Building a command system on top of a general purpose operating system seems like a reasonable cost-saving decision. It has attendant risks, but so do all of the alternatives.
Security issues are moot, I would have thought, since these systems are not connected to the internet, and the main threat is from people who have physical access to the hardware.
I also sort of suspect (without making any pretence of knowing what I'm talking about) that it's futile to try to make the computer system itself invulnerable to attack, and that human factors are likely to have a far greater influence on the overall security of the system. After all, Stuxnet was propagated via flash drives, and no-one should be sticking a random flash drive in a military submarine's computer systems.
What I'm trying to say is, physical access does not necessarily mean full physical access, and when the virus has to spread through some storage medium connected to e.g. USB the underlying OS certainly matters.
I mean, they probably autorun that for the subs, but I think its indicative of the design philosophy behind most MS products. "Made for those who don't need full control, with politics prioritized over security", because what security-minded programmer would ever enable that by default?
Edit: inserted middle paragraph + fixed typo
That's like saying "Linux sucks for embedded devices because Ubuntu automatically updates kernel and breaks stuff".
Typically they're worse, in my experience. Harder to work with, easier to make mistakes.
After having to install anti-virus software on an 100k+ EUR oscilloscope, yes. Yes, they do behave the same as end-user ones.
"Compact" versions (CE, or "embedded compact") genuinely have removed features, but CE will still automount devices if it has drivers for them and you've not turned it off.
If you're implying that Windows does, then that's the consumer version. These settings can be controlled by group policy. In a military or corporate environment operated by an administrator, they certainly should not be assumed to take on their default value, and instead should be assumed to take on their configured value.
I also have bad experiences with their open-source products (Visual Studio Community, Xamarin, .NET libraries written by them), their IoT for RPi offering. Their consumer OS's require manual cleanup and yearly full reinstalls. I've had software updates break my drivers, and one game (Gmod) on Windows 7 kill my graphics card twice, the second time taking my mobo with it. Their software installation/deinstallation system is unreliable. I've had automatic disk repair completely wreck a hardware RAID 2 setup. I had about two BSOD's a year until I switched to Linux.
I think my most stable Microsoft software experience I've had was Age of Mythology, and even that crashed sometimes.
> I have an insider view on this as when the ‘Vangard’ class of subs were being built in Barrow I was a member of the command System trials team…this was long before Windows and Microsoft and needless to say niche software, produced in very small quantities was much, much more unstable and buggy than any Windows release! I remember one long session where the only way the system would pass a particular tiral was for every one to ‘hands off’ their ‘pucks’ (and upside down mouse) for 15 mins. All went well until 2 minutes to go and some one brushed by the puck. The system went down!!! After a very long day we manged to get past this step!!
> Give me Windows anytime!!!
I don't think this has really been true since the bad old days of Windows ME. Maybe even XP.
I've never done a Windows reinstall for myself or for friends since the early 2000s.
> I had about two BSOD's a year until I switched to Linux.
BSODs too are largely a thing of the past unless you have some kind of hardware/driver issue, in which case you'd of course also have kernel panics, though at least if you have a bad Linux driver you can hope it's open source and fix it yourself.
> I've had software updates break my drivers,
I don't doubt it, but I can't tell you how often a software update broke sound and/or WiFi in Ubuntu. :) That said, I quit running it on bare metal and ever since I haven't had any issues with updates I can recall.
All in all, my experience with hundreds of installations of both, is that enterprisey Linux and both consumer/enterprise Windows are on the same level of reliability, although if you want Windows for reliability purposes you're probably going to spend more time in configuration. I really don't see any issue with running Windows in mission-critical systems.
IF you're the US or UK governments, you can get access to pretty much any driver or OS source you want.
Heres my current desktop which I rebooted 15 days ago
But I recall * nix-like OS's that have telnet enabled by default with insecure default passwords:
> https://www.malwaretech.com/2016/10/mapping-mirai-a-botnet-c...
"Mirai propagates by bruteforcing telnet servers with a list of 62 horribly insecure default passwords, starting with the infamous admin:admin."
Linux would provide exactly 0 additional protection over embedded Windows if China or the US decides they want what you've got.
Brave, brave assumption.