Funny you mention this. When I got my first (and last) Android phone, I was honestly expecting a somewhat functional/scriptable Linux environment with Perl, some web server, and a sane package manager. I imagined that I would be able to script behaviour and set up a cron job to make a call or connect to the net...... I did not even consider, that what I was getting was nothing like that. Besides this little surprise I hated the phone, the experience, everything about it.. including the uselessly slow emulator and the whole eclipse-based dev environment.
I am curious as to what you replaced your droid with?
I live in the real world where we call Linux Linux. Some of which is not GNU. Infact, I VMWare Workstation, ESXI, perl, Apache, postgresql, is what I see on my Unix VMs. I do not see gnu anywhere at all.
Why? Long term or short term answer? It is like driving an old diesel car. It might do 500.000km or it might be 300.000km before it dies. Maintenance goes up and average price goes down when you get to the higher mileage. But, I would not bet my business on anything over 250.000km. Prepare for replacement The average shareholder does not drive a car that old.
I think someone is taking too much risk with my money when a crucial part of that business may just break down.
Did you read the part about proprietary data formats that can't be moved?
Unlike a piece of machinery like a truck software does not age. It still runs the same is it did 17 years ago. True XP ages each time it is patched as you can't run a modern patched XP SP 3 with +1100 security patches on a machine with 128 megs of ram like the RTM version of XP. But software with no updates do not have this problem.
I believe the answer might be virtualization as this software will now never die as it is ingrained to the business process at hand. Problem is virtualization for the desktop is still immature as MS and VMWare focus on the server. For example can I push a GPO to make XP mode install and start across 4,000 workstations whenever the user clicks the DRM Master for Windows for Workgroups 1996 edition icon? Right now no.
Windows 8 has less options than Windows 7 pro in this regard. MS needs to up the game where a user can click an icon and the mode starts. Not the other way around and have it AD configurable in Windows 9.
MS updates its software all the time so I do not think they know how bad the problem really is? I was told Bank of America has a pre 360 mainframe app that still processes home loans. It runs in an emulator written for the 360 40 years ago which runs in another 370 emulator on a modern 390 system where the punch cards for this 1964 program are all long gone. Without these 3 embedded emulators BOA can't do mortgages!
Citrix may have a solution for some of these IE 6 apps as that runs in a browser plugin with a Windows 2003 server.
True the average shareholder does not drive a car that old, but they expect their people paying them to do just that! Why, the shareholder wants the new car to himself via the cost savings from someone else going without. Greed is greed and people only care about themselves. Argue all you want but these cheapskates and guys iwth clipboards own the companies. Not the CEOs.
Sadly if you really want to give a great ROI then do not invest in upgrading or virtualization and just keep XP longer. This what they have been doing for 10 years and the great recession didn't help either. Remember all the comments in 2009 when Windows 7 was released here on slashdot?
They were all, uh my boss is trying to figure out how not to lay us all off. I do not think they are paying attention nor caring about upgrading their perfecting working computers right now.
In world war I gas killed almost the whole British army in about an hour. Bullets killed 100,000 in 2 years while 1400 were killed in an hour including 300 children. If used continuiosly a 100,000 could happen easily within a few hours. Same with nuclear. I could argue more died from bullets than nuclear bombs therefore who cares about nuclear war. Doesnt mean its not more dangerous and deadly.
The idea here is to avoid repeating history as chemical weapons will be the norm as nothing will ever happen if you use them right? The death toll would be tens of millions instead if used from the start
I find it very interesting to read so many people here defending XP in light of its security weaknesses. We're talking about an OS that has a horrible security model out of the box and encourages applications to be designed to run with full admin privileges. If you are a developer stuck on XP and you haven't updated your software to work properly with the newer security model introduced in Vista, well shame on you. You've had way more than enough time... 7 years to be exact.
XP is the "odd one out" now, with regards to how you design a good, secure Windows application. There are 3 newer versions of Windows and the 4th is coming next week, all with a similar, much more robust security model. XP is now the bastard child, different from the rest. Sickly.
And don't forget the 64-bit question. While 32-bit XP was very widely used and adopted, the 64-bit "edition" was an instant bastard child, born out of the unholy union of XP and Server 2003 64-bit. Very few applications support 64-bit XP and with good reason. While it was the first 64-bit Windows on the desktop, its compatibility with existing and even new applications was never a strong point. It was a niche product and never gained widespread support. If you need 64-bit support, XP doesn't cut it. We work with very large datasets, and 64-bit is basically a requirement for much of what we do.
We are about to release the last versions of our software that support XP and I can't wait for the day we drop support completely. It's an additional testing burden when we already need to test all newer versions. Plus, it behaves differently than the rest. Continuing to support XP today drives up costs and limits adoption of newer and better technologies. It had a good run, but now it's time to let it die. There are newer and better Windows versions.
Part of the reason is habit and once you never do something in a very long long time your brain thinks it is wrong to do it because that means change.
In the case of upgrading after being told for 12 years to never ever update that is bad IT then feels it is unprofessional to upgrade. Why? It is something you never do. That is why etc!... on a more practical note the reason XP is used is many places the accountants and MBAs have taken over the IT departments and this thing called "The Great Recession" changed the mindset of these beancounters.
