Getting numbers on that would probably be difficult. I base that on 29 years of programming experience in large companies that depended on IBM mainframes for the heavy lifting and MS for front-end interfaces.
When I started at one Fortune 500 company (actually more like Fortune 100) they were using OS2 on desktop PC's since the head of Technical Services was an ex-IBMer.
They had a need to develop applications to run on laptops in the field.
I was hired and convinced my boss we could quickly develop such applications in Visual Basic 6.0. The head of Tech services fought us and told us OS2 would be around in that company for a long time.
We went ahead with Windows, VB6 and Access databases - were very successful.
In a very few years, OS2 was gone and so was the head of Technical Services. Their intranet was developed using Visual Studio, SQL Server and IIS.
Hello!
OS2 sadly has left the building a long time ago. IBM wants people to go with Tux. And on the big guy, as well. There are more licenses for ZVM running on him, now that Tux also runs there.
Its unfortunate. The last time I saw OS2 was keeping the company of a PS/2 server running a S/370 hosting arrangement for development. A very long time ago that was. I also met its bigger counterpart, a very big RS/6000 system with the same features.
Hello!
Actually no. XP is being officially supported on the 14th of next month. Then all they do deliver will be recent security things. Any old issues won't be fixed.
After 12 years, support for Windows XP will end on April 8, 2014. There will be no more security updates or technical support for the Windows XP operating system.
You misunderstood - I have Visual Studio 6.0 on my XP machine and I want to be able to use it.
I tried the V4 software - no luck. Then I discovered another WIN7 "feature". Driver files are stored in a different place and not named OEMxx.INF although something in the OS gives them an alias of OEMxx.inf if you look at them in a certain way.
Here is the thread where I made the Optascope V4 software work. Maybe it will help. I've since had to re-install the OS, so it's no longer running today, and that was on 32 bit Win 7 so...
Hello!
Actually no. XP is being officially supported on the 14th of next month. Then all they do deliver will be recent security things. Any old issues won't be fixed.
Now how'd you get VS6 installed on it?
Hello!
It really depends on who you ask. Officially mind you yes. Then they start delivering fixes only for new issues. Nothing old will be fixed. After all there are still embedded devices like ATMs and Vending Machines for Metrocards running it, and even signage.
I didn't misunderstood, I only asked how you'd managed to get VS6 running there. I once tried to get it installed on Win2K it wasn't happy.
Here is the thread where I made the Optascope V4 software work. Maybe it will help. I've since had to re-install the OS, so it's no longer running today, and that was on 32 bit Win 7 so...
Typical Microsoft obfuscation. They never actually tell you what the real differences are between "mainstream" and "extended" support, only that they differ in duration.
Note that Windows 7 "mainstream" support ends next year.
I don't. Lucky for me, for any serious work I went from DEC VMS to Unix to Linux. Apart from a short time when MS-DOS was de rigueur, what a nightmmare that was.
Also lucky for me there are many who feel the same way. It's better to share, cooperate, learn and build a better world. Rather than just accept the idea that "We make software, you do not, and by the way send us money".
My old project manager at Nokia back in 1998 put it beautifully, he said: "I don't want any more of Bill Gates' fingers in my project than is absolutely necessary".
Sadly Nokia was destroyed by recent the deal with MS. Like so many before.
By the way, what's all this nonsense about "Fortune 500" companies use VB or Outlook or Word or whatever MS SQL?
The biggest companies in the world, Twitter, FaceBook, Google and others do not.
How should some corporation using some tool dictate what we use out here in the rest of the world?
People usually use their computer to get work done in the most effective manner they can, for many that means using Windows and software that runs on Windows.
I wondered when I first saw this thread how long it would take for the usual suspects to start bashing MS, it of course didn't take long.
Not at all but the amount software available for the Windows platform and the corporate needs/support for things like SQL server, etc keep it at the forefront.
I don't think you'll find too many Fortune 500 companies using Linux (or other OS) for mission critical systems.
For starters, GE Medical Systems MRI and CT systems were on IRIX and newer systems are on Linux. So are most of their Rad and fluoro offerings and Radiology work stations.
Just one area to mention, sent from my Surface Pro running win8.1. Have not figured out how to dual boot it yet.
Not at all but the amount software available for the Windows platform and the corporate needs/support for things like SQL server, etc keep it at the forefront.
I don't think you'll find too many Fortune 500 companies using Linux (or other OS) for mission critical systems.
ISS! in orbit ! ...... all the IBM/Lenove lappy there use it as a base . some VM other OSes as needed .
as far I am worried I have all my XP stuff backed up and Its all good . Heck Ill just nuke the instal every other month .
OTOH If I go to china for work in a few months for my job then when I come home Il have a shiny new CF31 toughbook with 7Pro on it and Duo boot to Debian .
If I had the time I was VERY close to gettng my current toughbook on Debian but some silly audio issues prevented me from doing it as a main OS>...... granted I have a few spare HDDs and as the toughbook usses drive sleds I can with ease tinker with other HDDs .
* funny I Tried to put W7 Pro on it last week and the Exact same audio issue happens with windows tooo. so I blame the funky audio DAC inside .
A handy countdown clock on the Microsoft (NASDAQ:MSFT) site is ticking through the minutes until April 8, when the venerable and very outdated Windows XP operating system will no longer be supported by the company that created it way back in 2001.
Nobody can say the company didn't warn us, but that might not cushion the blow.
Somewhere between 30% and 40% of the world's computers are still running on XP. The lower number would translate to nearly 500 million computers. All of those computers are at least six years old, since that's when Microsoft stopped installing the operating system in new computers.
1) Will Microsoft employees be popping champagne corks and downing the bubbly whan that countdown clock hits zero?
2) Why is Microsoft stock at an all time high? Every tech article I read spells doom & gloom for Windows. The sky may be falling, but MSFT is soaring.
