Pretty bizarre situation though. Why did the Navy not migrate. It's not like the EOL of WinXP was the Spanish Inquisition.
At work we have an 300,000 USD spectrum anlyzer driven by Win2k.
So the company selling the spectrum analyzer would have to publish quite a lot of their internal documentation regarding hardware registers for the data acquisition boards, and they'll be reluctant to do this: Much of a modern measurement equipment's functionality is inside the data processing, and by documenting the interfaces it would make it possible/easier to reverse-engineer or extent (without paying for options) the functionality.
Why would the navy pay for support if the computers on xp were airgapped? The only reasonable conclusion is that these computers are on the network accessible from outside.
"Why certainly, sir! We can provide that for only $EQUIPMENT_COST * 10. Do you prefer floppies or a CDROM?"
I wish I was joking.
As others have pointed out, paying for support is likely much cheaper and less disruptive than developing, re-testing and re-verifying new versions of their systems. "If it ain't broke, don't fix it." I'd imagine when they do eventually migrate they'll try to stay on the new systems for as long as possible, as well.
I am (still) no expert, and Java developer on top, so working with these in vim/ultraedit was a bit nightmarish compared to what even basic Eclipse can offer you for debugging in Java. But the worst issues were bash comamnds that compared to AIX had a different syntax, and they for example ignored some parameters, or some params had different meaning... Bear in mind I was not in position to pick up which version of bash, perl etc gets installed where.
I believe the phrase "if it isn't broken, does fix it" is at play here.
A lot of drivers were developed back in the '90s and just tweaked for compatibility when absolutely necessary. Long-term compatibility is also why that world tends to favour Microsoft, that's one thing Redmond really cares about.
Then why is the Navy on XP?
>other hipster stuff
I've heard security called many things, but I think this is the first time I've heard of it referred to as 'hipster stuff'.
Because it's likely that a lot of their equipment was actually developed for Win95/98/2000 or even DOS.
> I've heard security called many things, but I think this is the first time I've heard of it referred to as 'hipster stuff'.
It was tongue-in-cheek, but what I meant is that most people don't upgrade their OS for fun (or for security) -- they do it only when forced by external pressure. Dunno about you, but I'd rather have nuclear submarines running on well-known and (literally) battle-tested software, screw smooth animations and glassy windows.
But perhaps i'm missing your point about RH?
a) throw away a $300,000 piece of equipment for lack of drivers, assuming the company producing it has disappeared without all trace
or
b) spending less than $300,000 on employee time to make it work again
then to me case b sounds preferable, even in efficiency-first organisations. The military, i don't know. All i'm saying is that b wouldn't even be feasible without stuff being Libre, so diatribe or not, it actually would benefit public, private and commercial users' interests.
Anyway, probably i'm too optimistic about things.
I had a customer who this day has a distributed system running Windows NT4 on Alpha for s critical business system. It was cheaper to setup a dedicated network then to deal with the application. IIRC, they now have a 5 year project to replace it that is just starting.
> Why did the Navy not migrate