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Comment by toyg | Hacker News Reader

XP was almighty popular for any sort of scientific instrumentation, in no small part because of its good compatibility with Windows 9x (!). Manufacturers of advanced equipment tend to worry about small things like Proper Science rather than OS versions and other hipster stuff, and they're often small companies, so they historically tend to go Minimum Effort Required when it comes to interfacing with computers. They're also very worried about performance, so they have to go low-level, increasing the likelihood of incompatibilities with the latest and greatest and reducing maintainability in general.

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.

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Libre software and the associated freedoms aren't (or shouldn't be, at least!) "hipster stuff"! They are also in no way in conflict with Proper Science. One might almost argue that with regards to reproducibility of results, Proper Science demands a certain amount of Freedom.

If you still have scientific equipment running Red Hat 6.2, you're not a lot better off.

If it's Libre (which i suspect RH isn't — but i am no expert) then all the source code should be available, and presumably you could hack the drivers (or whatever) to work with whatever new-and-improved hardware/software you want to run. That's kind of the point of Libre.

But perhaps i'm missing your point about RH?

read my post again: most manufacturers have no time for this sort of diatribe, and most users have no time or inclination to "hack the drivers" -- especially in rigid "efficiency-first" organisations like the military.

Still, if the choice is between

a) throw away a $300,000 piece of equipment for lack of drivers, assuming the company producing it has disappeared without all trace

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.

>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'.

> Then why is the Navy on XP?

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.

If you don’t interface with external systems, and your computer has no IO ports open to its users, well, then it doesn't matter. You could run DOS 6.2 and it would work just as well, security is not an issue there.

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