A few months of headache is probably still very much worth it. Although they aren't the only ones. Anything related to mechanical engineering is often horribly outdated. Just recently saw a brand new device to separate waste. Allegedly one of the best in the world. The controller runs on some arcane and old version of Windows CE or something like that that is half a day before the extremely long support window from Microsoft for embedded systems.
I don't think there is any technical justification for this you could just as well have used a brand new Windows 98. But jokes aside, even if the OS is still officially supported, why not choose a newer platform when starting such projects... There would be enough time to evaluate an OS.
It might be as simple as those old OS versions supporting serial or parallel ports or whatever arcane connector the Waste Seperator requires.
Ultimately, if it's a single-purpose machine-controlling-machine that is air-gapped and never requires internet or external storage access, what difference does it make what it runs?
Often the use case to connect such a controller is getting telemetry data from the machine. Not for waste sorting, but we have a machine to solder some parts and puts information about the items in a text file. It also runs an old Windows OS. The usual route to get process information is through a network share but the system only speaks smb1. Since we banned that protocol we now need to retrofit a small software application that just writes the data into a database. The device gets its own network segment and firewall rules and all but it still isn't completely air-gapped.
All that for basically a counter on how many parts it soldered so that we have an idea about how many parts we have in storage.
I think these decisions to use an old OS are mostly done because it was used for decades. Modern OS still know how to talk with serial ports. These connectors are still standard because they are much more reliable than USB for example, especially over larger distances. They are in use for any form a data that isn't audiovisual, where you need far more bandwidth.
... enjoyed a 65% market share as recently as January 2009. But its share began to steadily slide in the late 2000s, ... The demise of Internet Explorer coincided with Chrome's rapid rise. Launched in 2008...
there is a firefox-shaped hole in this story. Between 2000 and 2009, IE had moments where it was above 90%. The demise coincided with firefox's rapid rise. Chrome was a good browser, but it came a few years later.
In fact, IE stopped evolving after winning the browser war against Netscape, with version 6. Presumably, Microsoft wanted to block a future where windows desktops were irrelevant. This allowed firefox to raise from the mozilla-grave and provide a convincingly superior alternative, while Microsoft was asleep at the wheel.
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers where e.g. thecounter peaks IE in 2004Q2 with 95% . Other graphs and numbers on that page also point to the period of 2002-2004 as the point where IE started declining.
For Japan (nikkei writer lives), Firefox was never popular like in EU. People jumped from IE to Chrome.
I don't know why, ActiveX (except Flash and Java) wasn't big except some special gov sites so not a blocker for daily usage. Maybe Mozilla did great marketing in EU/US? I saw Google Chrome TV commercial (with a new great song that I love), but never saw for Firefox.
Basically there were 2 options: IE and the mozilla suite. The last one was so bloated that almost nobody used it.
Then some people decided to cut the fat, and threw everything except the browser away. The result was phoenix, a browser rising from the netscape ashes. It got renamed to firebord and then firefox, after name clashes with existing software. Mozilla took notice, and refocused away from the suite and to firefox. Apart from a serious downsizing, firefox got features like not being infectable by activex, being a bit faster than IE, and the killer feature: Tabs.
And that was enough. Every techy saw a better browser, and firefox spread by word of mouth. Every techy who was sick enough of malware hunting installed firefox at friends and family, with the treat that free support would evaporate if IE came back.
Meanwhile microsoft loudly proclaimed IE fast enough, malware problems with activeX and toolbars nonexistent, and tabs as too advanced for the average XP user.
There were hard battles fought in the enterprise. The average corporate intranet was taped together with activex, and firefox was the heathen that ignored the holy group policies. Besides, microsoft had a very succesfull campaign repurposing enterprise windows admin and dev staff to just say no to open source and laugh it out of the network.
Meanwhile, the average corporate underling had a better browser at home for free, and the internet slowly became unusable in IE. In the end, the end users won over their atrofied IT departments, but a lot of gnashing of teeth happened in the process.
Let’s take a step back and reminisce about the late 1980s and 90s, a time period when the U.S. was consumed with panic about Japan’s claim on the future via their technological might and wise long-term business sense. Steve Jobs looked up to Sony. Gibson set Neuromancer’s opening scene in Chiba. The anxiety is incredibly overt in movies like Gung Ho and books like Crichton’s Rising Sun.
Now they will have headaches for months because Internet Explorer is sunsetting.
I don’t intend to be mean, but I find the perspective interesting. Especially as new anxieties grow about China’s perceived claim on the future for somewhat similar reasons.
And then I look at the windows and I see the US city I live in unable to fix dangerous pothole, or collect trash.
