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Microsoft Pulls Plug for Support on NT4
seymansey writes "According to Neowin.net and News.com, Microsoft has apparently announced that as of the end of June, support for the now aging NT4 OS will be pulled. NT4 Server users have until the end of 2004 for support. Windows 98 users will be the next on the list for axed support too. Of course, Microsoft will still provide its knowledge base, but we wont see any more patches, etc. developed for the OS. After 7 years, it's kind of sad to see NT4 go."
they're going to pull the plug! Damn!
Arf!
And now Microsoft will turn it to Open Software so volunteers can start an own fork of it and continue deveploving it. .. and will win eurovision song contest and soccer world championship. And SCO will be popular again.
OR, then not.
A full description of Microsoft's end-of-support, end-of-life policies, including dates for *all* it's OSes, can be found here.
--LP
...where I work. Why upgrade a server if it still works? Put 2000 and XP on the workstations, sure, but why replace an already-functional server? As long as it keeps serving files, right?
:-/
Now there will be companies like ours scrambling to get 2000 Server or 2K3 server on their servers by the end of next year. And we won't have a choice. Upgrade or lose support. What do you do? You upgrade.
My journal has hot
I dropped support for Microsoft too.
BSD is designed. Linux is grown. C++ libs
Well, they acutally do provide lifetime support for their products. The only problem is that they define when the lifetime of the product is over.
...After 7 years, it's kind of sad to see NT4 go.
After spending two years in MA phone support for NT on laptops I would have to say I am happy the damn thing is finally dead.
Installing NT on anything was time intensive, installing drivers had to go in a particular order or it turned that hardware into a doorstop:
imag0: "You mean to tell me you installed the video drivers before you installed card services and your ethernet drivers?"
Client, quivering after spending the past three hours reloading NT on a laptop: "Uh, yeah."
imag0: "Ok, pull out your boot diskettes again and see if we can repair install..."
A long running joke in laptop support was that NT meant "Not Today". And it was true. Repair installs didn't. Service Control Manager (SCM) was only there to throw cryptic, useless errors at users just long enough to generate support calls and let's not get into how hard Adobe Acrobat and SP4 clusterfucked in some Trident configurations.
Glad it's dead. No love lost here. Burn your cd's and feel happy its gone the way of win 3.11 and MS Bob.
Good point. Here's a better lifecycle link at Microsoft, which includes it's Windows server products and a bunch of other server products. For Office and other MS products, you can try this link.
;-)
--LP, who is 'journal whoring', not karma whoring thank you very much
And then your bosses financial department screams at you the next time he can't read their convoluted, thoroughly programmed-to-death excel files. Most People who find staroffice a useful alternative aren't using ms-office so much as halfway to the limits of its functionality. I found this out the hard way: accountants are not Most People. Neither are auditors, and in some cases, even the people in the human resources department. They know crafty Excel techniques which simply don't translate into Freebie Office documents of any flavor, for good or bad.
Desktop evangelism can be dangerous, as it tricks the typical geek into thinking that because Staroffice is good enough a replacement to him for word and Excel (particularly the latter), that it's good enough for everybody. In a perfect world, maybe, but not in a real office with a lot of legacy programming, legacy programmers, legacy users, and genuinely talented Excel weenies. Much less Access weenies.
Same debate? Gimp versus Photoshop. I've had people 'explain' to me why the gimp is a perfectly suitable replacement to Photoshop. For making web graphics, sure. For doing advanced production work for high level print processing? Not only is Gimp not even in the same league, it's not even playing the same game.
Half of the corporate honchos I've had to deal with in regards to desktop issues get irritated that their office PC doesn't have the same annoying shovelware, quirky desktop setup, and bells & whistle proprietary add-ins as their ridiculous and expensive name brand PCs. Visions of apoplexy dance in my head at the idea of explaining to them why the "My Computer" icon is called something else, why it behaves differently when opened, and why the hell I can't load their three-versions-old copy of AOL onto a sweet chromed linuxy desktop, or if I can (via an emulator) why it runs slower, and why there's extra "stuff to click".
These are the same people I had to have meetings with about why the naked dancing chick.exe attachment their cousin sent them doesn't seem to work at the office (all attachments stored at server, released by me as appropriate - e.g. no exes,
I'll pass on evangelizing a more complicated (or even just 'different') user experience to these people, thank you very much.
"After 7 years, it's kind of sad to see NT4 go."
7 years ago, it was kind of sad to see NT4 coming.
Alex, I'll take keybindings not used by Emacs for $400....
Because using linux as a pdc avoids a lot of licensing expenses, and works quite well?
Windows XP resets without warning because that's the default behavior on the blue screen of death. To make it show the BSOD and possibly track down the problem
Start > Control Panel > System
Advanced Tab
Startup and Reovery settings
Uncheck "Automatically restart" under System Failure
...and that's all there is to it.
Look, I have to ride herd on a pile of MS servers, just now more 2k than NT. We've built a damn good business using the these machines. We've stretched the things to their limits of the with some of the processes that we have implemented. We've discovered deep bugs and pushed MS to fix 'em. We have a functioning, stable business that relies on this OS.
.NET and now not .NET.
This is where MS *always* makes it greatest mistake. They desire to become respected in the Enterprise market, yet these idiots cannot put a leash on their marketing department.
Hint to Microsoft: If you want to be taken seriously, stop changing your OS's willy-nilly. IBM supports OS's and hardware for years after they've gone past their prime. Why? Because their customers still use them. Businesses are built using your software as a tool to get work done. Now just because you decide that hammers are out of vogue, you cannot force everybody to switch over to pneumatic nail-guns. This "ok, ok, ok, we're serious now. We've come up with a great new way to do X" shit has got to stop. DDE, OLE, OCX, ActiveX, COM, DCOM, COM+.
You know, it is possible to run a network with their tools (quiet down, I work for people who have made this decision and pay me to implement it), but for cryin' out loud, business processes change slowly if at all and once that you realize that marketing won't sway established systems to change at the drop of a hat, the sooner that you will find customers that will stick with you for the long haul.
That is until you get greedy and start gouging on licenses...
Chris
So Buddha walks into a pizza parlor and says: "Hey, make me one with everything."