"Somewhere between 30% and 40% of the world's computers are still running on XP. The lower number would translate to nearly 500 million computers. All of those computers are at least six years old, since that's when Microsoft stopped installing the operating system in new computers." - My wife works at a public school and until last year ALL of the computers in the classrooms were running XP, so that could account for some of the lean towards XP. Last summer they upgraded their computer lab, and those computers are running a current OS. The individual class rooms however are still running XP and there is a bit of scrambling with the urge to upgrade these computers as well. One problem is that most of the computers are donated or "hand me downs" anyway and could not physically take an OS upgrade without experiencing other issues.
I worked at a Medical Device company where instead of paying a fortune to MS for licensing the company decided just to write their own OS.
More and more medical devices are being connected to networks and there are occasional firmware and OS updates.
Here is the thread where I made the Optascope V4 software work. Maybe it will help. I've since had to re-install the OS, so it's no longer running today, and that was on 32 bit Win 7 so...
Another thing contributing to older OSes is open code. Often builds go way back.
Frankly, running closed OSes is very frequently a requirement. I always appreciate advocacy for open tools, but there remain way too many reasons for a very large fraction of users. Running all OSS is still very much a luxury.
The much nicer development is having the major OSS tools out there for whoever wants to run and or build them on whatever OS they are stuck with, or maybe just prefer to run.
That proposition is an option for an order more users at present than running an open OS is. Really, it's not a big deal. Where we've got data portability and applications can be built on multiple OSes, life is pretty good. Heck, I could do Propeller stuff on SGI IRIX now, if I wanted to. In the beginning I did. Wasn't possible then. It is now. All good and getting better.
Edit: And another thing... The desktop on Open Source Software (OSS) ranges from downright crappy to solid, with a lot of workable, but... variations in between. This is often a very significant distraction. Yes, there is the command line, yes the differences are often shallow, or can be ignored, and so on. But really, people want to get stuff done more often than they want to work at optimizing their OS. For many, it's just an OS. Nobody cares. Really.
Despite fighting many battles with XP over the years and several disk format/clean installs, I have been relatively happy with XP.
Me too, its kind of like an arranged marriage where the two parties start out fine, but after awhile one turns out to be a total B1tcH! but after awhile you get used to it. When finally gone, you
miss the familiarity, routine, and habits. Until you find there is a really nice alternative right in front of you, and its been there all along. Any feelings of "missing it" go away like shadows at dawn.
I will NOT miss reinstalling windows every six months, and the endless downloads of ineffectual "fixes" that never seem to make anything better.
Swtiching to linux, the install takes about a third the time, and the upgrades happen at times that don't seem to get in the way, and appear to actual fix stuff. There's no virus software needed, and the apps are either clearly in development (use at your own risk) or "just work". There's no pop ups, I turned them off. ALL of them. Just like that. Start up takes seconds, not minutes, and shutdown takes seconds, not minutes. WOW! Almost like it was supposed to work that way! The list goes on and on.
I had to use windows on a work computer, I was appalled at the Smile those poor slobs are subject to. But, they don't know any better, so I guess they are better off not knowing.
My XP OS is the SAME INSTALL going on something like 6 years? My 7 install is 4. Mac OS is the newest one, and it's 3 years, and the only reason I've not moved it current to Mavricks is lack of a boot drive. I want to keep the old one to build Prop software for older Mac computers out there.
Sure, if people make a mess, or just load a lot of things, "bit rot" sets in quickly and a reinstall is the easy, but often painful answer. However, some basic practices are applicable on any OS we run. Truth is, one can make the same sort of mess on Linux, or Mac OS, whatever...
There are great reasons to encourage people to run Open Source Software, including their OS, but that one isn't in and of itself a very good argument anymore. Just saying...
Frankly, running closed OSes is very frequently a requirement.
When?, where? by whom? Why for God sake?
I can imagine all kinds of requirements that might make Linux a non-starter or vice-versa but that one make no sense to me at all.
What you are saying is that users of closed source operating systems, that have this requirement for them to be closed source, would have to stop using them if the source code ever became available.
Well, there is that. Yes, some times a known environment is the only one certified and or supported. Things may run technically, but legal and or license agreements prevent doing that. Happens all the time. Enterprise IT won't go there and will often mandate the environment just so they can scale a few people to serve a few thousand. Life sucks. Oh, and often those people don't get the rights to the machine needed to even boot another OS or alter the environment in a meaningful way too. That also happens all the time.
I know people who carry two machines, and I myself have done this from time to time. There is the machine you are supposed to be working on, and it's trusted to only do what it's intended to do. Then there is the other machine which really is the one people work on. Sometimes it's easier to buy your own machine and do the work, and just use the one issued to you for connecting to the secure network, etc...
But that really wasn't what I was getting at.
What I was getting at is the software I mentioned above, even with no onerous licensing and support issues, keeps people running closed OSes because the dependencies on that software and the fact that software doesn't run on anything but a closed OS! Again, Microsoft Exchange, Office, MSSQL, and various "cloud" services have a very high degree of lock in. If your IT experience involves that software, there is a good chance you really can't do it the way you need to on an Open OS. The code just isn't there, leaving you with virtualization, etc... as workarounds.
Most people who I talk to about this simply do not get the massive pile of business software that centers on that core Microsoft stack. It's huge!
Now, there are entire niches where that stack isn't present. And I see newer companies not starting with that stack, and they will typically run Apple computers or Linux and they will virtualize a few things to get it done, but that solution is not optimal at all, and frankly, isn't viable under all circumstances. Larger data sets + MCAD for example = poor performance under virtual environments, and that's just one little example.
The other funny thing is the people running away from Microsoft often head over to Google and their services, now able to run whatever OS they want, but are now dependent on Google services for a lot of basic things Microsoft used to handle. Google is cheaper, and it doesn't do as much, but it's still a lock in.
Few want to build their own, even though building their own is often possible in Linux land. I've done it in the past. These days, it's much cheaper to just sign up with Google and go run the company on that stuff, get financials from somebody else, CRM from somebody else, and just run whatever you have at hand. Newer firms are going that way sometimes.
Or, sign up with some partner and they will deploy a Microsoft stack for you, set policy, etc... and you go and run it that way.
The key thing is what people spend their time on. IT isn't considered a value add directly. It should be in a lot of cases, but it's not. People doing non-value added things, like configuring computers, running non-known configurations, etc... means they aren't adding value by making products, communicating, etc...
