from Hacker News

The US Navy's warfare systems command is paying to stay on Windows XP

by deepuj on 6/24/15, 7:11 AM with 58 comments

• by kriro on 6/24/15, 8:20 AM

  Guess the old "total cost of ownership" anti-Linux FUD slides from Microsoft from back in the day need an update. It's been a while since I read that stuff but I doubt they included "expensive payed for security fixes after product EOL" on their side.

  Pretty bizarre situation though. Why did the Navy not migrate. It's not like the EOL of WinXP was the Spanish Inquisition.

• by saiya-jin on 6/24/15, 8:49 AM

  I can confirm there are plenty of businesses running various systems on XP. It can get even worse, at work we STILL use XP 32 bit as primary workstations (at least Linux on all servers). I am a Java developer, so routinely I have over 3.5 GB of memory taken, on system that can access cca 3.2 GB max. And we're talking about virtualized remote machines, no real desktops (yes, it's crap). At least at the end of the year, Win7 64b coming.

  Main reason might not be XP as much as that plague called IE 6. Couple of important intranet apps run only on this. Migration underway, but this isn't apparently such a priority for our management.

  What backwardish 3rd world company I work for you ask? Well, one not really tiny private bank in Switzerland...

• by idlewords on 6/24/15, 8:02 AM

  This sounds like a great use of taxpayer money. $30M is chump change compared to the upgrade cost, and as I've grown older I've developed a reverence for working code and working systems.

• by userbinator on 6/24/15, 12:04 PM

  I wonder if they're still using pure DOS for some things, or if they're running DOS applications on XP:

  https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:US_Navy_110129-N-7676W-15...

  (Notice the floppy disks. They might actually be safer than USB drives, since the latter introduces considerably more attack area, whereas a floppy is an extremely dumb storage device.)

  In any case, from a risk-management perspective, I believe that software tends to get more stable over time if the only things being done are bug fixes; it's the radical rewrites and adding features that comes with new versions that bring more bugs. If it works, why "rock the boat" with new unknowns - there is more to lose than gain in this situation. I wouldn't be surprised if almost all of the important bugs in XP have already been found and fixed, and the limitations identified. It's like an asymptotic curve.

• by peterwaller on 6/24/15, 8:27 AM

  Does anyone know what they get for $9M/year? That sounds awfully cheap. A few engineers to port and install security patches? I guess there must be a few businesses out there paying, so what is the total money invested in maintaining Windows XP?

  I guess that one problem with keeping Windows XP alive is that with fewer people using it over time, the chances of discovering flaws which need patching goes down. But maybe these guys don't care about that because all their stuff is offline with epoxied IO ports, yes? /s

• by pjc50 on 6/24/15, 8:44 AM

  We laughed at the warship disabled due to NT issues. That was seventeen years ago. http://archive.wired.com/science/discoveries/news/1998/07/13...

  The warship has been decomissioned, but clearly Windows is more durable. They also clearly managed at least one upgrade in the past, from NT to XP. Maybe they're having trouble with UAC.

• by dogma1138 on 6/24/15, 1:24 PM

  MSFT still sells security updates for Windows 2000, It would not surprise me if you'll peal enough layers in a large organization to find NT5/4 machines still there which require the sacrifice of 3 goats and a virgin every full moon to continue running which might still get updates from MSFT since that organization pays for the extended support.

  The only thing that surprising in these stories is that MSFT is actually capable of providing support for products for such a long time, their ability to maintain information and transfer it to new employees must be unparalleled. The amount of documentation alone is probably enormous 12 years of 10000's of bugs for each specific version of each binary that's insane, especially considering that most companies out there will have issues supporting binaries which are 2 years old since they have no clue what exactly was going on with them back then.

• by caf on 6/24/15, 9:21 AM

  Spare a thought for the poor bastards Microsoft assigns this to - there can't be a whole lot of job satisfaction in porting bugfixes to a fifteen-year-old EOL'd OS for one customer.

• by elahd on 6/24/15, 4:22 PM

  This isn't too surprising. Our nuclear ICBMs are managed by systems old enough to use 8" floppies.

  http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2014/04/60-min....

• by jqm on 6/24/15, 12:19 PM

  I saw this job posted recently...

  http://www.lovelacehealthsystemjobs.com/?/work/job-post/desk...

  Is it even possible to buy Windows Server 2000 support anymore?

• by fnordfnordfnord on 6/24/15, 11:53 AM

  I'd guess/hope that this is mainly because of a bunch of embedded custom hardware (like PC-104 based systems) buried in different nooks and crannies of ships and weapons, as opposed to crufty VB and IE6 dependent office productivity stuff.

• by ck2 on 6/24/15, 8:32 AM

  Microsoft is supporting XP until April 2019 for WEPOS anyway.

  I'm hoping by then I can finally find a firewall for W7 that works remotely as well as the ones for XP.

• by kraig911 on 6/24/15, 11:16 AM

  Maybe with Microsoft's temperament towards open source as of late - they could open source Windows XP! Then the navy would surely upgrade...

• by dang on 6/24/15, 7:14 AM

  URL changed from http://www.popularmechanics.com/military/a16153/navy-paying-..., which points to this. HN prefers original sources.