Many IT loved Windows 7 back in 2009!. 90% of these corps invested in labs to test Windows 7 images but guess what happened that year in 2009? Stock market whent down 14,000 to 5,000! Corporations had massive layoffs totaling over 10 million.
When you need to make a choice to keep the lights on and feeding employees in these dark years the case of upgrading perfectly working computers goes out the Windows. Now mix in IT workers who have been told change is bad for 12 years and you have a recipe of resistance where the can is kicked. MBA folks get their raises by cutting costs and firing people and will lose their bonus next year if IT invests in technology that they do not really need (in their opinion).
IT needs to sell themselves better as these MBA guys think XP is just as secure. They are not computer geeks. They are money geeks. They do not understand these issues and in their eyes systems magically still work with what they have so why change?
If they can be told another code red can take the company down you can BET YOUR ASS THEY WILL UPGRADE infact they are just starting to do that now. The real quesiton in 2020 is what will compell them to leave Windows 7? I can't think of anything now besides HTML 6 and CSS 4 support from a non sucky version of IE (in that time's standard.) The PC is mature and turning into the mainframe now they gets updated every few decades because they work.
Our biggest struggle has actually been with outdated software. 16bit software just won't run on Win8 (64bit - can be enabled on 32bit, but that's just another wall waiting to be hit), and while our admin would be comfortable with installing a VM to keep these going, we're just biting the bullet and converting legacy files to formats used by more modern software, finding alternatives for those applications that we do still actively use, and keeping two machines around for everything else; one running with a VNC, and the other in storage 'just in case'.
Run VirtualBox on a machine and setup the appropriate guest OS to run your software. Enable remote display in VirtualBox for your newly created guest OS. Now anyone can connect using RDP or VPN - whichever you decide to host. I recommend RDP because the Windows clients will already have client software installed.
This is easier than setting up VM software on every computer. It also removes any restrictions governing which computer you can use to host the VM. And finally, it makes creating backups of your guest OS / application much easier as you just backup the VM image. The ability to take snapshots of the guest OS is also very useful.
Of course, other VM servers would also work. My experience is with VirtualBox and, despite being free, works suprisingly well in this sort of situation.
Can I deploy it to 10,000 workstations and manage it via group policy with Active Directory?
How will you tell 10,000 users to look for some weird icon they never hard of called virtual cereal boxen thingie? Or will they just open up IE 10 and inundate the 3 Indian help desk team asking them to fix DRM Windows 3.11 1996 edition CRM on their internets? Or will they not see hte icon for it on their shiny new 4 year old Windows 7 desktops and again call help desk whining they can't get any work done FIX IT NOW!
Last I saw even Windows 7 Pro with XP mode required a plugin not managed by active directory to be installed. gray hair users do not understand this. All they know is they have work to do and get angry and irritated when something changes and gets in the way. Even generation Y people do not know or care what virtualization is either if they do not work in IT.
... One of our customers has over 50k desktops, a business in the hospitality industry... going straight to Windows 8 next year, in both corp offices and individual locations around the globe.
Contrary to what you think, the world doesn't revolve around you or your narrow view of the world.
Jumping to 7 rather than 8 just shows you're afraid of change. When 99% of your employees spend all day in a 1 or 2 apps that are full screen, and you treat a machine like a utility rather than your lover, the change doesn't matter.
As a user, I find the start screen to be utterly jarring, but I switch between apps a lot. Most people don't.
When will ignorant slash dotters realize their fantasy/love affair with their PC is something most of the rest of the world laughs at?
Damn right we are afraid of change!
Change where the phone rings every 2 seconds saying WHERE IS THE START MENU FIX IT NOW and calls going up 10,000% and people slaming the door begging for their old pentium IVs back so they can get some work done etc.
Windows 8 is bad. Vista only 2 fortune 500 companies that I know of migrated which are Chevron and GM. Everyone else stuck with XP. Does that mean the 498 fear change? Yes and no. Most are embracing Windows 7 with 1/4 resisting and whining my guess here.
So Vista was not because of change but because or problems. Same with Windows 8. Windows 7 most corps put plans together and ran labs but remember the Great Recession of 2009 - current? Windows 7 came out in the worst economic downturn since the 1930s!
Upgrading computers when your share price is down 80% and you are wondering how many employees you need to lay off is frankly retarded. Many XP users stayed until 2011 when economic conditions improved and kept what they had instead to survive.
I knew a guy who had a TRS 80 until the 21 st century. His data was on it and without it he would have to close down his business. He gets parts on craigslist and yard sales to keep his business going.
This software will never ever die. If your customers are on that one proprietary app and it is gone then you lose all your customers. Also according to the cost accountants there is no return in shareholder value by upgrading?
Drp master ERP 1996 edition for Windows 3.11 with IE 4 backend works just fine for the last 15 years. So why fix something that lowers the share price that works fine with a long track record?
Windows XP is dangerous even patched. So many businesses use IE 6 unpatched to handle social security cards, credit card numbers, and other things.
It was designed in an era when MSN and AOL was big and the web was this little thing called minspring and geocities.com pages. All you needed was a password and you were fine right?
