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The US Navy's Warfare Systems Command Just Paid Millions To Stay On Windows XP
itwbennett writes: The Navy relies on a number of legacy applications and programs that are reliant on legacy Windows products,' said Steven Davis, a spokesman for the Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command in San Diego. And that reliance on obsolete technology is costing taxpayers a pretty penny. The Space and Naval Warfare Systems Command, which runs the Navy's communications and information networks, signed a $9.1 million contract earlier this month for continued access to security patches for Windows XP, Office 2003, Exchange 2003 and Windows Server 2003.
XP, being NT, still has the POSIX subsystem. It probably still works with NetBSD's pkgsrc, too.
Also, it's not so useless as you claim; Microsoft themselves used it internally for years to host Hotmail, and right up until Win8.1 it was a viable alternative to Cygwin for anybody with a compatible version of Windows (or who wanted to force it to run anyhow). It handles/handled some things, such as SetUID/SetGID, which Cygwin couldn't (and I believe still can't) emulate, supported case-sensitivity on NTFS (though this could be used to confuse the hell out of Win32 programs), had a couple of different choices of package managers available, and could compile and run most source code intended for *nix systems (third-party compatibility layers added support for some of Linux's extensions to POSIX).
There's no place I could be, since I've found Serenity...
The Navy purchases computers as parts of much larger systems, often ships. These things get assembled and their expected lifetime is much longer that the technology cycles we enjoy outside of their domain. Refit schedules are not driven by the computers on board but rather by much larger, more expensive and longer lived components like diesel motors. The Navy is just in the last couple of years starting to move some of their onboard computer systems to what they refer to as "Carry On" components. There are probably ships in the fleet that have 25 year old electronics on them because these components weren't ever expected to be replaced.