Posted on 04/13/2014 1:44:21 AM PDT by dayglored
Usually, the Internal Revenue Service is the one getting paid this time of year, but Uncle Sam will be lining someone else's pockets this tax season because of its attachment to Windows XP. In case you hadn't heard, support for XP officially stopped on April 8th, meaning that Microsoft will no longer provide support or security updates for the venerable OS.
However, governmental computers can't be left vulnerable, so the IRS will be paying Microsoft millions of dollars for custom support to keep their machines secure and functional. Right now, over half the agency's PCs still run XP...
(Excerpt) Read more at engadget.com ...
Putting your clients in a pinch is something they should remember about Microsoft... they exist to sell you OS upgrades. That's reason enough to get off the MS train.
Yes, Big Windows can do this to them once. But once your clients have got this problem solved, they will find a way to ensure that it never happens again. I'm guessing that some flavor of Linux will be in their futures.
Who to root for in this one? The IRS or Microsoft? No good guys here.
OMG now XP becomes the 3rd, the other 2 you can’t escape, Death and Taxes....
They likely have applications which wont work on win7.
Ms is a business. They get to choose what they do.
They gave everyone several years notice. If the irs cant pull its head out of its butt then they are at fault.
I know in some organizations the software they use will not run on Window7 or 8. So they get stuck until the “other” user application software gets replaced or upgraded.
Wrong.
100% wrong.
Who better to attack than folks whose guardians just walked away?
I run a mixed network at home because my kid’s schools use XP.
Amazing - most government computers transitioned through Vista and onto Win 7, yet more than half of IRS computers are still running XP. Massive incompetence at work here - that and the “diversionary forays” into illegally hindering Conservative organizations. Computers are the lifeblood of modern day business - it seems a bit criminal for such as the IRS to neglect the necessary upgrades.
Microsoft’s version of a protection racket.
Gotta think up some way to keep the dough flowing
Microsoft and the government, anyone see a problem here?
I work for a major Fed group, and we don't get funded like the IRS... and even WE are all on Win 7.
The IRS should try vaulting into the 20th century sometime.
Yet I’ve overseen WinXP—>Vista and Vista—>Win7 upgrades on 100% of my systems in my Army units since DoD forces us for primarily security purposes (although the move to Vista screamed of the right palms being greased).
Maintaining XP is a major security problem that only involves the tax information (which is 100% PII [personally identifiable information]) of nearly every person in the country. What could possibly go wrong?
Hey Microsoft, since you are supporting the IRS, how about sending us some of those fixes as well. After all WE are paying you for the IRS support.
The company I work for does a refresh every two years. We lease computers, including individual laptops. We get support from an outside vendor. On a rolling basis, everyone’s laptop is turned in for a newer model, with the leasing company moving applications and data off the old machine, including the desktop. One is encouraged not to keep data on the hard drive, but use the network drives. They system works pretty well, but is somewhat disruptive since you need to learn all the latests wrinkles in Office every two years.
Disconnect IRS computers with XP from the internet. No more facebook, no more porn downloads... make government work unappealing.
An operating system is dead when it is no longer used, not when it is no longer supported. As long as so many juicy targets use XP it will be hacked aggressively.
“Its a damned good operating system.”
What you said. I’m running it at this very moment, and am holding on to it like Grim Death. Other computers in our house are running Vista, Windows 7 & 8. We return to the PC with XP when we need something truly stable and dependable.
If I’m paying for Uncle Sugar to receive support with my money, why can’t I get support with my money?
It is not an unusual situation at all. I worked for a tech company that as of two years ago still did not have any computers beyond XP and had a number of tools still on NT and even some on DOS/Win 3.1 and we had a huge IT staff. The problem is that we had a lot of proprietary software that was mission critical that was very expensive to upgrade to work with new operating systems and tools that couldn’t be upgraded for a reasonable cost or was impossible because the vendors were no longer around.
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