No such thing as a buffer overflow, exception handaling bugs, sandboxing? Whats that? etc.
Did you know for Chrome and Firefox to function in XP sandboxing is actually disabled! The kernel is 12 years old and can not support it. You can run something by simply doing a peak and poke into a ram address in XP in limited user mode! When that.dll is run your malware is run with it. You do not have to click anything to get infected. Just use flash which has a memory corruption bug and your machine is instantly owned in a web page.
Windows 7 at least scrambles ram addresses via ASLR. Instead of handing out ram addresses hard coded into.dlls it uses virtual addresses which are 2 TB in length. Windows 8 goes a step further and prevents spraying all the virtual ram addresses until the right address is actually rewritten.
IS MS being greedy here?
MS has a whole security team with hundreds of people working with law enforcement agencies complete with a whole freaking command center! That costs $$$$ to maintain. Why? So people in 2001 who paid $120 can fund it year after year? Cars are not free either and maintenance in software is covered by the manufacturer in the case of XP so you never see it.
MS is breaking even at this point with XP unless of course you are fine with no patches at all. Oh and FYI XP was fine pre SP 2. I ran it on day one in 2001 and I had no issues at all and was still a humongous upgrade from Windows 98.
I laugh at XP holdouts when I ask them what is just soo horrible about Windows 7. They talk about settings. Never about the platform and how they are familiar with the old explorer, fonts, colors, things were in the right spot etc. They never heard of Aero peak, Aero snap, instant search, or any of the improvements in the past 5 years.
Most slashdotters still do not know you can hit the windows key and type whatever you want. I never use the start button anymore after Vista.
But, Windows 8 really does have very servere problems. There are no stacking apps in a task bar, no more than 1 tile on the screen, inferior search to Windows 7, and here is a normal user who has written 30 days of MacOSX, Linux, and Vista, now trying his best at Windows 8.
Notice how no pictures even show in the pictures app? No clear way to go back to the start screen, the touchpad does weird things and pretends it is a cell phone screen, it is thrown together with no design so customers can buy Windows phones.
When XP is officially out of support, there will be oodles of exploits that never get patched. I'm going to love to see the carnage and fallout from that.
The users do not care. I am talking mechanic shops, restaurants, and other small businesses who make up the majority of business users not the big boys with custom apps contrary to popular belief.
Many stil use SCO Unix for the POS systems to print customer receiepts for crying out loud in green screen glory. You all seen them and know what I am talking about?
Hospitals will find it cheaper to pay MS for patches at $250,000 up as that is the cost to replace a single MRI. To have the FDA recertify all that infrastructure is too expensive. They will keep using IE 6 and XP until after 2020 and never will change and just go buy parts from craigslist. You can thank Obamacare for that which is cash stripping hospitals left and right.
Schools still use IE 6 and Windows 2000 and have no plans to upgrade. They work just fine and they have cards with some software called freeze which with the hardware can undo any changes that any malware can provide. It makes them undestructable and saves money in leui of non upgrading.
I think XP is the start of the mainframe like platforms that exist for decades upon decades. The desktop innovation is gone and it is about mobile platforms now. XP = IBM 360 while Windows 7 = 380 of the the 80s that never changes.
If you scratch under the skin and go on the network it is still there underneath the surface. POS systems, clients in a particular group who need an IE 6 app, equipment, branch offices far from headquarters etc.
90% still have XP used somewhere and 40% still haven't started migration yet from what I have seen. FYI I specialize in XP to Windows 7 migrations in consulting.
Hospitals and schools and small to medium sized businesses are the ones not upgrading. Even without IE 6 many smaller businesses doo not give a shit as they like the fact employees cant use facebook and view IT as an expense. Small to medium sized businesses make up the majority of jobs and have no IT departments but do have accountants who always advise no to IT.
XP is not going anywhere for years to come with these users. It is amazing how technology moved forward until 2002 or so and just stopped and set for this market. No gradual slowness just stopped from tje 2002 recession. These users now realized the cost saving and familiarity and like it. Why change for the sake of change
Disabling Aero and instant search, aero peak, aero snap, gets rid of the reason to switch and reconfirms to those who hate change that XP is a supperior OS and ruins the credibility of your IT department as all change is for the sake of change.
I always let my users know the new capabilities and then they nod their head s and some even look forward to change aas they now see a plus side. You need to sell yourself
I still use mechanical drives as SSDs are shaky quality wise and only have 1 million writes. I pound my disks with hundreds of gigs of VMs.
SSD is very expensive for non casual users and the reliability with the limited writes are not there yet. I know I may get modded down by some fanboys here who swear by it, but I see risk for the sake of quicker boot times.
I/O is not much better if at all than a mechanical drive. It is latency with lots of small files which makes SSD 100x faster but to me this just means booting faster and some apps may shave off a few seconds. I save $$$$ with using what already works with my 1 TB drive.
You can get a Lacie server/Network Appliance for $599.
It includes a 5 disk raid and Linux running Samba or if you want $1099 for one with Windows Server Small Business Edition and some SSDs for a few hundred more after that if you need Windows specific stuff and more performance and ram.