Really, it's all about that. Even a little example will suffice. Say I run Open Office. Right now, in my niche, I deal with a few hundred companies. ALL of them Heater, save for a few, run Microsoft. And that means Microsoft Office. And guess what? If I run Open Office, my stuff doesn't look quite right. My stuff won't run the macro they have embedded. My stuff will strip the goodies out of their stuff when I touch it and save it back, and it goes on and on and on.
Outside of the few niches mentioned here, that is how it is. Those of us doing software at some dot com can use Linux, or Apple, and Apple is by far the more trendy thing today. Even among new software startup type companies. Even they don't want to dork around with desktop environments that have been in a state of change since the beginning. How long has X been under repair? How many replacements are there for it? How many window managers are there? What paradigm? GNOME, TWM, Enlightenment, KDE, etc...
Now make no mistake. I can jump on most anything but Android because I've not explored it yet, and get stuff done. Many of us here can. But is it worth doing?
That question contains some really hard, ugly answers to the effect of no, because... and again, reasons given. Communication is the number one reason we use computers, Internet, etc... and a whole pile of that communication is people to people, e-mail and documents, and another whole pile of it is business to business and that means data sets, mapping, SQL, and god knows what else.
If a company does anything significant, they are going to have IP contained in proprietary software and they will have it there because open software does not exist, and it won't exist for a really long time because a lot of that proprietary software took zillions of man hours to realize and there quite simply aren't enough people with enough time and skill to even think of competing.
Again, do you use CAD? Lots of engineers do. The geometry kernels on those CAD systems have millions of man-years into them. There are some crude, mostly broken and ineffective open kernels out there and guess what? Nobody outside the academics and those doing science projects cares. At. All.
Just today I took a credit card over the phone. $7,500 dollars. Reason: Need to open proprietary files to do the work. Want the work? Open the files. Want to open the files, buy the software. End of story. Want to run the software? Run it on Windows because it was written to the Microsoft Foundation Classes in the 90's, and the effort required to port it off of that runs in the millions and millions of dollars and more man hours than I care to discuss. At that time we had HOOPS, QT and some others sort of there, workable, but not optimal at all. The window was missed plain and simple. Today those things are better, but still not optimal and the ports still cost and they still won't get done and there you go.
I've got nice OS skills on my resume. Want to know something interesting? I'm often more attractive when I DON'T LIST THEM. Strange huh? I thought so too, but I did take the time to find out why, and a lot of the why has to do with the stuff I've put in the last few posts.
And this is why I really don't bash closed OSes. They are often needed / mandated. Best move is to build the open code on them and use it where possible working to keep data portability high and keep skills mapped to open tools so one can do things for low cost in a pinch. I've been doing that for years. Been writing about it for years too.
Truth is, we could have made some traction in the 90's. Didn't happen. Most of the basic desktop problems from the 90's are still with us. Exchange? That was noted in the 90's too, while OSS advocates were talking up how bad *** UNIX mail and other services are, companies were putting Exchange in all over the place.
Do you want to know why?
One feature. Seriously. Shared Outlook calendars. For years the only way to participate in Outlook meeting notices was to have Outlook and the only way to manage all of that in a shared environment was to have Exchange.
That one single thing dominated small to mid sized business who quite simply has to have it. The OSS response? Some lame shared web calendars that would work for you and me, but never an organization.
I could go on and on, but the realities are there and quite easy to see. OSS is great, but it's got a very serious functionality and interoperability challenge in the form of the Microsoft business software stack.
Here's one other small thing. Want to do smaller scale accounting? QuickBooks. Seriously. It only runs on Windows and it's darn tough to find accountants who CAN'T use it. So what does everybody get? QB, and with it windows, and since there is Windows, might as well get the standard stuff and set about doing business and making money instead of tinkering with computers and figuring out how to communicate with everybody else, and how come Sales presentations look dorky, etc....
Life sucks in corporate land Heater. Big. Feel good about what you do and where you are. A very large fraction of your peers globally have no such luck.
Oh, and I was there too, in the 90's. Wrote about this coming mess in various places. /. LWN Linux Today, OS News, and you name it. Others were too. Nothing material ever got done and here we are. I'm not blaming anybody. The OSS we have today is great, but nobody ever figured out how to really compete with the big boys making money hand over fist with closed tools. Nobody.
Like I said, give me an SGI, HPUX, Linux, MAC OS, Windows, who cares? I can run it. No worries. I can run it fast too. Almost nobody I deal with even cares. So why should I? Serious question. I know the drill, again was there, writing about it, doing it, building it too.
I still recommend people get those skills. They can do their own thing, and where that's true, they can do well and do it open. But the vast majority of people are gonna be dealing with closed OSes, because the people who write the checks like it better that way. Fact.
Good news is in this niche it is still possible to get it done, make money and do your own thing on OSS. Very highly recommended, but don't knock those people running closed. The reasons number in the hundreds and they don't always have the control or the time. Also fact.
(sorry, but somebody did ask... brutal I know, but real)
Ah good, I just made this morning big mug of tea and there is a huge potatohead chapter to read:)
Having a known, certified, approved, environment is totally orthogonal to having open or closed source software. Clearly most people are running Windows and know nothing about what is in it or what happens when it is updated. Conversely a machine running an opensource operating system and apps can be locked down tight. Anyone conflating these two issues does not understand what they are doing.
I am very much aware of the massive pile of Windows only business software. It's that appalling situation I constantly criticise. It leads to this "...my stuff doesn't look quite right. My stuff won't run the macro they have embedded. My stuff will strip the goodies out of their stuff when I touch it and save it back, and it goes on and on and on." How is that a good situation?
I'm not totally against close source software. Your CAD systems are a fine example. If someone is going to invest millions of man hours into something then they deserve to be able to recover their investment.
Where it goes wrong is when you have invested years creating things with that software and then find you are locked in. Perhaps you cannot export your designs to other systems. There you are, stuck, forever. You are reliant on that single supplier.
