Hacker News Reader

Comment by AzzyHN | Hacker News Reader

Why are these things running Windows!?

OS is irrelevant in this case, and CrowdStrike deserves all the blame. They literally brought down Linux systems earlier this year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41005936

It's still a valid question, just not directly related to the crashes.

Because almost everything industrial runs windows because that's what the devs of those companies were most familiar with since MS-DOS days and evolved organically over time to modern versions of Windows due to great backwards compatibility and platform familiarity.

Right but typically embedded systems run Linux, because while Windows has great compatibility on x86 it's virtually worthless outside of that.

Those aren't embedded systems though, but mini PC computers. And embedded systems often run bare metal C code, not always Linux, especially for spindle/servo control where they get their commands from that PC.

A lot of industrial machinery is just $x00,000 of equipment strapped to a windows pc. Hell, a lot of it is strapped to a version long EOL

Can confirm this is the norm in machine shops. I encounter systems running dos, 3.1, 95, 2k and mostly XP constantly. I rather prefer the old dos systems of the obsolete stuff. Less variables. It is easier and more reliable to freeze the tech in time than it is to manage updates.

My last CNC job was just a 98 pc that dropped into dos to load programs, this must have been right around when win10 came out. Sneakernet and floppies made it secure enough, but the main network where all the orders were handled was... terminal based.

There are a lot of things running Windows because it's pretty straightforward to write a user-mode driver to interact with custom hardware compared to Linux, where every driver needs to be in the kernel and built with the kernel. Yes, there's DKMS, but it's still more of a faff than the relatively plug-and-play mechanism that Windows offers, especially since Vista.

Almost every system you interact with in the world has some critical thing in its innards running windows.

Most stuff is fine in France.

Not according to Air France. https://www.connexionfrance.com/news/air-france-flights-and-...

No Crowdstrike salespeople in France?

We are using OpenOffice as firewall

https://www.numerama.com/politique/12508-albanel-le-minister...

I like the idea that technology is so unreliable in star trek because the computers are all centuries of software accretion with Windows way down the stack somewhere.

The late great Vernor Vinge explored this in A Fire Upon The Deep. One of the characters is/was in a former life a programmer-archeologist. The idea being that so many thousands of years in the future every relevant program has already been written, so his job was to comb the archives for the right mix of codes and integrate them, rather than right something new.

“So we've got this CNC controller written in Rust from 2036, and, ah, here is a GUI for something like that written in late 90's Visual Basic 6… Just combine those and…”

“So uhm, you do know what you are doing, right?”

“Sir! I am a programmer-acheologist! Oh this is fascinating… Hold on, I must unearth and preserve this beauty of a BAT-file before we can go any further.”

More specifically why are they running extra endpoint management software that receives automatic updates from the Internet...

This is basically the IoT apocalypse scenario (AC is down??) but ironically not affecting many IoT devices, I assume.

The automation world runs on windows

Because Microsoft is giving away licenses to unis, esp in developing countries. IT jobs are seen there as a way to earn a good living and you get hordes of people who know nothing but Windows. That's how you get into the situation where most of the toolchains for embedded systems run on Windows, software for embedded systems is written on and for Windows, and so on. And then, one botched update fucks up everything.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com