Fast 140 megs a second system that can serve as a print server as well. I see big enterprises use them to for small branch offices with 50 people where only a T1 is on the wan. These save network bandwidth too as they cache copies of files of popular shares across the WAN and sync them gradually too!
You do not need a nice $50,000 rack unless you are medium sized. They are very easy to setup and people forget appliances can be teh way to go for many. With $300 a month for a cloud service + $200 for network bandwidth you can meet the ROI within 1 month!
Nice straw man Billy, might want to watch out for matches...WHOOSH! Why are you not driving your car with bike handlebars? Bikes are the #1 vehicle, are YOU afraid of innovation? Because that is exactly how retarded you sound because a SHITTY UI IS A SHITTY UI and just for the record, time it took me to "embrace innovation" with Android? About 3 minutes. OSX? Less than 10, iOS? About 4 minutes...Win 8? THREE FUCKING HOURS LATER AND THE BITCH IS STILL FIGHT ME because "herpa de derp we think a fucking touchpad and a touchscreen are the same thing, they both say touch right? herpa derpa".
I have used everything from DOS to OS/2 to BeOS, how many OSes have YOU used Billy? I have ALWAYS been on the bleeding edge, when your ass was dragging behind on XP? I was running a beta of 2K3 stripped down into a desktop and the SECOND that XP X64 hit beta my ass was on it. I know innovation sir, I'm friends with innovation and Windows 8 is NOT innovation!
OMG perfect! Download apps to keep track of your apps. Apps for getting apps. Apps for watching apps. Apps to launch apps. Apps to search for launching apps that launch other apps to watch other apps for all my apps to simpy get cell phone apps!
Sign me up today. I will take that Atom and my new Cryris 3 app to run inside my VMWare workstation app with emulated OpenGL/Direct X. According to www.tomshardware.com all the x87 fpu benchmarks show it can cream the hell out of AMD piledriver 8 core anyday and represents real world performance according to the fan boys on here and over at that site... with the all so loving Metro UI on a non touchscreen.
Windows Server 2012 is more VM ready and can resolve such issues.
No, I do not work for MS or anything, but it is a major selling point with ADs designed to be in a guest and moved around. I do not care about Metro on the server like I do on the desktop but it is designed to run the DC in a VM.
Infact, MS will not support ADs setup like this. If your employer is doing this then your IT staff should have read Technet! Either move it out or upgrade to 2012 that is properly designed.
It is more expensive than a cloud unless you are really big. Many startups that used to use Amazon's service decided with virtualization it was cheaper to use their own after they needed fiber connections and others to host massive bandwidth for all the boxens on the cloud.
With 1/2 down your speed will be adversely affected. With VSphere is about $7,000 including a CentOS or Windows Server License and Windows Server 2012 with HyperV is the same price. You can host VMs and have data backed up elsewhere for redundancy. Yes this will eat up data and raise costs with your T3, but it will consume less data than clouding everything.
Repeat the cloud does not save you money with all the hidden costs.
Join us and our fear mongering afraid of change group and embrace the Windows 2003 Server, IE 6, and Java applets and be a hero with the cost accountants in your organization and the old silver hair ladies in your organization.
You can be lazy all you want as you simply never have to change!
True Redhat know has YUM which handles.rpms but it does not support SXS or multiple versions of.dlls (aka.so's in Linux land) like in Windows. So apt-get can update something for a new app, but what about the other app that only runs on the old one? Oops
What about apps that have hard coded dependence in/etc scripts (yes scripts and not.RC files like in FreeBSD and Solaris) that break programs when they change. Apt-get upgrade may change these.bash files which break your SSH.
I prefer the Unix way more with.RC with #uncomment to enable this (popular in Solaris and FreeBSD), but it has the problem of no dynamic and multiple versions of libraries and files that are linked when you run a program. Linux was way ahead in 1998 with Debian. But now in 2013 it is way behind. I heard GCC now supports some of this but still.
Drivers do not have a stable ABI so an update to X always breaks my ATI setup which is why I switched back to Windows. The Yums and Apt-gets worked fine with only 100 packages in 130 megs of apps in the old days but it can't handle anything complex with thousands of apps which change all the time today in 2013. As a habit I always do a fresh install on a VM of Linux rather than do a dist upgrade.
Clients demand expert knowledge of forested domains, SCCM 2010, SCCM 2012, intune, upgrading trusts and domains, and it adds up. I rarely see this same requirement for Linux.
Windows is what I am expected to know so that is what I use unless you feel happy to pay my student loans, rent, and my food? Windows 7 handles many gigs of data fine and it does not suck like its earlier relatives. Just got to keep your AV software updated and patched always.'
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OR download Java and the free Android SDK that comes with preconfigured Eclipse.
FYI DISABLE THE JAVA IN YOUR ADD-ONS in IE/FIREFOX WHEN YOU ARE DONE.
Funny you mention this. When I got my first (and last) Android phone, I was honestly expecting a somewhat functional/scriptable Linux environment with Perl, some web server, and a sane package manager. I imagined that I would be able to script behaviour and set up a cron job to make a call or connect to the net......
I did not even consider, that what I was getting was nothing like that. Besides this little surprise I hated the phone, the experience, everything about it.. including the uselessly slow emulator and the whole eclipse-based dev environment.