Then I had to learn what is a boiling advisory because water is not safe to drink out of the tap.
Does Japan and China have functional school? That might be the kicker on the long run.
Seems like fake news. If people have continued to use IE11 until now, what's to stop them from continuing to use it henceforth? It being "deprecated" doesn't stop you from installing and using it.
Last year I was given a piece of pump control software to inspect, with the focus being the potential possibility to modify it.
We knew it had a web interface, but just couldn't get it to start.
The researcher who commissioned this mentioned that only one person ever managed to start that app - another researcher who used an ancient laptop with IE11 as the only browser.
We took that laptop, launch IE11 with the proper URL and lo and behold - a Java Applet appeared before our eyes.
All the modern browsers removed support for this technology around 2018.
27 comments
[ 0.21 ms ] story [ 66.1 ms ] threadWhen things are that inefficient, it's hard to have too much sympathy.
I don't think there is any technical justification for this you could just as well have used a brand new Windows 98. But jokes aside, even if the OS is still officially supported, why not choose a newer platform when starting such projects... There would be enough time to evaluate an OS.
Ultimately, if it's a single-purpose machine-controlling-machine that is air-gapped and never requires internet or external storage access, what difference does it make what it runs?
All that for basically a counter on how many parts it soldered so that we have an idea about how many parts we have in storage.
I think these decisions to use an old OS are mostly done because it was used for decades. Modern OS still know how to talk with serial ports. These connectors are still standard because they are much more reliable than USB for example, especially over larger distances. They are in use for any form a data that isn't audiovisual, where you need far more bandwidth.
I genuinely didn’t know where to start.
In fact, IE stopped evolving after winning the browser war against Netscape, with version 6. Presumably, Microsoft wanted to block a future where windows desktops were irrelevant. This allowed firefox to raise from the mozilla-grave and provide a convincingly superior alternative, while Microsoft was asleep at the wheel.
See e.g. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Usage_share_of_web_browsers where e.g. thecounter peaks IE in 2004Q2 with 95% . Other graphs and numbers on that page also point to the period of 2002-2004 as the point where IE started declining.
I don't know why, ActiveX (except Flash and Java) wasn't big except some special gov sites so not a blocker for daily usage. Maybe Mozilla did great marketing in EU/US? I saw Google Chrome TV commercial (with a new great song that I love), but never saw for Firefox.
Basically there were 2 options: IE and the mozilla suite. The last one was so bloated that almost nobody used it.
Then some people decided to cut the fat, and threw everything except the browser away. The result was phoenix, a browser rising from the netscape ashes. It got renamed to firebord and then firefox, after name clashes with existing software. Mozilla took notice, and refocused away from the suite and to firefox. Apart from a serious downsizing, firefox got features like not being infectable by activex, being a bit faster than IE, and the killer feature: Tabs.
And that was enough. Every techy saw a better browser, and firefox spread by word of mouth. Every techy who was sick enough of malware hunting installed firefox at friends and family, with the treat that free support would evaporate if IE came back.
Meanwhile microsoft loudly proclaimed IE fast enough, malware problems with activeX and toolbars nonexistent, and tabs as too advanced for the average XP user.
There were hard battles fought in the enterprise. The average corporate intranet was taped together with activex, and firefox was the heathen that ignored the holy group policies. Besides, microsoft had a very succesfull campaign repurposing enterprise windows admin and dev staff to just say no to open source and laugh it out of the network.
Meanwhile, the average corporate underling had a better browser at home for free, and the internet slowly became unusable in IE. In the end, the end users won over their atrofied IT departments, but a lot of gnashing of teeth happened in the process.
Now they will have headaches for months because Internet Explorer is sunsetting.
I don’t intend to be mean, but I find the perspective interesting. Especially as new anxieties grow about China’s perceived claim on the future for somewhat similar reasons.
And then I look at the windows and I see the US city I live in unable to fix dangerous pothole, or collect trash. Then I had to learn what is a boiling advisory because water is not safe to drink out of the tap.
Does Japan and China have functional school? That might be the kicker on the long run.
https://techcommunity.microsoft.com/t5/windows-it-pro-blog/i...
Context: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31752496
We knew it had a web interface, but just couldn't get it to start.
The researcher who commissioned this mentioned that only one person ever managed to start that app - another researcher who used an ancient laptop with IE11 as the only browser.
We took that laptop, launch IE11 with the proper URL and lo and behold - a Java Applet appeared before our eyes.
All the modern browsers removed support for this technology around 2018.
What Chrome, Chromium, and Microsoft Chrome?