Actually I used to be involved in writing CAD software. Electronic schematic capture and PCB layout stuff. There was a huge team working on it for years at that company. The package used to sell for 10 or 20 thousand pounds per seat. The "advanced" Unix packages were even more. Seems crazy looking at it today. We can get pretty much the same functionality we had back then for free today, both closed and open source.
"Life sucks in corporate land Heater." Perhaps it does. It's odd, I have been working with huge corporations for decades, starting with GEC moving on through Racal, Lucas, Nokia. Almost never had to use Windows, almost never sucked. Well, I was a freelancer so if it sucked I could just walk away.
Today I'm looking at the "new kids on the block", huge corporations that I imagine never see a Windows machine. Google, Facebook, Twitter and others. Even Oracle is in on the free software idea.
"...nobody ever figured out how to really compete with the big boys making money hand over fist with closed tools. Nobody."
Sure they did. See list above. I'd even throw RedHat in there. Plenty of companies are making piles of money shipping Android phones as well. And so on.
An observation:
When the topic of closed vs Free Software (Capital "F" and "S") comes up the open source side is often portrayed as mass of nerds working in their mom's basements. Now it's true that the Free Software movement starts out as loose knit collaboration between individuals. Heck, that's how all software development started out back in the day, (All the way back to Babbage and Ada) how else would you make progress with out sharing your creations? There is too much work to do alone.
But there is something much bigger going on now a days. I offer a couple of examples:
Oracle kicked off development of the btrfs. I new file system that supports snapshots and RAID and all kind of goodies. Well btrfs is now a joint development between Oracle, Intel, Fujitsu and others.
Apple has the LLVM based Clang compiler for C, C++, Ojective C. Well Clang is now a joint development involving Google and others.
These projects are open source and free to anyone who want's to down load it.
What we have here is huge corporations realizing that it's to their mutual advantage to work on projects together and that the best way to do that is to have the whole thing open.
This is a far cry from the lone hacker in a basement. A trend that will continue driving people like MS into a corner.
The up and coming generation of developers know all this. It's not cool to work at MS. Imagine you are a rock star genius programmer. Do you a) Want to work at MS where your creations, your source code, are hidden in the dark and you are unknown. Or b) work for a Google or such on open source software where your creations and reputation are know by your peers around the world?
Ahh good points Heater. Since I must go and work for a while, I'll just say this:
Google, et al. have learned to COEXIST with the closed ecosystem. Those projects you mention are smart, and a clear trend. Know who did it first? The movie production guys. They wanted off IRIX, because MIPS was not keeping up as a CPU. They flirted with Windows, rejected the octopus as Chip puts it, and proceeded to roll their own on Linux. The result is impressive, and it illustrated the "center of gravity" idea perfectly, more or less forcing ports of some commercial software TO LINUX, and not just shabby ports, good ones. Alias moved MAYA over because it was going to be a dead end otherwise for them.
Similar moves are going on today, and embedded is one such niche where it's going to be possible to run all open, and the CAD tools are already ported as are the big, expensive tools like simulation, etc... Embedded could largely mirror what the movie guys did. Hope it happens.
In the overall business ecosystem though, we are talking small bits here and there. The big nut to crack is Exchange, Office, MSSQL, and apps way too married to the MFC. That's not really started yet, though there has been discussion since the 90's about it.
The answer, BTW has been to move those things into the cloud and interoperate more. In other words, keep the turf, and see if it doesn't make sense to gain some ground on Google's turf. Whether or not that flies is still being determined, but I can tell you that Office365 makes Outlook sing, and Google does not. Both work, but one works a whole lot better than the other one does. And that one program, forget everything else I said, just that one program ties a very large chunk of business to closed software. Nobody has cracked that nut yet. And there are lots of others, but that one, Outlook, has been the one I've watched, because I think it's the easiest one and it offers the most bang for the buck in terms of who can move to OSS and who cannot.
You make a great point about the new, up and comers. Interesting, a lot of them run Apple MAC OS. At least it's UNIX, and that means running Open in a lot of cases. They also write a lot of their own tools, and they also don't need the same kinds of B2B infrastructure as zillions of existing companies do too.
It may take an entire cycle of companies coming in, with older ones going away to really see a meaningful shift. The battle lines being drawn and fought right now hint at decade long time to change scales.
It uses an internet connection on both machines in lieu of a cable. Simple and free, but not necessarily secure. They could be storing everyone's data as they "help them" transfer it. Is Sandra Bullock available to star in Hollywood's next blockbuster sequel, "The Net 2"?
People usually use their computer to get work done in the most effective manner they can....
Can't really blame them for that.
...for many that means using Windows and software that runs on Windows.
Exactly. That is the trap that appals us so much.
I wondered when I first saw this thread how long it would take for the usual suspects to start bashing MS, it of course didn't take long.
"suspects", "bashing", you make it sound like what we are saying is a bad thing.
To be clear this is really not anything to do with bashing MS. Although that does get my full support as well.
No, it's all about the crazy situation of dependency we find ourselves in. I find it incredible that we ever allowed a huge proportion of the worlds business, governmental and other infrastructure to become dependent on a single supplier in a foreign country over which we have no control.
The same arguments would apply to dependency on an Apple or a Google or whoever.
Seems this does not bother you. It has increasingly bothered me for decades already.
"suspects", "bashing", you make it sound like what we are saying is a bad thing.
To be clear this is really not anything to do with bashing MS. Although that does get my full support as well.
No, it's all about the crazy situation of dependency we find ourselves in. I find it incredible that we ever allowed a huge proportion of the worlds business, governmental and other infrastructure to become dependent on a single supplier in a foreign country over which we have no control.
The same arguments would apply to dependency on an Apple or a Google or whoever.
Seems this does not bother you. It has increasingly bothered me for decades already.
What bothers me is how every time Windows is mentioned the poor user is bashed as being some type of ignorant cave dwelling Neanderthal that is not enlightened enough to jump on the Linux train.
There is always the simplistic BS about Open Office or whatever it is called now being all you need to replace MS Office and blah blah blah.
Many business type applications on Windows support application automation/interoperability on a scale that I haven't seen in the Linux world.
