Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

Comment by maxxxxx | Hacker News Reader

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My company runs a medical device on windows. We have to control configuration tightly. Windows 10 is already out of control but they seem to be hell bent on making it worse. Time to jump ship I always tell management but the MS reps are very good at selling to execs.

Your company should be using Windows 10 Enterprise that gives you full control including update management? In fact, you should be using WSUS to control updates regardless if its Windows 10 Enterprise or even Pro.

Their company should be using Windows 10 IoT (the successor to Windows Embedded), which allows a lot more things to be turned off than the desktop or even server Windows editions.

Doesn’t that support only UWP store apps?

That's Windows IoT Core. Windows IoT Enterprise supports regular apps as well.

Funny, I'm sure you're being helpful but I can't tell if this is satire. Thank god for gnu.

It gets much better. Take a big stash of cash and try to buy windows licenses. It’s really difficult to spend money.

Would be nice if it were easier to get that info. Our MS reps never mentioned this.

https://docs.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/iot-core/windows-io...

It's all easily available online. Don't rely on anyone to give you the full truth on anything they are trying to sell you.

I am sure I had this conversation with you months ago, actually.

What if their company is a dentist and they just want a stable system to run their X-ray machine?

Not all businesses want or need enterprise-level IT management, and there are alternatives to having a full-time professional sysadmin that do not involve being the stereotype dumb user who forgets to apply security updates.

That's what enterprise LTSC is for. No windows apps, no gimmicks and completely configurable and long term support.

Sorry, perhaps I wasn't clear. I meant, what if the business running the OS and using the device was a dentist? They might only have a handful of PCs in the whole place, but those machines would potentially be used to process medical records, review results of scans from specialist equipment, etc. In that sort of environment, you obviously have a need to deploy security updates straightforwardly, but you also want a lot of stability because your specialist software and/or the interfaces to your specialist equipment might break otherwise, and you certainly can't have computers rebooting whenever they feel like it. The Enterprise LTSC edition might satisfy the stability aspects, but is it even available to organisations like that on a reasonable basis and does it have the ability to deploy security updates easily without tying them up with any other changes you might not need or want?

I always see you comment negatively when Microsoft is mentioned. You also make comments that clearly indicate your Windows experience is not practical (meaning you maybe read about Windows minutiae far more often that you actually experience or understand them) and those comments COMPLETELY undermine your effort to bad-mouth Windows.

This article (which you clearly didn't read) makes no mention of this change happening to Windows 10, but a ChromeOS-like "Windows Lite" instead, and if you are capable of controlling Windows "tightly" then you would definitely know how updates can be managed in appliances or devices that run a version of Windows designed for those use cases.

Do you have direct experience with that use case? I have been doing Windows development for a long time and since around 2010 I have become increasingly frustrated with their constant changes of direction. They can do great stuff if they set their minds to it (see SQL server for example or maybe MVC) but in my view the desktop development experience has worsened a lot in the last years . In addition my company has a lot of legacy stuff so we can’t just switch to their shiny new tools every few years.

Yes. I've been administering Windows in large enterprises (>100,000 end users) since 1996, and I've been developing software since about 2001.

Seems we are pretty even :). I have a few more years but that doesn’t really matter at some point.

Any reason you're not using LTSC on a medical device? It doesn't sound like MS is at fault for anything here, it sounds like you're using the wrong SKU. As far as I know, medical devices and such are one of the use cases for LTSC.

We do use LTSC (against strong advice from our MS rep who pushed semi annual). It’s still a pain to deal with.

I can't say that entirely surprises me. Reading through the other comments, seems like Windows IoT Enterprise is the best fit, which is something I didn't know about. I've always wondered how something like this is approached in the Windows10 era. They certainly have plenty of SKUs. I can see how you reached for the wrong thing, I can't say I would or would not have done all the research to find IoT Enterprise, may well have gone with LTSC myself if in your shoes.

There used to be windows embedded which had a different philosophy but was dropped on windows 10. Now we have IoT but figuring out the applicability and license model is tricky. It seems it’s another thing where MS isn’t sure what they really want so they crank out a ton of variations of the same thing and you have to guess what to use.

Use WSUS, ensure your policies and network are set for clients to only update from your own update server.

Test and approve any updates you want to release.

Also in your case it would also be worthwhile to look into whether you shouldn't be using the LTSB branch of Windows.

And pray your users never click the ‘download updates from Microsoft’ link you can’t remove.

We do all of that. It’s still a big mess that’s very hard to control.

I wonder what the balance between keeping devices updated on a medical device, and keeping them from updating is?

That doesn't sound easy, although it also seems like an odd choice for an OS for a medical device.

The medical device is basically a WPF app. There are a lot of similar ones on the market. The whole effort got started during windows XP time and back then windows made sense. Now with windows 10 you spend a lot of effort locking down features you never wanted and are hard to get rid of. At this point I would much prefer to go iOS, web or Linux. They all have their downsides and upsides but windows is becoming pretty developer unfriendly. Just getting a quote for licenses is a six month ordeal with multiple meetings and contradictory information from MS. They make it hard to give them money.

I work on a similar project but WinForms, but not as mission critical as a hospital setting. I'm currently decoupling UI from application logic as much as possible, and will move from .Net Framework to .Net Core 3.0 when it launches this year. At that point, I'll begin replacing WinForms with client-side Blazor. When there's just one current version of .Net again with .Net 5's release in 2020, those transitions will be seamless since I'll already be on .Net Core 3.0.

Full-stack C# which grants me easy flexibility on what I want to happen client vs server-side, with near-native performance. I can drop a Safari shortcut on home screens for iOS, and an Edge link on desktops for Windows. If you wanted some sort of iOS specific behavior that you can only access from there, the application could be wrapped in a webview. It'll also be seamless to package it as an Electron app for Ubuntu support. I don't intend to go with Electron or put it in a native iOS app, just browser links for whatever platform they want to use, but there's plenty of flexibility.

This is a webapp-done-right in my opinion and really a PWA. Perhaps the path I've set out for myself would work for you. The application I work on is critical to the daily functions of a large business, but not "medical grade", so I may be able to work on the knife's edge a bit more.

I have a similar plan but progress is slow in medical devices and our execs tend to believe salespeople more than our engineers so it will take a while to convince people to invest in a multi-people multi-year effort.

Ah, thank you.

Interesting, yeah I would think a chrome device, or android, iOS, some sort of base level secure focused linux might be a better place. Especially not 'home' flavors windows.

I know some folks working with some medical stuff and they've all since moved off of windows onto Linux, not an easy move, but windows just didn't make sense as their software moved into more of an "embedded" (not sure if anyone uses that term anymore) type setup than a desktop connected to a machine like it used to be.

"embedded" (not sure if anyone uses that term anymore)

They certainly do. There's an entire industry that builds control software for network-connected devices. These days you probably run an embedded web server and/or provide a network-accessible control protocol over something like TCP or UDP with separate software/app that runs locally on the user's device. Then on the back end you link to whatever functionality the device has rather than just storing everything in a database as a typical CRUD application would. There's a wide range of tools available for things like putting together a minimal Linux base and cross-compiling your code as well.

“There's a wide range of tools available for things like putting together a minimal Linux base and cross-compiling your code as well.”

That’s what I would do now. Much easier to build up a device from components than trimming down Windows 10.

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