I am curious as to what you replaced your droid with?
Linux is the kernel. Other stuff is other stuff.
Thanks RMS for that brilliant comment.
I live in the real world where we call Linux Linux. Some of which is not GNU. Infact, I VMWare Workstation, ESXI, perl, Apache, postgresql, is what I see on my Unix VMs. I do not see gnu anywhere at all.
Why? Long term or short term answer? It is like driving an old diesel car. It might do 500.000km or it might be 300.000km before it dies. Maintenance goes up and average price goes down when you get to the higher mileage. But, I would not bet my business on anything over 250.000km. Prepare for replacement The average shareholder does not drive a car that old.
I think someone is taking too much risk with my money when a crucial part of that business may just break down.
Did you read the part about proprietary data formats that can't be moved?
Unlike a piece of machinery like a truck software does not age. It still runs the same is it did 17 years ago. True XP ages each time it is patched as you can't run a modern patched XP SP 3 with +1100 security patches on a machine with 128 megs of ram like the RTM version of XP. But software with no updates do not have this problem.
I believe the answer might be virtualization as this software will now never die as it is ingrained to the business process at hand. Problem is virtualization for the desktop is still immature as MS and VMWare focus on the server. For example can I push a GPO to make XP mode install and start across 4,000 workstations whenever the user clicks the DRM Master for Windows for Workgroups 1996 edition icon? Right now no.
Windows 8 has less options than Windows 7 pro in this regard. MS needs to up the game where a user can click an icon and the mode starts. Not the other way around and have it AD configurable in Windows 9.
MS updates its software all the time so I do not think they know how bad the problem really is? I was told Bank of America has a pre 360 mainframe app that still processes home loans. It runs in an emulator written for the 360 40 years ago which runs in another 370 emulator on a modern 390 system where the punch cards for this 1964 program are all long gone. Without these 3 embedded emulators BOA can't do mortgages!
Citrix may have a solution for some of these IE 6 apps as that runs in a browser plugin with a Windows 2003 server.
True the average shareholder does not drive a car that old, but they expect their people paying them to do just that! Why, the shareholder wants the new car to himself via the cost savings from someone else going without. Greed is greed and people only care about themselves. Argue all you want but these cheapskates and guys iwth clipboards own the companies. Not the CEOs.
Sadly if you really want to give a great ROI then do not invest in upgrading or virtualization and just keep XP longer. This what they have been doing for 10 years and the great recession didn't help either. Remember all the comments in 2009 when Windows 7 was released here on slashdot?
They were all, uh my boss is trying to figure out how not to lay us all off. I do not think they are paying attention nor caring about upgrading their perfecting working computers right now.
In world war I gas killed almost the whole British army in about an hour. Bullets killed 100,000 in 2 years while 1400 were killed in an hour including 300 children. If used continuiosly a 100,000 could happen easily within a few hours. Same with nuclear. I could argue more died from bullets than nuclear bombs therefore who cares about nuclear war. Doesnt mean its not more dangerous and deadly.
The idea here is to avoid repeating history as chemical weapons will be the norm as nothing will ever happen if you use them right? The death toll would be tens of millions instead if used from the start
I find it very interesting to read so many people here defending XP in light of its security weaknesses. We're talking about an OS that has a horrible security model out of the box and encourages applications to be designed to run with full admin privileges. If you are a developer stuck on XP and you haven't updated your software to work properly with the newer security model introduced in Vista, well shame on you. You've had way more than enough time... 7 years to be exact.
XP is the "odd one out" now, with regards to how you design a good, secure Windows application. There are 3 newer versions of Windows and the 4th is coming next week, all with a similar, much more robust security model. XP is now the bastard child, different from the rest. Sickly.
And don't forget the 64-bit question. While 32-bit XP was very widely used and adopted, the 64-bit "edition" was an instant bastard child, born out of the unholy union of XP and Server 2003 64-bit. Very few applications support 64-bit XP and with good reason. While it was the first 64-bit Windows on the desktop, its compatibility with existing and even new applications was never a strong point. It was a niche product and never gained widespread support. If you need 64-bit support, XP doesn't cut it. We work with very large datasets, and 64-bit is basically a requirement for much of what we do.
We are about to release the last versions of our software that support XP and I can't wait for the day we drop support completely. It's an additional testing burden when we already need to test all newer versions. Plus, it behaves differently than the rest. Continuing to support XP today drives up costs and limits adoption of newer and better technologies. It had a good run, but now it's time to let it die. There are newer and better Windows versions.
Part of the reason is habit and once you never do something in a very long long time your brain thinks it is wrong to do it because that means change.
In the case of upgrading after being told for 12 years to never ever update that is bad IT then feels it is unprofessional to upgrade. Why? It is something you never do. That is why etc! ... on a more practical note the reason XP is used is many places the accountants and MBAs have taken over the IT departments and this thing called "The Great Recession" changed the mindset of these beancounters.
Many IT loved Windows 7 back in 2009!. 90% of these corps invested in labs to test Windows 7 images but guess what happened that year in 2009? Stock market whent down 14,000 to 5,000! Corporations had massive layoffs totaling over 10 million.
