Windows for Warships™ reaches Royal Navy frigates

Windows For Warships

All your missiles are belong to us!

Everybody Knows

That MS software is the best thing for desk-top productivity.

So lets keep it there where the worst that can be (and often is) lost is a day's work

Bsod = blue sea of death

skull and crossbones because they will wish they'd 'pirated' linux !

@ Robert Long

AAAAHAHAHAHHAHAH

Seriously, I think that...

*sniker*

...you might have a good...

BWAAAAAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!

...point!

AHAHAHAHAHAHAHA*cough* *cough*

Oh, wait, you seriously are stupid enough to believe what you just wrote. I thought you were joking.

This is delicious

OK, folks...the silver lining.

RW's "horny Sailor" plugs in his laptop (or maybe even, if IE is really **really** an inseparable piece of Windohs, using the innate browser), downloads some pr0n from his favorite website...and the viruses and trojans that come with it. One such virus takes control of the C&C subsystem and "mistakenly" IFF's Waqui Jaqui as an incoming Exocet...and proceeds to "eliminate the threat".

GPS?

Wonder if any of these boats will find themselves trying to navigate the lights at Trafalgar Square or the Green Zone in Baghdad? Maybe would be better to fit em out with wheels...

(Paris cos that's where they might end up too. And she looks worried about the hole thing...)

@RW

"If MS can create a bullet-proof version of Windows for this use, why not for desktop use?"

How much do you want to pay for it?

Oh you obviosly don't know what will happen to said horny seaman/woman when found out but I'll bet Lewis will be able to enlighten you.Laptop at sea I for one wouldn't want to take one little enough kit space for what you have to have let alone fragile kit like that.

Hahaha

The American Navy tried this once and it failed miserably. Why don't you Brits have a go a debugging this garbage?

Mine's the one with the life jacket built in.

Open vs. Closed

For goodness sake. It will be something like 10 years before these ships will have another major refit, so will they be stuck with WforW for all of this time? I'm sure the Type 45s are expected to have a 30 year+ lifetime.

With Windows, the MoD are beholden to Microsoft, and have to negotiate extended support at whatever price MS want to charge (how long will Win2K have been out of support when the next refit comes)?

At least with Linux, as a supplier, you can fork the code, and take complete ownership of the product. The length of support becomes how long you are prepared to pay people to be familiar with it, and the security becomes as good as the people you employ. If they are good, you don't even have to rely on the community for fixes. I would have to check, but I believe that provided you keep a product in-house (or should that be onboard-ship), you would not have to release any modified source.

I suppose that one good thing is that if they are using commodity hardware, then it would be possible to drop in the latest Dell server into the rack, provided that you can get the Win2K drivers for the SATA disk and display adapters. Or maybe retrofit another OS.

What?

@Anonymous Coward Posted Monday 5th January 2009 17:08 GMT

" Linux is full of obscure drivers which have never been looked at by more than one or two developers - and that aside, it is easy to write obfuscated C code that can perform entirely unexpected operations even though, on the outside, it looks innocuous."

You must be joking. I've seen very clean code beeing rejected for inclusion by mere formating problems or duplication of code or something similar. It's very unlikely that "obfuscated C" will be accepted. It's far cheaper to bribe some coder at MS to include some function at (almost) release time than it's to find the best coder in the world to write something that will pass Linux's "meritocracy". Remember, in Linux's world the most important thing you have is your reputation. In MS land the most important thing is the paycheck...

I don't want to be rude, but I make your words mine:

"I fear you speak from somewhere behind the scrotum."

Regards,

Nuno

What's so special about Windows Embedded?

Perhaps the folks who've said "Windows Embedded is different" could tell us, in detail, with examples and evidence and links to definitive sources, what they think is so special, so different, about Windows 2K/XP Embedded. (Perhaps they could also tell us where in the WIndows world they are employed?)

Windows XP Embedded *is* basically just Windows XP, that's the point of it (unlike say Windows CE, which has little in common other than the name). Any difference between XP and XPe is largely in the commercial arrangements (price, licencing, discounts, long-term support, etc), with a few limited technical differences such as official support for network booting, and some related trickery eg componentizable OS, support for read-write files on a readonly media filesystem, etc.

Don't take my word for that, see what Microsoft's XPe people have to say:

http://www.microsoft.com/windowsembedded/en-us/products/wexpe/default.mspx

http://download.microsoft.com/download/e/0/2/e02165a2-4f29-4741-b89c-30cbd48bff58/Windows_XP%20Embedded.pdf

Windows HomeServer was meant to be tried, tested and trustable because it was only a minor variant of mainstream Windows Server 2003. Was Windows Home Server therefore secure, reliable, and bug free? No, it was silently corrupting (and permanently destroying) user data even in pure-Microsoft setups with no third party apps, and doing so for over a year before Microsoft fixed a bug in a badly written and inadequately tested HomeServer-specific filesystem component:

http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx/kb/946676/en-us?spid=12624

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/03/11/microsoft_windows_home_server_bug/

Fortunately the same can't happen to any unique bits of XP Embedded that aren't used elsewhere, right?

