News Windows XP given its twelve-month notice

"The NHS" isn't one single organisation so different Trusts will run different software configurations.

It'd be impossible to run an organisation that big with a single ICT structure as needs vary depending on the area the trust serves (and the budget they have)

The cards aren't silly, they are a security procedure. Three factor authentication (username/password/certificate) is pretty normal when identifiable personal data is concerned.

I've worked in numerous public sector organisations where a smart card is needed for logon. Often the same card is used for building access control and ID so you need to carry it anyway to get around the building so it's not something extra, it's part of your normal day.

 

...you've been in a hospital before?
The german health insurance card isn't an ID, it doesn't identify you, there's not necessarily a picture on it, it sure doesn't require a password or pin to access.
It's a convenience, as Germany has ~250 public health insurers (that's excluding the private ones) so it contains the name of your insurance, and your insurance number, probably your name, c'est tout.

Heck i've been in a hospital where the doctors asked for someone else's card, as it is too much of a hassle dealing with a foreign european health insurance.

 

XP has been the best win os so far, XP with a win7 skin is the best of both worlds.

All that came after XP were bloated, resource hungry pos.

All M$ had to do was update XP for more powerful hardware platforms and provide some nice skins ..if it's not broke don't fix it, but then M$ would not make as much money re-selling the same OS over and over as something new, when really its just another vista service pack your buying.

 

I don't know, aside from the bloat and (IMO) mess of a Control Panel, Windows 7 is better than XP in just about every way imaginable. XP technically was broken - it was horribly vulnerable and it was designed for an age of single-threaded 32-bit computing. XP and the software it came with *cough*IE*cough* were single handedly holding back the entire PC industry due to it's limitations of modern hardware. When you compare everything that 7 can do that XP can't, you'll realize that it just simply isn't possible or realistic for MS keep up with XP. Hell, people got pissed off when SP3 came out because it made some PIII systems run slower even though it offered a lot of necessary fixes. On the kernel level, XP is a major maintenance burden. This is probably why Apple dropped support for things like Rosetta in OSX 10.7.

Linux too has been dealing with the burdens of maintaining old hardware for a while now. Just recently it stopped supporting i386, and it has been dropping support for a lot of other old hardware that would be asinine to use today. XP was a very nice OS for it's time, and it's still good on some simple modern systems such that use Semprons or Atoms, but it needs to go. All I want is for MS to clean up their damn code. There is no excuse for how bloated 64 bit Windows 7/8 are.

 

I did like xp, but can you imagine a touch pc or htpc running it? What we use computers for has changed, and for the better imho. There comes a timw when the old way of doing things no longer makes sense

 

To say XP is broken is a bit of an exaggeration & everything you mention could have been fixed with a simple update. IE is as much a part of XP as Firefox. iow not at all. If its broken like you say and has all these problems with hardware compatibility ..then why does it still run faster than later versions of win?

M$ routinely stop updating their OS properly because they basically want to sell you the same thing over and over again.

Planned obsolescence or built-in obsolescence in industrial design is a policy of planning or designing a product with a limited useful life, so it will become obsolete, that is, unfashionable or no longer functional after a certain period of time. Planned obsolescence has potential benefits for a producer because to obtain continuing use of the product the consumer is under pressure to purchase again,.......

 

Last time I checked, I'm pretty sure that this is how businesses work.

Otherwise we'd all still be driving around in heavily patched up Model Ts and cooking our food in giant $50,000 Raytheon microwaves

After all they'd still get us from A to B and heat our food with the correct maintenance

 

Really there are working model T's still driving around in your world getting people from a to b?

I think comparing XP to the model T ford is basically nonsense. ..all it shows is that you have swallowed the marketing & did not spit.

Yes, your right, M$ would release a new OS every month/week if consumers accept it ...but I think my point went over your head.

 

Oooh you're a tough customer ain't ya?

XP still works fine in most scenarios, but it's an old product that has been superseded three times now. Of course Microsoft will be ending support for it, why on earth would they continue to spend time and resources supporting such an old product?

To give you a slightly less flippant analogy, manufacturers offer warranty on their products because you as a customer expect the products to work correctly. However, very few companies will cover items for more than 5 years, because in the mean time they have revised/updated/replaced the design with a newer (and theoretically superior) product. Microsoft continuing to patch old operating systems is essentially their warranty service. If a fault is found, they fix it, and the cost is covered by the money you spent up front all those years ago.

But the cycle has to be finite - it would simply make no sense at all not to retire products after a given period. Unlike you I am not clearly biased (referring to the company as M$, really? In 2013? ), I don't care any more for Microsoft than any other supplier of goods or services - I'm just being realistic without a giant and uncomfortable looking chip on my shoulder.

