ATM machine had a windows crash and took my money.

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Today ATM machine crashed and rebooted in windows. Naturally I am not impressed with this.
Why is a money dispensing machine running Windows XP. Is it so they can show fancy adverts
and graphics. Doesn't memory leaks mean anything to them. Why do they need a 1GB system
just to follow a simple financial transaction. The code seriously doesn't need to be more then 16mb
and run off a 10 year old tried and tested single chip device.

I think you probably hit the nail on the head.

Shame they can't run the Windows in a 'sandbox' or something, so that if it crashes the rest of the system won't.

PS How much talking to disengaged people on the phone or visiting marginal helpful people in person did it take for you to get your money back?

Last edited by AardvarkGoodSwimmer on 01 Jul 2011, 2:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.

Notify the bank.

ruveyn

And sometimes you get lucky and someone is genuinely helpful, but that's almost a happy accident.

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Are computers already beyond human control? In some ways, yes. In some ways, no.

ATMs actually existed in 1972. All was needed is a reliability tweak and a few tweak for a changing system.

When 99.9 of the code is not responsible for the task at hand, there is something seriously wrong.

an odd analogy can be drawn to the beurocracy the banks use to manage themselves, it took me over a week to have an "eaten" card(by an atm in greece) shipped to denmark and then back to me in greece, ridicoulous.
why not arrange a phone call or a recovery system where i can have the card in my hand with a phonecall to my own bank.

This would be impossible if they were using a transactional database correctly.

when it is things like that I prefer it to be running Linux heck in that even Android is better then running Windows on something like that
.
.
yes there is a android x86
.
If that happen I would call the Bake right a way if that happen to me.

XP? Really? That's an incredibly stupid thing to use for such a dedicated task. Even Linux would be more justifiable.

They should run it on Linux or UNIX, because... come on windows xp?! on an ATM?! seriously?!

Ideal they would use BSD unix without user interface.
The ATM software would use its own graphics. I wouldn't
trust Linux on an ATM, as as update are too fast. All together
the software will easily fit on the bottom half of a floppy disk.

I would also have a separate single chip computer to monitor screen, keyboard
and cash dispenser. If computer crashed ,which would be unlikely, the monitoring
computer would know what has happened.

It will take a long time to get over this. Windows XP!

indeed it would be a good solution to use some SoC system with a simple program running on ot to manage input and output. While XP was somewhat stable after SP1, I still wouldn't trust an ATM with an OS like that.
It would indeed be better with a small internal linux distro, just make updates a nightly cron job or something... at least linux is made to run for long periods of time without falling on its ass

Do you know how long Windows XP can running before it crashes

If you search in Google Images "ATM Crash windows" are find some bizzare pics.

They probably wanted to use a commercial OCR library for check scanning or something. The real crime here is not using Windows XP on an ATM, but using a database design that allows for the loss of data integrity in the event of a crash. This would be a problem with any OS.

I thought that no database was like this not any sql one anyway.