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.

Comments

Not a bad price

[Anonymous Coward]

Is it just me, or does that not seem like that bad of a price?

Re:Not a bad price

[Anonymous Coward]

Different branches and divisions probably have different needs. The programs are probably purchased as binaries. Staff would need to be changed, software repurchased, data migrated, etc. This isn't unusual, and happens in most large and small companies, not just the military. For the longest time Law practices were stuck in DOS because of the Word Perfect software addons they used, for example. They worked extremely well, so there was no reason to change. 9 million is probably a lot cheaper than retraining all the employees, all the data migrations, hardware upgrades, windows upgrades, etc, etc. They can work on it slowly one department at a time.

Re:Not a bad price

[spongman]

it'll buy you nearly 1 hour of launches from an aircraft carrier.

Re:Not a bad price

[cbhacking]

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).

Yeah

[Greyfox]

They did that with OS/2 back in the day, too. They stayed on OS/2 1.2 a couple years past when the OS expired for everyone else. I guarantee you what they paid for this one was less expensive than changing all the documentation to reflect a later version of windows.

XP? OK. But, Office?

[Duckman5]

Someone help me out here. I can understand why they would be running XP. It was a stable OS and it was used in a lot of embedded systems. They probably don't want to just replace the underlying operating system on a computer running a nuclear submarine or something.

Office, though? What are they doing? Using a mail merge macro to address the nuclear missiles on said submarine? Why the heck can't they just replace that with minimal issues?

At the end of the day, though, I'm not that worried. $9.1 million is a drop in the bucket compared to the nearly $700 billion DoD budget. There's a whole lot more pork in that barrel to be worried about.

Re:XP? OK. But, Office?

[Goetterdaemmerung]

Office 2003 is arguably still the best version of Office. I have co-workers who still use it and I've used pretty much every version since 4. I don't disagree with them, although I have personally transitioned to 2010 for compatibility. Newer versions don't provide much additional usability and make certain things more difficult such as removing the ability to select chart curves directly from the legend. Why??

Re:XP? OK. But, Office?

[tehcyder]

What are they doing? Using a mail merge macro to address the nuclear missiles on said submarine?

Jesus, Duckman, what part of "Top Secret" don't you understand?

More stupid reporting on SlashDot

[Anonymous Coward]

"That reliance on obsolete technology is costing the tax payers". Do you have any idea how much it would cost the tax payers to try to *replace* all that embedded technology? Far, far more than $9.1M. I really wish that people wouldn't post articles with such blatant biases and so little background research.

The best thing that Microsoft could do for the world is put Windows 7 into perpetual maintenance and charge $50/year for the product. No more churn to replace hardware and software when they obsolete an old O/S. No more retraining costs to get IT personal who can manage the new O/S which does things just differently enough to trip people up.

At least MS isn't as bad as Apple where the literally force you to buy new hardware along with the new O/S (Ipad 1 anyone?)

Re:More stupid reporting on SlashDot

[OrangeTide]

Maybe we shouldn't have bought the technology in the first place if we had no plan on how to effectively upgrade it.

(I'm an embedded SW engineer)

Re:More stupid reporting on SlashDot

[vux984]

The thing that irks me is that once various governments and organizations have "sucked-it-up" and ponied up the "ransom" to keep XP going -- why cant the public at large benefit from this. Especially given that we are the ones literally paying for it.

Once the patches are written, tested, and released why aren't they available on Windows update?

Don't get me wrong, I want XP to die in a fire. Cutting over to Vista onward, embracing 64 bit*, leaving the days of "administrator by default" behind, etc were all good things. But still if my government dropped 9 million bucks to get MS to develop some more security patches for XP; it'd be nice if the lathes at work could have them too.

* (yes, yes, i know xp 64 bit existed. shut up. :)

To be fair, $5M of it was to restore

[jpellino]

the XP version of Minesweeper. Apparently they get a lot of use out of that one.

A more accurate summary might be:

[lytlebill]

'The US Navy paid $9.1M to insure that critical systems running an older OS are still supported while they continue to transition away from said older OS, a process that anyone with IT experience knows cannot happen overnight, and sometimes can take years, particularly when it comes to systems with potentially disastrous consequences at risk should you just slap updates on them willy-nilly.'

I do realize that we're talking about post-Dice Slashdot here, but this is one of the lamer website shillings I've seen in a while. Honestly, the article itself isn't nearly as sensational as this clickbait summary would have you believe.

Re:A more accurate summary might be:

[Jack Griffin]

You'll never believe what this Government did next!
10 secrets the Military don't want you to know!
This one simple trick made $9 Million!

It's not funny, it's sad.

Re:A more accurate summary might be:

[cfalcon]

Eh, my experience is that a lot of things in the military are sold as systems, and that includes the OS that goes along with it. You'd be bitching more if they had to rebuy all their systems, and pay contractors and subcontractors to develop for and test on, the latest windows OS. Since some components still use XP, they will need XP to stay up to date. That's not really a shock.

Again, I want to EMPHASIZE, these aren't just a bunch of desktops with people clicking on shit, or an OS that does a generic job. The whole damned piece is certified for a specific purpose, in many many cases.

This is not government waste, this is the opposite. I mean, everything else in the military is expected to function for more than the fart of a silicon valley billionaire, and paying for maintenance is far cheaper than buying a whole new All The Things.

It's not a hammer

[Overzeetop]

it's not a hammer, it's a manual nail insertion device designed to provide application of no less than 5000 ft-lb of energy to a drawn steel fasteneing device of up to 0.162" in diameter and 3.5" long with swaged or pressed impact points. The design must be such that operation is possible by users which fall within the 20th and 98th percentile for size based on standard American male growth charts for all races. The device shall require low skill level for operation. Item must be maintenance free with no adjustment required for initial or long term operation. All materials shall be sourced in accordance with OPM regulations and include a certificate of authenticity for all natural materials and a certification of chemical composition for all non-natural materials. Chemical composition may be provided by certificates of origin and testing by third parties at the source of material, or through destructive testing and analysis of the 0.1% of the fabricated product quantity per lot. Each lot shall be identified using ONLY the military item number (no commercial numbers or identification shall be allowed), be marked "U.S. Military Use Only", and carry the lot number. Identification shall be integrally cast, impressed, and/or indelibly marked on the item, or on each part of the item if the assembly is separable.