When you need to make a choice to keep the lights on and feeding employees in these dark years the case of upgrading perfectly working computers goes out the Windows. Now mix in IT workers who have been told change is bad for 12 years and you have a recipe of resistance where the can is kicked. MBA folks get their raises by cutting costs and firing people and will lose their bonus next year if IT invests in technology that they do not really need (in their opinion).
IT needs to sell themselves better as these MBA guys think XP is just as secure. They are not computer geeks. They are money geeks. They do not understand these issues and in their eyes systems magically still work with what they have so why change?
If they can be told another code red can take the company down you can BET YOUR ASS THEY WILL UPGRADE infact they are just starting to do that now. The real quesiton in 2020 is what will compell them to leave Windows 7? I can't think of anything now besides HTML 6 and CSS 4 support from a non sucky version of IE (in that time's standard.) The PC is mature and turning into the mainframe now they gets updated every few decades because they work.
Our biggest struggle has actually been with outdated software. 16bit software just won't run on Win8 (64bit - can be enabled on 32bit, but that's just another wall waiting to be hit), and while our admin would be comfortable with installing a VM to keep these going, we're just biting the bullet and converting legacy files to formats used by more modern software, finding alternatives for those applications that we do still actively use, and keeping two machines around for everything else; one running with a VNC, and the other in storage 'just in case'.
Run VirtualBox on a machine and setup the appropriate guest OS to run your software. Enable remote display in VirtualBox for your newly created guest OS. Now anyone can connect using RDP or VPN - whichever you decide to host. I recommend RDP because the Windows clients will already have client software installed.
This is easier than setting up VM software on every computer. It also removes any restrictions governing which computer you can use to host the VM. And finally, it makes creating backups of your guest OS / application much easier as you just backup the VM image. The ability to take snapshots of the guest OS is also very useful.
Of course, other VM servers would also work. My experience is with VirtualBox and, despite being free, works suprisingly well in this sort of situation.
Can I deploy it to 10,000 workstations and manage it via group policy with Active Directory?
How will you tell 10,000 users to look for some weird icon they never hard of called virtual cereal boxen thingie? Or will they just open up IE 10 and inundate the 3 Indian help desk team asking them to fix DRM Windows 3.11 1996 edition CRM on their internets? Or will they not see hte icon for it on their shiny new 4 year old Windows 7 desktops and again call help desk whining they can't get any work done FIX IT NOW!
Last I saw even Windows 7 Pro with XP mode required a plugin not managed by active directory to be installed. gray hair users do not understand this. All they know is they have work to do and get angry and irritated when something changes and gets in the way. Even generation Y people do not know or care what virtualization is either if they do not work in IT.
... One of our customers has over 50k desktops, a business in the hospitality industry ... going straight to Windows 8 next year, in both corp offices and individual locations around the globe.
Contrary to what you think, the world doesn't revolve around you or your narrow view of the world.
Jumping to 7 rather than 8 just shows you're afraid of change. When 99% of your employees spend all day in a 1 or 2 apps that are full screen, and you treat a machine like a utility rather than your lover, the change doesn't matter.
As a user, I find the start screen to be utterly jarring, but I switch between apps a lot. Most people don't.
When will ignorant slash dotters realize their fantasy/love affair with their PC is something most of the rest of the world laughs at?
Damn right we are afraid of change!
Change where the phone rings every 2 seconds saying WHERE IS THE START MENU FIX IT NOW and calls going up 10,000% and people slaming the door begging for their old pentium IVs back so they can get some work done etc.
Windows 8 is bad. Vista only 2 fortune 500 companies that I know of migrated which are Chevron and GM. Everyone else stuck with XP. Does that mean the 498 fear change? Yes and no. Most are embracing Windows 7 with 1/4 resisting and whining my guess here.
So Vista was not because of change but because or problems. Same with Windows 8. Windows 7 most corps put plans together and ran labs but remember the Great Recession of 2009 - current? Windows 7 came out in the worst economic downturn since the 1930s!
Upgrading computers when your share price is down 80% and you are wondering how many employees you need to lay off is frankly retarded. Many XP users stayed until 2011 when economic conditions improved and kept what they had instead to survive.
Or the data is stored and it is a must have now.
I knew a guy who had a TRS 80 until the 21 st century. His data was on it and without it he would have to close down his business. He gets parts on craigslist and yard sales to keep his business going.
This software will never ever die. If your customers are on that one proprietary app and it is gone then you lose all your customers. Also according to the cost accountants there is no return in shareholder value by upgrading?
Drp master ERP 1996 edition for Windows 3.11 with IE 4 backend works just fine for the last 15 years. So why fix something that lowers the share price that works fine with a long track record?
Windows XP is dangerous even patched. So many businesses use IE 6 unpatched to handle social security cards, credit card numbers, and other things.
It was designed in an era when MSN and AOL was big and the web was this little thing called minspring and geocities.com pages. All you needed was a password and you were fine right?
No such thing as a buffer overflow, exception handaling bugs, sandboxing? Whats that? etc.