There are good reasons why Windows isn't used, and won't be used, in any safety-related or safety-critical systems on aircraft. There's plenty of experience in the UK railway industry (where Windows *has* been used for functionally important systems on some trains) that says using Windows in the wrong place is bad for you - one well known problem in the industry is the frequent train delays caused by unplanned reboots of the Windows-based systems involved in certain safety interlocks on certain trains. Still, what do the aerospace and rail industries know about engineering reliable systems? (The rail industry has had its problems, and using inappropriate technology is certainly part of that).

OpenBSD...it's the answer

to all of life's computing questions.

Paris, cause....girls is soft, I touched one once

US Navy

Despite all the references to the now 10-years-out-of-date Yorktown malarkey, the US Navy has been running on Windows for years with no problems (well, other than that of their present Commander-in-Chief).

And yet another thought....

I wonder if one could just right-click on the missile launcher and select "Set target" and later "Fire"....

Or, even better, if the weapon control software would say something like this during a war:

"Your trial period is finished. Please register this product to continue using it"

You forgot about this

It surprised me to see that everyone failed to see the full length of this....

MS Windows being so easy to crack and hack, we're seeing the next step in the beginning of SkyNet.....

Next thing, is equip the "innocent" cleaner robot with MS Software. Wait a few days, and it'll strangely change from repeating "clean up dirt" to "clean up mankind" and grab a 40W range PPC.

I never would have guessed SkyNet ran windows.... But It makes sense...

Officer - "Enemy missile inbound!"

Guy in front of computer responsible for automated defenses- "Hmm??!! (clicking his mouse)

Officer - "Enemy missile inbound!!!! 400 yard range!"

Guy in front of computer responsible for automated defenses - "Damn! You made me blow up a mine! There goes my high-score! Even my kids have a better score than me! Do you know what that means , private??? Have you realised what you have done???? Can you imagine how long I have tried to break that high score? You have just... " KABOOOMMMMMMMMM

Windows XP Embedded - EOL 2017

http://www.xppro2016.com/lifecycle

Plenty of time to get the XP bugs sorted and the Vista follow-on into the market?

But will El Reg still be around?

Zeitgeist

Working as a small wheel in medical imaging and having being exposed to the forced (management decision...) transfer of mission critical software from VMS to windowsXP embedded (using only reviewed and tested drivers on fixed hardware setups), I can only say: "Good luck lads!".

As someone further up posted, it is to my experience indeed not so much the mediocre OS which injects the X(P) factor in the stability equation but actually the coders which come bundled with such a transfer:

Trained on appealing but completely obfuscated development tools like .net they go about writing mission critical code on layered and layered and layered software stacks that they don't understand nor feel they would need to.

We require a new feature? Hey no problem, just write it quickly in managed C#, couple it with the managed C++ backbone and fuse the result with the legacy C-divers for the old hardware and voila...

As our old VXworks veteran would put it: "These boys would fork five threads and a data-base for 'hello world' and not even know it."

And with each .NET version only a few of the old bugs go and many new features and with them intrinsically more new bugs arrive.

And the binaries get bigger and bigger and fewer wnd fewer remember the days when trusty compilers where lean and mean and tendency was to keep the code solving simple tasks as simple as possible.

Anyway, at the end of the day we have now more feature rich apps but the entire shebang runs on state of the art hardware less snappy (and has 10x more jitter in response times) than it used to when it did run on VMS on the old DEC Alphas and has, to put it mildly, a fifth of the uptime.

Is this really the way "mission critical" should go I wonder ...

Terrifying

This is absolutely terrifying. I remember back in the day there was a market for "fault tolerant" computing where it really mattered: and this was for systems that were inherently more reliable to begin with.

Seems now we're going down the route of "fault guaranteed".

Who's the total and utter fuckwit that actually authorised this? Why did nobody challenge them?

BSOD

Oh my God this will bring a new meaning to BSOD - Maybe now the name should be changed no Navy Blue Screen Of Death and what will the text say - Unhandled Missle Exception at location 0efffdde.

"XP is only obsolete if MS say it is."

And MS *has* said it is obsolete.

re: So if it wasnt Windows...

"And they chose Linux, would there be "Oh we just have to recompile the Kernel before we launch that missile" comments?"

Yes, exactly like they have to ask MS to do to get XP working on their Warships. The problem is that ONLY MS can do it. They can't.

With Linux, they can ask HP/IBM/RH/... or whoever they bought the solution from to compile it or they can dump the supplier (or be dumpbed BY their supplier) and do it themselves.

Unless XP has a hidden "Launch Missile" command the manuals don't mention...

@Mark 15:44 "MS has said XP is obsolete"

>>"XP is only obsolete if MS say it is."

>And MS *has* said it is obsolete.

Well that depends. The mainstream bit of MS, the ones that are trying to flog Vista to an unwilling market, have indeed said XP is obsolete. But then they would say that wouldn't they.