Examples that I use frequently are AutoCAD, MS Excel, MS Word, and Internet Explorer. Some of these applications have reduced time to create engineering drawings by 90% or more.
The bottom line is most people have work to do and they need to get it done in the most pragmatic way they can.
It is about using the right tools at the right time within the budget of the task at hand.
What bothers me is how every time Windows is mentioned the poor user is bashed as being some type of ignorant cave dwelling Neanderthal that is not enlightened enough to jump on the Linux train.
There is always the simplistic BS about Open Office or whatever it is called now being all you need to replace MS Office and blah blah blah.
Many business type applications on Windows support application automation/interoperability on a scale that I haven't seen in the Linux world.
Examples that I use frequently are AutoCAD, MS Excel, MS Word, and Internet Explorer. Some of these applications have reduced time to create engineering drawings by 90% or more.
The bottom line is most people have work to do and they need to get it done in the most pragmatic way they can.
It is about using the right tools at the right time within the budget of the task at hand.
C.W.
Since I retired from the information systems/programming world I'm sure much has changed.
The software applications I now rely on the most are Quicken, TurboTax, Excel/Outlook/Word (and the VBA scripting capabilities included therein).
My bank, brokerage firms, and some of my credit card companies let me download/upload information using that software.
I can't say for sure, but I doubt there is any non-Microsoft versions of these programs that financial institutions allow to interface with their systems, so I plan using Windows for a long while.
Microsoft doesn't always get it right (e.g. Vista, Windows 8, etc) so I choose Win7 rather than Win8.
The Component Object Model (COM), Distributed COM (DCOM), Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), ActiveX, etc. along with scripting tools allow me to make some nifty little tools for personal use.
The ability to create an instance of Internet Explorer in VBScript or an HTML Application (.hta) and extract information using the Document Object Model is also really slick.
It's how I create my version of the OBEX directory... http://ronczap.home.insightbb.com/OBEX3.htm
Comments
Hello!
OS2 sadly has left the building a long time ago. IBM wants people to go with Tux. And on the big guy, as well. There are more licenses for ZVM running on him, now that Tux also runs there.
Its unfortunate. The last time I saw OS2 was keeping the company of a PS/2 server running a S/370 hosting arrangement for development. A very long time ago that was. I also met its bigger counterpart, a very big RS/6000 system with the same features.
The MS web site says April 8 all over the place http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/end-of-support.aspx
April 14, 2009 was the end of "mainstream support" http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/lifecycle
You misunderstood - I have Visual Studio 6.0 on my XP machine and I want to be able to use it.
Here is the thread where I made the Optascope V4 software work. Maybe it will help. I've since had to re-install the OS, so it's no longer running today, and that was on 32 bit Win 7 so...
http://forums.parallax.com/showthread.php/141713-Optascope-81M
Hello!
It really depends on who you ask. Officially mind you yes. Then they start delivering fixes only for new issues. Nothing old will be fixed. After all there are still embedded devices like ATMs and Vending Machines for Metrocards running it, and even signage.
I didn't misunderstood, I only asked how you'd managed to get VS6 running there. I once tried to get it installed on Win2K it wasn't happy.
But okay I'll concede the point.
Thanks! I meant to ask you about that. Might be problematic with 64-bit...
Typical Microsoft obfuscation. They never actually tell you what the real differences are between "mainstream" and "extended" support, only that they differ in duration.
Note that Windows 7 "mainstream" support ends next year.
I don't know what to say. I'm horrified at the prospect.
Nobody is twisting your arm - If you don't want to use them, don't!
Also lucky for me there are many who feel the same way. It's better to share, cooperate, learn and build a better world. Rather than just accept the idea that "We make software, you do not, and by the way send us money".
My old project manager at Nokia back in 1998 put it beautifully, he said: "I don't want any more of Bill Gates' fingers in my project than is absolutely necessary".
Sadly Nokia was destroyed by recent the deal with MS. Like so many before.
By the way, what's all this nonsense about "Fortune 500" companies use VB or Outlook or Word or whatever MS SQL?
The biggest companies in the world, Twitter, FaceBook, Google and others do not.
How should some corporation using some tool dictate what we use out here in the rest of the world?
I wondered when I first saw this thread how long it would take for the usual suspects to start bashing MS, it of course didn't take long.
C.W.
For starters, GE Medical Systems MRI and CT systems were on IRIX and newer systems are on Linux. So are most of their Rad and fluoro offerings and Radiology work stations.
Just one area to mention, sent from my Surface Pro running win8.1. Have not figured out how to dual boot it yet.
ISS! in orbit ! ...... all the IBM/Lenove lappy there use it as a base . some VM other OSes as needed .
as far I am worried I have all my XP stuff backed up and Its all good . Heck Ill just nuke the instal every other month .
OTOH If I go to china for work in a few months for my job then when I come home Il have a shiny new CF31 toughbook with 7Pro on it and Duo boot to Debian .
If I had the time I was VERY close to gettng my current toughbook on Debian but some silly audio issues prevented me from doing it as a main OS>...... granted I have a few spare HDDs and as the toughbook usses drive sleds I can with ease tinker with other HDDs .
* funny I Tried to put W7 Pro on it last week and the Exact same audio issue happens with windows tooo. so I blame the funky audio DAC inside .
Microsoft XP Countdown Clock http://www.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/enterprise/end-of-support.aspx
Two questions:
1) Will Microsoft employees be popping champagne corks and downing the bubbly whan that countdown clock hits zero?
2) Why is Microsoft stock at an all time high? Every tech article I read spells doom & gloom for Windows. The sky may be falling, but MSFT is soaring.
"Somewhere between 30% and 40% of the world's computers are still running on XP. The lower number would translate to nearly 500 million computers. All of those computers are at least six years old, since that's when Microsoft stopped installing the operating system in new computers." - My wife works at a public school and until last year ALL of the computers in the classrooms were running XP, so that could account for some of the lean towards XP. Last summer they upgraded their computer lab, and those computers are running a current OS. The individual class rooms however are still running XP and there is a bit of scrambling with the urge to upgrade these computers as well. One problem is that most of the computers are donated or "hand me downs" anyway and could not physically take an OS upgrade without experiencing other issues.
