Posted on 04/13/2014 1:44:21 AM PDT by dayglored
Apparently the IRS has been too busy persecuting the Tea Party to keep their systems current.
Oh please! Microsoft EXTENDED the extended support window for XP by 3 years after an uproar in the community. Microsoft spent over a billion dollars to continue writing patches for XP. That includes salaries for programmers, coding newer versions of .NET for the older XP kernel, and maintaining call center support for XP users. Microsoft bent over backwards to keep XP alive, but they told EVERYONE years ago that April 8, 2014 was the end of it all. 3 years is a lifetime in IT.
I've worked in a healthcare setting where a LOT of legacy applications ran critical systems including registration, bed tracking, pharmacy applications, and the like. They kept XP around, because those vendors went out of business, but ya know what? The hospital system for which I worked saw the writing on the wall back in 2010, and they contracted new vendors to come in and replace the old systems.
I currently work in the financial industry, and we have XP in our environment to support financial applications that are over 10 years old. The problem? Those applications were coded by people who have long since left the company, and no one wants to re-write them or provide a better solution. Meanwhile, we've had to pull access from those terminals down to bare bones due to security concerns that keep our risk management people awake at night.
Point is, you've had 5 years to research and deploy replacements for systems. If your systems are not on a network or on the Internet, then continue using them until they die unceremonious deaths. If they're on the Internet or connected to a network, Microsoft's provided 3 operating systems since XP (4, if you consider ME, but no one takes it seriously), so there's really no excuse for not migrating to a new platform.
I understand some industries use XP for heavy equipment operations. My only question/concern there: if that machine is compromised, do you really want some hacker half a world away to be able to take control while the safety of people is at hand? It's disturbing how much XP is still out there, esp. if you understand from the IT security perspective how vulnerable those systems are now.
Windows 7 XP Mode will run 99% of all applications that required Windows XP on Windows 7. Google it and learn.
Exactly correct, which is why I laugh at all the luddites here on FR who insist on continuing to run XP claiming they'll never give it up, or "from my cold dead hands."
Sooner or later a kernel exploit/virus exploit/malware exploit is going to take over their machine and they'll lose their data. They'll continue to blame Microsoft for not continuing to support a 12 year old OS that's required security patches to plug thousands and thousands of exploits which Microsoft developed and provided freely for that same 12 year period.
It took Microsoft 12 YEARS to come to the conclusion that they'd likely be patching one of the most INSECURE OS' out there for another 12 years and into infinity for what a POS the Windows XP kernel is. And yet some people want to continue down that path? Yikes. Grow up.
That's right. Any OS that's been so poorly designed security-wise that's required 12 YEARS of patches with no end in site to plugging ALL the security holes that OS contains is going to become one BIG TARGET.
The luddites here whining about losing support for a 12 year old OS which also happens to be the most INSECURE OS ever put out (12 years of security patches? C'mon!) will get what they deserve when they keep running it and lose all their data.
Oh please! Microsoft EXTENDED the extended support window for XP by 3 years after an uproar in the community. Microsoft spent over a billion dollars to continue writing patches for XP. That includes salaries for programmers, coding newer versions of .NET for the older XP kernel, and maintaining call center support for XP users. Microsoft bent over backwards to keep XP alive, but they told EVERYONE years ago that April 8, 2014 was the end of it all. 3 years is a lifetime in IT.
Agreed. They've 'supported' (as a consumer, when was the last time you actually got 'support' from Microsoft?) this OS for a lot longer than most software companies would. Of course, they've also made a lot of money from it. Nothing wrong with that, of course, but I've always considered it to be an inferior operating system at best. It wasn't even worth using at all until SP2.
I understand some industries use XP for heavy equipment operations. My only question/concern there: if that machine is compromised, do you really want some hacker half a world away to be able to take control while the safety of people is at hand? It's disturbing how much XP is still out there, esp. if you understand from the IT security perspective how vulnerable those systems are now.
Agreed. Companies have had a lot of time to migrate to something more recent.
Problem is, computers have gotten powerful enough that not even Microsoft bloatware can really slow it down enough to make people need to upgrade. Most people don't install their own operating system at all. Consumers in general are as ignorant of computers, and how to use and secure them properly as they are of anything else, if not more so. If your computer continues to function, people are really not interested in making major changes to them. This is a serious problem for companies like Microsoft, which is why they are pushing the subscription model so hard. The vast majority of users have no need whatsoever of the new "features" of Microsoft's bread and butter products like Office. The are perfectly happy using a 15-year old operating system with Office 97 installed because it does everything they need it to do. As long as they stay away from Microsoft internet browsers, (which are a driver for OS upgrades) they can continue to use it until their hardware physically dies. Microsoft is not making any money at all off of these folks.
From a technological standpoint, computers have generally become much more of a 'durable good' than something that really needs to be disposed of every three to five years. You see that businesses have fully embraced that, by the sheer number of computers in use that are 5+ years old. If MS is going to commit fully to the 'subscription' model, they really need to make their operating more modular so they could do 'continuous' upgrades, like some of the Linux distributions are doing.
It’s very short-sighted (aka stupid) to tie yourself to custom business software that either can’t be upgraded/exported to another platform or you won’t do either b/c of cost.
Unfortunately more OS developers are going the route of “continuous upgrades” with long term support (LTS) while supporting specific hardware models. I’m thinking specifically of iOS on Apple products and more generally of Android on compatible devices. If manufacturers can program to specific hardware platforms, it makes support easier.
Microsoft’s “problem,” if it really is one, is that they are generally platform agnostic. If you can present storage to a device, you can install Windows on it. This has caused Microsoft’s supported software requirements bloat to the point that the OS has grown to 4 GB of compressed operating system goodness while Android and iOS can run on less than 1 GB of available disk. Even Linux can be cherry-picked down to a sleek 250 Mb with some distros.
Hardware is a durable good insomuch as it can be reused, but as operating systems and computing platform requirements improve, older hardware becomes difficult to program to. I can point to Broadcom as a good example of a manufacturer that just cuts off old hardware at the knees and refuses to provide back-channel support to developers. Try getting wireless to work with Linux on a 10 year old laptop, and you’ll find how futile it can be to support older hardware.
Microsoft’s subscription model will be optional, but it’s already in place with products such as Office 365 where most of your Office platform is configured and accessible only through an Internet-enable device. When they start with the old dumb-terminal model where we have a WYSE device in our homes connected to the Internet and presenting everything to us, only then will I agree on the durable good idea, but then there will always be those of us, myself included, who want the horsepower in the home office and not at some distributed data center halfway across the country.
du -h TinyCore32/ 21M TinyCore32/
Takes less than 5 seconds to boot in VMware. It's awesome for troubleshooting, and the distro is amazingly fast even when booting off a thumb drive.
Your comments about Broadcomm are well taken. They suck. Hate their wireless cards, and won't buy anything with their name on it under any circumstances.
I'm just glad that I don't have to be the microsoft treadmill any more. I just don't need the frustration.
My primary job is as a Windows engineer. I run my company’s domains and infrastructure on Windows 2008 and 2012. I have access to all of our keys and could install any Microsoft OS on any machine I wanted, but I don’t. At home I run an enterprise-class server with VMware ESXi 5.1 (free) and a cluster of 15 VMs all running Ubuntu Server 12.04. The only Windows machines in my home are my wife’s laptop and Surface and my gaming machine, but every single Microsoft license is legit.
Point is, given the opportunity, I’ll take Linux over Microsoft even if the MS license is technically free.
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