However, elsewhere in MS, the "embedded" bit of MS have said XP lives on to 2016 or later (see various MS URLs already posted here).

Are you trying to say we can't trust promises from the "embedded" people in MS?

what happened to...

only allowing XP to continue shipping (pun?) on slow netbook equivalent hardware ?

BSOD = Blue Sea Of Death

"XP Embedded isn't XP" <panto><Oh Yes It Is>

Repeat after me: Microsoft say XP Embdedded is XP Pro repackaged. Don't you trust them?

"Try running Adobe Dreamweaver on it. Or Gears Of War 2."

I don't have access to those right now. Do you remember the failure mode, eg the error message you got when you tried them? I'll hazard a guess that certain bits of runtime support needed by these things had been configured off of the system you were using - that's what the XP Embedded build tools are intended to do, leave out bits that the **fixed configuration** (hint) embedded systems are known not to need. You probably don't need (and probably aren't supposed to use) Dreamweaver on an HP thin client, a Tektronix logic analyser, a National Instruments PXI rack, on Windows for Warships, or whatever, so you can leave off the bits which the **fixed configuration** (hint) setup doesn't need. A little bit like "Add/Remove Windows Components" has allowed you to do in Windows Control Panel for a decade or more. Except that with Windows XPe, config changes are supposed to come from the people who supplied your system, rather than being something you or the IT folks do yourself.

A differently configured XPe could easily have left the missing bits on. As it happens, afaik XPe currently only does DX9 [1] -if your chosen applications need trendy modern DX10, you're stuck (for now) because XPe currently only "supports" DX9 - though I see earlier Dreamweavers were quite happy with DX8. (DXanything isn't my bag though, so I may have misunderstood).

VMS (already mentioned briefly in this discussion) had this include/exclude capability back in the 1980s, even before Windows, when the capability was called VMStailor and it allowed you to fit most of a whole OS on 20 or so MB (who remembers the VAX 725?). But back then VMS was still largely VMS even after tailoring.

And this year, and indeed to 2015 and beyond, Windows XPe is still largely WIndows XP Pro - the differences are largely commercial and packaging, not technical. And in particular, any features, bugs, and vulnerabilities in XP Pro are likely to be features, bugs, and vulnerabilities in XPe, unless the relevant code has been "tailored off", 1980s-VMS-style.

[1] http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/dd143254.aspx talks about DX9 in Windows XPe . I don't know what would happen technically if you tried installing DX10 on an XPe system (after all, it's only XP Pro repackaged, right?), but it would become commercially unsupported. Still not convinced? Then download yourself a free XPe evaluation kit and try it for yourself.

Mine's the one with the BartPE CD in the pocket. Now there's an OS that really won't run Dreamweaver (or will it?).

Umm - there's another little problem here..

You're all just talking about Windows in an island fashion (rather appropriate as it's the Navy :-)). It gets, however, even more interesting. You see, even at MoD they're mouthing compliance with something called Network Enabled Capability (NEC), which is in a nutshell the ability to wire up forces from different nations and make them act as one electronically. Sensor-to-shooter linking is an important example of this.

Has ANYONE ever seen any MS implementation where integration with non-Windows wasn't a problem? Or even a Windows-to-Windows setup between older and newer versions where the code appears to be designed to ram the need to upgrade repeatedly down your throat when you can least use it?

What do you think is going to happen in an NEC context?

"Clippy: Hi, it appears you're talking to another force, do you want help with that? Sorry, the other force has used a protocol that we haven't yet managed to embrace/screw up so we'll do everything possible to get in your way. BTW, your sensors detect a missile incoming at Mach 2, but we have just dropped shooter comms. Have a nice, albeit brief day."

Meanwhile, in a parallel universe...

Captain (Nathan Barley, dressed in skin-tight black lycra with metallic mauve rank stripes, and bluetooth sunglasses. Think 'Torchwood' but even more gay): "Siobhan, darling, that scruffy-looking PC user barge is getting rather too close for comfort. Can we schedule a design meeting to envisage enabling the defensive iGuns? Also, could you refill my vodka & lime, my Segway needs recharging, and what-say we go to Fuscia Alert, hmmm?"

1st Lt. Siobhan N*gogomobil (reclining on carved Balinese organically-grown renewable-sourced teak chaise-lounge): "But mon capitaine! Fuscia is so last Tuesday! Might I suggest a bold Teal with Burnt Sienna Mandelbrot-set inspired Alert? It would be so much more today, and would really get the ratings attention, really focus their working conciousness on the task of workshopping methods of appeasing the incoming cruise missiles. Er, look, aren't they a horrible shade of grey?"

Captain: "Er, Siobhan darling, my iCaptains iWheel iThingie has just made a little 'clink-clonk' noise and put a cute little bomb icon up - is that bad?"

KER-BLAM!

Regarding the title of the piece

What do you do when Windows stops working? Frig it.

Geddit?

Ah, never mind...