with Windows? Luckily no one would ever rely on Windows to control elevators right? Think again. Read the Elevator Management System product document from Otis. Not only do you need Windows 2000 or XP for the Main Station but is accessed via a web browser from anywhere on the Internet! Talk about a hacker's dream.

Oh my, I really thought most of these things ran on opensource which is more secure :/

Oh my, the second page is even worse. Remind me never to go flying again?

[Juridian]

open source isn't necessarily more secure...

[nihil]

gore...............it's worse than we first thought

Windows 3.11 is finally being withdrawn.

http://arstechnica.com/journals/micr...nd-in-4-months

Actually that was a good operating system, which is why it has lasted so long in the embedded systems arena.

I guess that is the real point of the two pages I linked. For most of the applications mentioned what you really need is an embedded system, not some fancy, fragile, consumer bloatware?

[Juridian]

I guess that is the real point of the two pages I linked. For most of the applications mentioned what you really need is an embedded system, not some fancy, fragile, consumer bloatware?

I'm totally behind this.

[gore]

I didn't ever really get a shot at playing with Windows 3.11 so I'm not able to say much. I do have a copy of it here somewhere on the original IBM Floppies, but I don't have a machine I can really run on it that I could use it with to the full extent. Oddly enough my Slackware 12 test machine's HD JUST died.

I knew something was up when after 135 days uptime the HD activity light looked like the power light (didn't even flicker for a second) so I tried to run top and nothing happened. After a few other tries of nothing happening, I turned it off and started it back up today to see if I could check it. Once I got to the root prompt to log in, I noticed file system and swap errors. I tried logging it and it would show root, but once I hit enter it just sat there and showed another log in prompt.

Ah well, the HD in this thing is older than every machine in this house. It hasn't ever been replaced, and it was a family members who never took care of it, so I guess that was going to happen anyway. It won't display graphics anymore because the video card is pretty screwed up in it, and it's only got 8MB of video memory anyway, and like a 500 MHz Celeron processor in it.

It was a nice test machine but now I guess I can try the Slackware Live CD or something since the drive I'm assuming is dead. lol. Still finding a use for this thing somehow.

If all else fails I'll put it up against the door so the fan can't blow it shut.

[cwk9]

I guess that is the real point of the two pages I linked. For most of the applications mentioned what you really need is an embedded system, not some fancy, fragile, consumer bloatware?

Tons of embedded systems still happily running DOS out there for this very reason. OS does next to nothing and the app its running does most of the heavy lifting.

[nihil]

cwk9

Tons of embedded systems still happily running DOS out there for this very reason.

I think that explains why Windows 3.11 has lasted so long. If you remember, with Windows 3.x you had to load DOS separately before you installed the Windows GUI. I would guess that presents an embedded systems developer with a much more attractive environment than attempting to unravel later versions of Windows?

Kind of reminds me of back in the day when you could hardly go into a manufacturing environment and not find a DEC PDP-11 (later VAX-11). The fundamental assembly language was MACRO-11, and a typical language for process control was DOS-11, but they supported all sorts of languages including UNIX and BSD.

// off topic for gore:

http://simh.trailing-edge.com/

//

@ gore:

500Mhz Celeron, 8Mb video............... You could run Win 95/98/98SE quite happily on that.

Win 3.11 will run on a 486/33Mhz with 16Mb of RAM and 1Mb of video. Actually it will run on far less, as I currently have Win95 (950B) running on a Gateway 2000 with a Cyrix 386 processor!!!!!

Time to go "dumpster diving" my friend?

As for your dead HDD. I would try slaving it, reformatting and running a diagnostic tool. The kind of symptoms you are describing could be a dying PSU.

[gore]

Windows actually won't work on it as the video can't display a GUI now, it shows up badly with lines everywhere as a way of showing the video card is about to crap out too heh. That's why I didn't install X on it as it wouldn't look good. You can run text only stuff as it doesn't show up as much but that's about it.

And yea, now that the weekend is coming up and I don't have to go without sleep I can run my hardware diagnostics on it without having to leave in between.