More and more medical devices are being connected to networks and there are occasional firmware and OS updates.
BTW, support for Office 2003 is also ending.
RDL2004,
Well I managed to get the Oscilloscope V4 Software installed.
I downloaded and installed Virtual PC and Windows XP Mode from Microsoft.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows7/install-and-use-windows-xp-mode-in-windows-7
I ran Windows Update in XP Mode and applied 116 updates
I installed the V4 Oscilloscope software.
At the top of the Windows XP Mode - Windows Virtual PC window is a USB dropdown.
I selected "USB <-> Serial" Attach and selected my Windows 7 com port (e.g. com port 9) and XP Mode made it Com 3.
In the Oscilloscope software I selected COM 3.
Frankly, running closed OSes is very frequently a requirement. I always appreciate advocacy for open tools, but there remain way too many reasons for a very large fraction of users. Running all OSS is still very much a luxury.
The much nicer development is having the major OSS tools out there for whoever wants to run and or build them on whatever OS they are stuck with, or maybe just prefer to run.
That proposition is an option for an order more users at present than running an open OS is. Really, it's not a big deal. Where we've got data portability and applications can be built on multiple OSes, life is pretty good. Heck, I could do Propeller stuff on SGI IRIX now, if I wanted to. In the beginning I did. Wasn't possible then. It is now. All good and getting better.
Edit: And another thing... The desktop on Open Source Software (OSS) ranges from downright crappy to solid, with a lot of workable, but... variations in between. This is often a very significant distraction. Yes, there is the command line, yes the differences are often shallow, or can be ignored, and so on. But really, people want to get stuff done more often than they want to work at optimizing their OS. For many, it's just an OS. Nobody cares. Really.
Me too, its kind of like an arranged marriage where the two parties start out fine, but after awhile one turns out to be a total B1tcH! but after awhile you get used to it. When finally gone, you
miss the familiarity, routine, and habits. Until you find there is a really nice alternative right in front of you, and its been there all along. Any feelings of "missing it" go away like shadows at dawn.
I will NOT miss reinstalling windows every six months, and the endless downloads of ineffectual "fixes" that never seem to make anything better.
Swtiching to linux, the install takes about a third the time, and the upgrades happen at times that don't seem to get in the way, and appear to actual fix stuff. There's no virus software needed, and the apps are either clearly in development (use at your own risk) or "just work". There's no pop ups, I turned them off. ALL of them. Just like that. Start up takes seconds, not minutes, and shutdown takes seconds, not minutes. WOW! Almost like it was supposed to work that way! The list goes on and on.
I had to use windows on a work computer, I was appalled at the Smile those poor slobs are subject to. But, they don't know any better, so I guess they are better off not knowing.
I say good bye, old friend, and good riddance!
My XP OS is the SAME INSTALL going on something like 6 years? My 7 install is 4. Mac OS is the newest one, and it's 3 years, and the only reason I've not moved it current to Mavricks is lack of a boot drive. I want to keep the old one to build Prop software for older Mac computers out there.
Sure, if people make a mess, or just load a lot of things, "bit rot" sets in quickly and a reinstall is the easy, but often painful answer. However, some basic practices are applicable on any OS we run. Truth is, one can make the same sort of mess on Linux, or Mac OS, whatever...
There are great reasons to encourage people to run Open Source Software, including their OS, but that one isn't in and of itself a very good argument anymore. Just saying...
I can imagine all kinds of requirements that might make Linux a non-starter or vice-versa but that one make no sense to me at all.
What you are saying is that users of closed source operating systems, that have this requirement for them to be closed source, would have to stop using them if the source code ever became available.
That is obviously nuts!
I know people who carry two machines, and I myself have done this from time to time. There is the machine you are supposed to be working on, and it's trusted to only do what it's intended to do. Then there is the other machine which really is the one people work on. Sometimes it's easier to buy your own machine and do the work, and just use the one issued to you for connecting to the secure network, etc...
But that really wasn't what I was getting at.
What I was getting at is the software I mentioned above, even with no onerous licensing and support issues, keeps people running closed OSes because the dependencies on that software and the fact that software doesn't run on anything but a closed OS! Again, Microsoft Exchange, Office, MSSQL, and various "cloud" services have a very high degree of lock in. If your IT experience involves that software, there is a good chance you really can't do it the way you need to on an Open OS. The code just isn't there, leaving you with virtualization, etc... as workarounds.
Most people who I talk to about this simply do not get the massive pile of business software that centers on that core Microsoft stack. It's huge!
Now, there are entire niches where that stack isn't present. And I see newer companies not starting with that stack, and they will typically run Apple computers or Linux and they will virtualize a few things to get it done, but that solution is not optimal at all, and frankly, isn't viable under all circumstances. Larger data sets + MCAD for example = poor performance under virtual environments, and that's just one little example.
The other funny thing is the people running away from Microsoft often head over to Google and their services, now able to run whatever OS they want, but are now dependent on Google services for a lot of basic things Microsoft used to handle. Google is cheaper, and it doesn't do as much, but it's still a lock in.
Few want to build their own, even though building their own is often possible in Linux land. I've done it in the past. These days, it's much cheaper to just sign up with Google and go run the company on that stuff, get financials from somebody else, CRM from somebody else, and just run whatever you have at hand. Newer firms are going that way sometimes.
Or, sign up with some partner and they will deploy a Microsoft stack for you, set policy, etc... and you go and run it that way.
The key thing is what people spend their time on. IT isn't considered a value add directly. It should be in a lot of cases, but it's not. People doing non-value added things, like configuring computers, running non-known configurations, etc... means they aren't adding value by making products, communicating, etc...
Really, it's all about that. Even a little example will suffice. Say I run Open Office. Right now, in my niche, I deal with a few hundred companies. ALL of them Heater, save for a few, run Microsoft. And that means Microsoft Office. And guess what? If I run Open Office, my stuff doesn't look quite right. My stuff won't run the macro they have embedded. My stuff will strip the goodies out of their stuff when I touch it and save it back, and it goes on and on and on.