Did you know for Chrome and Firefox to function in XP sandboxing is actually disabled! The kernel is 12 years old and can not support it. You can run something by simply doing a peak and poke into a ram address in XP in limited user mode! When that .dll is run your malware is run with it. You do not have to click anything to get infected. Just use flash which has a memory corruption bug and your machine is instantly owned in a web page.
Windows 7 at least scrambles ram addresses via ASLR. Instead of handing out ram addresses hard coded into .dlls it uses virtual addresses which are 2 TB in length. Windows 8 goes a step further and prevents spraying all the virtual ram addresses until the right address is actually rewritten.
IS MS being greedy here?
MS has a whole security team with hundreds of people working with law enforcement agencies complete with a whole freaking command center! That costs $$$$ to maintain. Why? So people in 2001 who paid $120 can fund it year after year? Cars are not free either and maintenance in software is covered by the manufacturer in the case of XP so you never see it.
MS is breaking even at this point with XP unless of course you are fine with no patches at all. Oh and FYI XP was fine pre SP 2. I ran it on day one in 2001 and I had no issues at all and was still a humongous upgrade from Windows 98.
I see both sides to this.
I laugh at XP holdouts when I ask them what is just soo horrible about Windows 7. They talk about settings. Never about the platform and how they are familiar with the old explorer, fonts, colors, things were in the right spot etc. They never heard of Aero peak, Aero snap, instant search, or any of the improvements in the past 5 years.
Most slashdotters still do not know you can hit the windows key and type whatever you want. I never use the start button anymore after Vista.
But, Windows 8 really does have very servere problems. There are no stacking apps in a task bar, no more than 1 tile on the screen, inferior search to Windows 7, and here is a normal user who has written 30 days of MacOSX, Linux, and Vista, now trying his best at Windows 8.
Notice how no pictures even show in the pictures app? No clear way to go back to the start screen, the touchpad does weird things and pretends it is a cell phone screen, it is thrown together with no design so customers can buy Windows phones.
When XP is officially out of support, there will be oodles of exploits that never get patched. I'm going to love to see the carnage and fallout from that.
The users do not care. I am talking mechanic shops, restaurants, and other small businesses who make up the majority of business users not the big boys with custom apps contrary to popular belief.
Many stil use SCO Unix for the POS systems to print customer receiepts for crying out loud in green screen glory. You all seen them and know what I am talking about?
Hospitals will find it cheaper to pay MS for patches at $250,000 up as that is the cost to replace a single MRI. To have the FDA recertify all that infrastructure is too expensive. They will keep using IE 6 and XP until after 2020 and never will change and just go buy parts from craigslist. You can thank Obamacare for that which is cash stripping hospitals left and right.
Schools still use IE 6 and Windows 2000 and have no plans to upgrade. They work just fine and they have cards with some software called freeze which with the hardware can undo any changes that any malware can provide. It makes them undestructable and saves money in leui of non upgrading.
I think XP is the start of the mainframe like platforms that exist for decades upon decades. The desktop innovation is gone and it is about mobile platforms now. XP = IBM 360 while Windows 7 = 380 of the the 80s that never changes.
So you disabled instant search, aero snap, and aero peak?
Then why leave XP? Without these win 7 is XP but with 300% more bloat?!
If you scratch under the skin and go on the network it is still there underneath the surface. POS systems, clients in a particular group who need an IE 6 app, equipment, branch offices far from headquarters etc.
90% still have XP used somewhere and 40% still haven't started migration yet from what I have seen. FYI I specialize in XP to Windows 7 migrations in consulting.
Hospitals and schools and small to medium sized businesses are the ones not upgrading. Even without IE 6 many smaller businesses doo not give a shit as they like the fact employees cant use facebook and view IT as an expense. Small to medium sized businesses make up the majority of jobs and have no IT departments but do have accountants who always advise no to IT.
XP is not going anywhere for years to come with these users. It is amazing how technology moved forward until 2002 or so and just stopped and set for this market. No gradual slowness just stopped from tje 2002 recession. These users now realized the cost saving and familiarity and like it. Why change for the sake of change
B.S.
Just yesterday Office 2010 SP2 got installed on my PC.
Office 2014, and VS 2014 are almost done.
Disabling Aero and instant search, aero peak, aero snap, gets rid of the reason to switch and reconfirms to those who hate change that XP is a supperior OS and ruins the credibility of your IT department as all change is for the sake of change.
I always let my users know the new capabilities and then they nod their head s and some even look forward to change aas they now see a plus side. You need to sell yourself
I still use mechanical drives as SSDs are shaky quality wise and only have 1 million writes. I pound my disks with hundreds of gigs of VMs.
SSD is very expensive for non casual users and the reliability with the limited writes are not there yet. I know I may get modded down by some fanboys here who swear by it, but I see risk for the sake of quicker boot times.
I/O is not much better if at all than a mechanical drive. It is latency with lots of small files which makes SSD 100x faster but to me this just means booting faster and some apps may shave off a few seconds. I save $$$$ with using what already works with my 1 TB drive.
You can get a Lacie server/Network Appliance for $599.
It includes a 5 disk raid and Linux running Samba or if you want $1099 for one with Windows Server Small Business Edition and some SSDs for a few hundred more after that if you need Windows specific stuff and more performance and ram.
