WannaCry [OT]

[Richmond Mathewson]

That happens all the time.

Try getting support for a golfball typewriter . . .

I couldn't get a new monitor for my BBC Master Compact and had to fool 
around
with SCART sockets, RGB gubbins and a soldering iron.

But, as King Camp Gillette didn't say, but certainly implied,
planned obsolescence is what drives both commerce and development.

Richmond.

On 5/15/17 7:11 pm, Mike Kerner via use-livecode wrote:
> Unfortunately, there are very expensive pieces of gear that have controls
> on them that for one reason or another cannot be controlled by OS's newer
> than XP.  I happen to have one, here.  It cost $750,000.  There is no
> dealing with the OS issue without replacing the control, and that is also
> extremely expensive, on the order of $400,000, so you would not replace the
> control without replacing the whole unit.  M$, when they decided to dump
> the XP paradigm, just like when they got rid of DOS, broke upgradability
> for ATM's, machine tools and CMM's, X-Ray and MRI machines, PBX's, etc.
>
> On Mon, May 15, 2017 at 10:56 AM, Richard Gaskin via use-livecode <
> use-livecode at lists.runrev.com> wrote:
>
>> David V Glasgow wrote:
>>
>>> I recently finished a fixed term contract working for a pretty IT
>>> savvy NHS Trust.  The NHS has been forced by central government to
>>> reallocate IT (and other infrastructure) monies to front line
>>> services.  They are also trapped by legacy software with dependencies
>>> on old (and proprietary) Windows systems and software. Now obviously
>>> stupid, but actually historic stupidity which was in the 1990s
>>> disguised  as good business and standard practice.
>>>
>>> Not to mention the Clinical Information Systems which look and behave
>>> as if it is still the 1990’s.
>>>
>>> Apart from that, everything is fine.
>> That's the sad reality of so many security budgets: they don't become
>> adequate until after it's too late.
>>
>> The dependency on older unsafe software versions is one that's always
>> mystified me.  I once worked for a vendor whose clients included several
>> large hospital networks, and one of them required us to deliver our app in
>> a way that would maintain compatibility with IE 6, years after Microsoft
>> warned customers to stop using it.
>>
>> Subsequent versions of a software are generally supersets of features
>> found in earlier versions, with the only things missing as we go forward
>> being bugs.
>>
>> When written to spec, it should move forward gracefully.  Microsoft has
>> done a better job of maintaining backward compatibility than most.
>>
>> So if someone writes an app that doesn't work going forward, dependent on
>> things specific to an outdated system, in effect their app is dependent on
>> bugs.
>>
>> For any org to consider bug-dependent software "mission critical" should
>> raise eyebrows.  For a hospital it seems even more serious.
>>
>> But I understand how budgets tend to gloss over things like this.  And
>> this week, even the most reluctant orgs do too.
>>
>> --
>>   Richard Gaskin
>>   Fourth World Systems
>>   Software Design and Development for the Desktop, Mobile, and the Web
>>   ____________________________________________________________________
>>   Ambassador at FourthWorld.com                http://www.FourthWorld.com
>>
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>
>