 

I said XP was technically broken, not actually. But, it isn't a matter of updates to make XP keep up, because it isn't that simple. It is certainly possible but an OS is designed to help you operate your hardware, and the kernel will become sloppy and struggle when it has to worry about hardware that would seem eons apart in human years. So, for example, suppose XP got the patches to support all instructions of modern processors, better multithreading support, DX11, and so on. There would be thousands of computers running XP that would not be able to use ANY of those features due to hardware limitations. So, people would buy a new game that claims to be XP SP4 compatible and find that it either doesn't work, is unusably slow (or unstable), or has visual glitches everywhere. The blame for such problems would would be pointed at the game devs, the MS devs, the hardware devs, or the OEM - none of which are at fault. If MS were to continue supporting XP, they'd have to make sure that all hardware from 2001 to 2013 are functional with every update, and that is not cost or time effective. Making a new OS helps devs focus on the hardware of that OS's generation. It may result in breaking compatibility, but sometimes that's a necessity in order for technology to move forward - people need to accept the fact that if you want to be apart of the computer world, staying in your comfort zone will mean you're going to be left behind.

Anyways, Windows XP performs better than future versions of Windows on hardware that was designed for XP. I would bet that a Pentium D or an Athlon 64 would perform better on XP than Windows 7 or 8. I would also bet that an nvidia 7900 would perform better on XP. But, I would bet that an i7 and an FX-8350 in Win7 would EASILY outperform XP.


EDIT:
I would like to point out that I think it'd be nice if there was basically an XP2 - something very barebone and lightweight like XP but uses a new kernel that only supports hardware from 2007 and newer.

 

Lightweight? XP? Does no one here remember the bashing XP got on launch for being bloated nonsense? Win2K was the last attempt MS made at a proper unintrusive lightweight OS.

 

I was once one of those people who felt XP was pretty bloated at the time of it's release (and that was before I used linux), and today I'd say it's still pretty heavy on disk usage considering how little it can do. But, with SP3 it's still less than 3GB (not including paging files, hibernation files, or system restore). Considering how cheap and massive HDD storage is these days, such a size isn't really a big deal. That being said, on a mechanical HDD, the size of Windows 7/8 64 bit is... tolerable, but I personally find it unacceptably large for an SSD and I see no excuse for it to be as huge as it is.

I haven't used Visual Studio very much but from what I've seen, it adds a lot of unnecessary code. (in a similar way with Dreamweaver and HTML). That code might ensure accuracy (which in a consumer point of view is good) but it results in bloated code, which wastes system resources and takes longer to load. Bloated code also means that when a problem needs to be fixed, it's harder to locate the issue. I'm perfectly ok with a piece of software being released that is bloated due to precautionary reasons, but only if the devs intend to optimize and clean up the code in the end. This is something MS devs don't do (in fact they seem to cause the opposite) and this is one of the reasons why I'm a fan of KDE in linux. KDE started out as a fat glitchy mess. It was packed full of cool features, but it was otherwise coded horribly. But, once it reached version 4.5, the devs didn't have much else to add, so they just started cleaning it up. Every release of it for the past couple years seems to drop by at least 10MB with dozens, even hundreds of bug fixes. It's at version 4.10 today.

 

Thx

Nope, my HTPC ran 98SE for years, was way too slow for XP. (back in 2000)
Or wasn't that what you meant?

 

Nope, just one Trust I'm afraid, which is pioneering Windows To Go. The rest is still on XP and IE6 and Office 2003/2007. What can I say? Lazy IT.

We also have card readers for staff ID cards, but many people still use passwords which they are forced to change every few months and cannot reuse for years. That's NHS IT also: forces you to use passwords which are hard to remember for humans but easy to crack by machines.

 

In a lot of cases, it's (incompatible) legacy applications and budget that are the factor in stopping/delaying migrations.

As soon as you introduce personal data into an application the costs for migration sky rocket as the data retention legalities come into play. No doubt the NHS has a fair amount of legacy systems like any other public sector employer.

I'm in the middle of such a migration project at work and it's been 18 months in planning and testing alone, rollout to the users is the quick bit at only 5 months as we are only based in a single county so travel isn't too bad.

I'm assuming that an NHS trust is going to be larger than we are and just the total man-hour costs of migrating/upgrading thousands of computers (whilst ensuring continuity of service) will easily be into the millions of pounds, and that's excluding any desktop hardware or servers that need to be upgraded.

Getting financial backing for a migration project is hard without MS putting a date on end of support, as any business is going to need a very solid reason to get the budget to switch away from a system that already works and is supported.

By the end of the project I'm involved in it will have been over two years in total, no doubt such migrations are under way behind the scenes in many ICT departments already, without any non ICT staff even knowing

 

Actually that's IT in general, forcing people to use and change long passwords they can't remember anyway so they securely post-it them to their monitor