Outside of the few niches mentioned here, that is how it is. Those of us doing software at some dot com can use Linux, or Apple, and Apple is by far the more trendy thing today. Even among new software startup type companies. Even they don't want to dork around with desktop environments that have been in a state of change since the beginning. How long has X been under repair? How many replacements are there for it? How many window managers are there? What paradigm? GNOME, TWM, Enlightenment, KDE, etc...
Now make no mistake. I can jump on most anything but Android because I've not explored it yet, and get stuff done. Many of us here can. But is it worth doing?
That question contains some really hard, ugly answers to the effect of no, because... and again, reasons given. Communication is the number one reason we use computers, Internet, etc... and a whole pile of that communication is people to people, e-mail and documents, and another whole pile of it is business to business and that means data sets, mapping, SQL, and god knows what else.
If a company does anything significant, they are going to have IP contained in proprietary software and they will have it there because open software does not exist, and it won't exist for a really long time because a lot of that proprietary software took zillions of man hours to realize and there quite simply aren't enough people with enough time and skill to even think of competing.
Again, do you use CAD? Lots of engineers do. The geometry kernels on those CAD systems have millions of man-years into them. There are some crude, mostly broken and ineffective open kernels out there and guess what? Nobody outside the academics and those doing science projects cares. At. All.
Just today I took a credit card over the phone. $7,500 dollars. Reason: Need to open proprietary files to do the work. Want the work? Open the files. Want to open the files, buy the software. End of story. Want to run the software? Run it on Windows because it was written to the Microsoft Foundation Classes in the 90's, and the effort required to port it off of that runs in the millions and millions of dollars and more man hours than I care to discuss. At that time we had HOOPS, QT and some others sort of there, workable, but not optimal at all. The window was missed plain and simple. Today those things are better, but still not optimal and the ports still cost and they still won't get done and there you go.
I've got nice OS skills on my resume. Want to know something interesting? I'm often more attractive when I DON'T LIST THEM. Strange huh? I thought so too, but I did take the time to find out why, and a lot of the why has to do with the stuff I've put in the last few posts.
And this is why I really don't bash closed OSes. They are often needed / mandated. Best move is to build the open code on them and use it where possible working to keep data portability high and keep skills mapped to open tools so one can do things for low cost in a pinch. I've been doing that for years. Been writing about it for years too.
Truth is, we could have made some traction in the 90's. Didn't happen. Most of the basic desktop problems from the 90's are still with us. Exchange? That was noted in the 90's too, while OSS advocates were talking up how bad *** UNIX mail and other services are, companies were putting Exchange in all over the place.
Do you want to know why?
One feature. Seriously. Shared Outlook calendars. For years the only way to participate in Outlook meeting notices was to have Outlook and the only way to manage all of that in a shared environment was to have Exchange.
That one single thing dominated small to mid sized business who quite simply has to have it. The OSS response? Some lame shared web calendars that would work for you and me, but never an organization.
I could go on and on, but the realities are there and quite easy to see. OSS is great, but it's got a very serious functionality and interoperability challenge in the form of the Microsoft business software stack.
Here's one other small thing. Want to do smaller scale accounting? QuickBooks. Seriously. It only runs on Windows and it's darn tough to find accountants who CAN'T use it. So what does everybody get? QB, and with it windows, and since there is Windows, might as well get the standard stuff and set about doing business and making money instead of tinkering with computers and figuring out how to communicate with everybody else, and how come Sales presentations look dorky, etc....
Life sucks in corporate land Heater. Big. Feel good about what you do and where you are. A very large fraction of your peers globally have no such luck.
Oh, and I was there too, in the 90's. Wrote about this coming mess in various places. /. LWN Linux Today, OS News, and you name it. Others were too. Nothing material ever got done and here we are. I'm not blaming anybody. The OSS we have today is great, but nobody ever figured out how to really compete with the big boys making money hand over fist with closed tools. Nobody.
Like I said, give me an SGI, HPUX, Linux, MAC OS, Windows, who cares? I can run it. No worries. I can run it fast too. Almost nobody I deal with even cares.
I still recommend people get those skills. They can do their own thing, and where that's true, they can do well and do it open. But the vast majority of people are gonna be dealing with closed OSes, because the people who write the checks like it better that way. Fact.
Good news is in this niche it is still possible to get it done, make money and do your own thing on OSS. Very highly recommended, but don't knock those people running closed. The reasons number in the hundreds and they don't always have the control or the time. Also fact.
(sorry, but somebody did ask... brutal I know, but real)
Ah good, I just made this morning big mug of tea and there is a huge potatohead chapter to read:)
Having a known, certified, approved, environment is totally orthogonal to having open or closed source software. Clearly most people are running Windows and know nothing about what is in it or what happens when it is updated. Conversely a machine running an opensource operating system and apps can be locked down tight. Anyone conflating these two issues does not understand what they are doing.
I am very much aware of the massive pile of Windows only business software. It's that appalling situation I constantly criticise. It leads to this "...my stuff doesn't look quite right. My stuff won't run the macro they have embedded. My stuff will strip the goodies out of their stuff when I touch it and save it back, and it goes on and on and on." How is that a good situation?
I'm not totally against close source software. Your CAD systems are a fine example. If someone is going to invest millions of man hours into something then they deserve to be able to recover their investment.
Where it goes wrong is when you have invested years creating things with that software and then find you are locked in. Perhaps you cannot export your designs to other systems. There you are, stuck, forever. You are reliant on that single supplier.
Actually I used to be involved in writing CAD software. Electronic schematic capture and PCB layout stuff. There was a huge team working on it for years at that company. The package used to sell for 10 or 20 thousand pounds per seat. The "advanced" Unix packages were even more. Seems crazy looking at it today. We can get pretty much the same functionality we had back then for free today, both closed and open source.
"Life sucks in corporate land Heater." Perhaps it does. It's odd, I have been working with huge corporations for decades, starting with GEC moving on through Racal, Lucas, Nokia. Almost never had to use Windows, almost never sucked. Well, I was a freelancer so if it sucked I could just walk away.
