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El Reg reports UK.gov confirms it's binned extended Windows XP support
The [UK government] signed up for Microsoft's OS [...] support service--aka a Custom Support Agreement--last year, but a recent meeting of government Technology Leaders decided enough is enough. A post on the Government Technology Blog says the Leaders "took a collective decision to not extend the support arrangement for 2015".
A support agreement that ended in April was therefore not renewed.
[...] An [undisclosed] number of agencies are still running XP, at least on some machines, leading the government digital service to suggest "We expect most remaining government devices using Windows XP will be able to mitigate any risks, using the CESG guidance."
[...] As we've reported, agencies including the Metropolitan Police, the [National Health Service], and [Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs] are still to finish XP migration projects.
Related: Microsoft Ends Support for Windows XP
[Editor's Comment: Original Submission]
(Score: 5, Insightful) by K_benzoate on Wednesday May 27 2015, @11:49PM
It's impressive, in a way, and in many others deeply disheartening.
Many people would happily go on using Windows XP for another 15 years if they could. Even more impressive (to me, at least) many of the machines would probably go on running for that long too. I still find people using dust choked Dell Optiplexs, their Pentium 4 chips smoldering like a nuclear reactor, still running the original install of XP with which they shipped.
The upgrade treadmill is an artificial process foisted on us by the exigencies of capitalism. It's not an inevitability. It's not a law of nature. Code, once written, never goes bad or stops working. And code that's been hammered on and fixed up for nearly two decades is probably better than something of equal complexity that just got done being written.
If these governments had used Linux, their databases could still happily be running in a hundred years essentially unchanged--maybe virtualized completely at that point. I'm actually fairly confident that embedded Linux will be around in 100 years. Why? Because it can. There's no one with the authority to pull the plug on it. It's well understood, and the problems it solves aren't likely to change fundamentally or go away. I liken it to biology. There's DNA in you that's identical to the DNA in a fern, or a starfish. It does things at the cellular level which all life has to do. It's reliable, infinitely reusable, robust, and most of the bugs have been squashed over the these billions of years it's been running.
The real crime here is that Her Majesty's Government hasn't decided that enough is enough with this proprietary crap. Why shackle yourself to *another* codebase that's going to be artificially forced into senescence in 10 years? Why go through all of this again when MS EOL's Windows 7/8? At least when it's the US government doing this there's an aspect of nationalism, Microsoft being a US based company. The millions or billions that are "wasted" at least stay inside our own economy. But Britain is throwing money at a foreign company, albeit a close ally.
I suppose the potlatch is just always going to be part of human society in one form or another.
Climate change is real and primarily caused by human activity.
(Score: 2) by PizzaRollPlinkett on Thursday May 28 2015, @03:01PM
Yeah, back then disk drives were made a lot better. You won't be seeing today's Win7 machines in a few years with their original installs of Win7, because the drives will have died.
(E-mail me if you want a pizza roll!)