Fast 140 megs a second system that can serve as a print server as well. I see big enterprises use them to for small branch offices with 50 people where only a T1 is on the wan. These save network bandwidth too as they cache copies of files of popular shares across the WAN and sync them gradually too!
You do not need a nice $50,000 rack unless you are medium sized. They are very easy to setup and people forget appliances can be teh way to go for many. With $300 a month for a cloud service + $200 for network bandwidth you can meet the ROI within 1 month!
Nice straw man Billy, might want to watch out for matches...WHOOSH! Why are you not driving your car with bike handlebars? Bikes are the #1 vehicle, are YOU afraid of innovation? Because that is exactly how retarded you sound because a SHITTY UI IS A SHITTY UI and just for the record, time it took me to "embrace innovation" with Android? About 3 minutes. OSX? Less than 10, iOS? About 4 minutes...Win 8? THREE FUCKING HOURS LATER AND THE BITCH IS STILL FIGHT ME because "herpa de derp we think a fucking touchpad and a touchscreen are the same thing, they both say touch right? herpa derpa".
I have used everything from DOS to OS/2 to BeOS, how many OSes have YOU used Billy? I have ALWAYS been on the bleeding edge, when your ass was dragging behind on XP? I was running a beta of 2K3 stripped down into a desktop and the SECOND that XP X64 hit beta my ass was on it. I know innovation sir, I'm friends with innovation and Windows 8 is NOT innovation!
But don't take MY word for it, how about some citations? here is a good one and this shows how they cocked up even the shutdown process and reviewers agree with me its THAT bad and the OEMs also know its a turkey., Face it win 8 is a joke and you can say having Ballmer take a steaming dump on your PC is "innovative" all you want Billy, its still a big pile of feces lying there.
OMG perfect! Download apps to keep track of your apps. Apps for getting apps. Apps for watching apps. Apps to launch apps. Apps to search for launching apps that launch other apps to watch other apps for all my apps to simpy get cell phone apps!
Sign me up today. I will take that Atom and my new Cryris 3 app to run inside my VMWare workstation app with emulated OpenGL/Direct X. According to www.tomshardware.com all the x87 fpu benchmarks show it can cream the hell out of AMD piledriver 8 core anyday and represents real world performance according to the fan boys on here and over at that site ... with the all so loving Metro UI on a non touchscreen.
Windows Server 2012 is more VM ready and can resolve such issues.
No, I do not work for MS or anything, but it is a major selling point with ADs designed to be in a guest and moved around. I do not care about Metro on the server like I do on the desktop but it is designed to run the DC in a VM.
Infact, MS will not support ADs setup like this. If your employer is doing this then your IT staff should have read Technet! Either move it out or upgrade to 2012 that is properly designed.
It is more expensive than a cloud unless you are really big. Many startups that used to use Amazon's service decided with virtualization it was cheaper to use their own after they needed fiber connections and others to host massive bandwidth for all the boxens on the cloud.
With 1/2 down your speed will be adversely affected. With VSphere is about $7,000 including a CentOS or Windows Server License and Windows Server 2012 with HyperV is the same price. You can host VMs and have data backed up elsewhere for redundancy. Yes this will eat up data and raise costs with your T3, but it will consume less data than clouding everything.
Repeat the cloud does not save you money with all the hidden costs.
Funny IE 6 is not on the list?
Join us and our fear mongering afraid of change group and embrace the Windows 2003 Server, IE 6, and Java applets and be a hero with the cost accountants in your organization and the old silver hair ladies in your organization.
You can be lazy all you want as you simply never have to change!
Shit I left a client whose time was almost 2 weeks for a response. After all IT is a cost center according to the bean counters so it doesn't matter.
Linux still has it.
True Redhat know has YUM which handles .rpms but it does not support SXS or multiple versions of .dlls (aka .so's in Linux land) like in Windows. So apt-get can update something for a new app, but what about the other app that only runs on the old one? Oops
What about apps that have hard coded dependence in /etc scripts (yes scripts and not .RC files like in FreeBSD and Solaris) that break programs when they change. Apt-get upgrade may change these .bash files which break your SSH.
I prefer the Unix way more with .RC with #uncomment to enable this (popular in Solaris and FreeBSD), but it has the problem of no dynamic and multiple versions of libraries and files that are linked when you run a program. Linux was way ahead in 1998 with Debian. But now in 2013 it is way behind. I heard GCC now supports some of this but still.
Drivers do not have a stable ABI so an update to X always breaks my ATI setup which is why I switched back to Windows. The Yums and Apt-gets worked fine with only 100 packages in 130 megs of apps in the old days but it can't handle anything complex with thousands of apps which change all the time today in 2013. As a habit I always do a fresh install on a VM of Linux rather than do a dist upgrade.
Keeping employed my friend.
Clients demand expert knowledge of forested domains, SCCM 2010, SCCM 2012, intune, upgrading trusts and domains, and it adds up. I rarely see this same requirement for Linux.
Windows is what I am expected to know so that is what I use unless you feel happy to pay my student loans, rent, and my food? Windows 7 handles many gigs of data fine and it does not suck like its earlier relatives. Just got to keep your AV software updated and patched always.'
If you do not then you are not a professional.