Today I'm looking at the "new kids on the block", huge corporations that I imagine never see a Windows machine. Google, Facebook, Twitter and others. Even Oracle is in on the free software idea.
"...nobody ever figured out how to really compete with the big boys making money hand over fist with closed tools. Nobody."
Sure they did. See list above. I'd even throw RedHat in there. Plenty of companies are making piles of money shipping Android phones as well. And so on.
An observation:
When the topic of closed vs Free Software (Capital "F" and "S") comes up the open source side is often portrayed as mass of nerds working in their mom's basements. Now it's true that the Free Software movement starts out as loose knit collaboration between individuals. Heck, that's how all software development started out back in the day, (All the way back to Babbage and Ada) how else would you make progress with out sharing your creations? There is too much work to do alone.
But there is something much bigger going on now a days. I offer a couple of examples:
Oracle kicked off development of the btrfs. I new file system that supports snapshots and RAID and all kind of goodies. Well btrfs is now a joint development between Oracle, Intel, Fujitsu and others.
Apple has the LLVM based Clang compiler for C, C++, Ojective C. Well Clang is now a joint development involving Google and others.
These projects are open source and free to anyone who want's to down load it.
What we have here is huge corporations realizing that it's to their mutual advantage to work on projects together and that the best way to do that is to have the whole thing open.
This is a far cry from the lone hacker in a basement. A trend that will continue driving people like MS into a corner.
The up and coming generation of developers know all this. It's not cool to work at MS. Imagine you are a rock star genius programmer. Do you a) Want to work at MS where your creations, your source code, are hidden in the dark and you are unknown. Or b) work for a Google or such on open source software where your creations and reputation are know by your peers around the world?
Damn, my tea's gone cold...
Google, et al. have learned to COEXIST with the closed ecosystem. Those projects you mention are smart, and a clear trend. Know who did it first? The movie production guys. They wanted off IRIX, because MIPS was not keeping up as a CPU. They flirted with Windows, rejected the octopus as Chip puts it, and proceeded to roll their own on Linux. The result is impressive, and it illustrated the "center of gravity" idea perfectly, more or less forcing ports of some commercial software TO LINUX, and not just shabby ports, good ones. Alias moved MAYA over because it was going to be a dead end otherwise for them.
Similar moves are going on today, and embedded is one such niche where it's going to be possible to run all open, and the CAD tools are already ported as are the big, expensive tools like simulation, etc... Embedded could largely mirror what the movie guys did. Hope it happens.
In the overall business ecosystem though, we are talking small bits here and there. The big nut to crack is Exchange, Office, MSSQL, and apps way too married to the MFC. That's not really started yet, though there has been discussion since the 90's about it.
The answer, BTW has been to move those things into the cloud and interoperate more. In other words, keep the turf, and see if it doesn't make sense to gain some ground on Google's turf. Whether or not that flies is still being determined, but I can tell you that Office365 makes Outlook sing, and Google does not. Both work, but one works a whole lot better than the other one does. And that one program, forget everything else I said, just that one program ties a very large chunk of business to closed software. Nobody has cracked that nut yet. And there are lots of others, but that one, Outlook, has been the one I've watched, because I think it's the easiest one and it offers the most bang for the buck in terms of who can move to OSS and who cannot.
You make a great point about the new, up and comers. Interesting, a lot of them run Apple MAC OS. At least it's UNIX, and that means running Open in a lot of cases. They also write a lot of their own tools, and they also don't need the same kinds of B2B infrastructure as zillions of existing companies do too.
It may take an entire cycle of companies coming in, with older ones going away to really see a meaningful shift. The battle lines being drawn and fought right now hint at decade long time to change scales.
It uses an internet connection on both machines in lieu of a cable. Simple and free, but not necessarily secure. They could be storing everyone's data as they "help them" transfer it. Is Sandra Bullock available to star in Hollywood's next blockbuster sequel, "The Net 2"?
Otherwise, Laplink charges $40 for their software & cable, for one time use! http://www.amazon.com/Laplink-PCmover-Ultimate-High-Speed-Cable/dp/B008MR37XK
To be clear this is really not anything to do with bashing MS. Although that does get my full support as well.
No, it's all about the crazy situation of dependency we find ourselves in. I find it incredible that we ever allowed a huge proportion of the worlds business, governmental and other infrastructure to become dependent on a single supplier in a foreign country over which we have no control.
The same arguments would apply to dependency on an Apple or a Google or whoever.
Seems this does not bother you. It has increasingly bothered me for decades already.
What bothers me is how every time Windows is mentioned the poor user is bashed as being some type of ignorant cave dwelling Neanderthal that is not enlightened enough to jump on the Linux train.
There is always the simplistic BS about Open Office or whatever it is called now being all you need to replace MS Office and blah blah blah.
Many business type applications on Windows support application automation/interoperability on a scale that I haven't seen in the Linux world.
Examples that I use frequently are AutoCAD, MS Excel, MS Word, and Internet Explorer. Some of these applications have reduced time to create engineering drawings by 90% or more.
The bottom line is most people have work to do and they need to get it done in the most pragmatic way they can.
It is about using the right tools at the right time within the budget of the task at hand.
C.W.
Since I retired from the information systems/programming world I'm sure much has changed.
The software applications I now rely on the most are Quicken, TurboTax, Excel/Outlook/Word (and the VBA scripting capabilities included therein).
My bank, brokerage firms, and some of my credit card companies let me download/upload information using that software.
I can't say for sure, but I doubt there is any non-Microsoft versions of these programs that financial institutions allow to interface with their systems, so I plan using Windows for a long while.
Microsoft doesn't always get it right (e.g. Vista, Windows 8, etc) so I choose Win7 rather than Win8.
The Component Object Model (COM), Distributed COM (DCOM), Object Linking and Embedding (OLE), ActiveX, etc. along with scripting tools allow me to make some nifty little tools for personal use.
The ability to create an instance of Internet Explorer in VBScript or an HTML Application (.hta) and extract information using the Document Object Model is also really slick.
It's how I create my version of the OBEX directory... http://ronczap.home.insightbb.com/OBEX3.htm