I agree to an extent. If you are still using older systems (and I am guilty; personally, I still use Win7, and will continue to as long as I can get support.)
But on fully-updated Win10 for the enterprise (which we have) this shouldn’t be happening. We are well protected, but we’ve had to lock down our machines, our networks, and our internet access far beyond what should be required.
I tried to do an update for win8.1 on an old laptop (orig win7) and was told it was no longer supported. How is win7 still getting it?
Paid support for two corporate versions of Windows 7 is available through early 2023, though they strongly recommend that you upgrade to Win 10 ASAP. They provide some security updates but no enhancements. My labs use some instrumentation that has not been upgraded. Since it does not connect to our internal networks or the public internet, we feel that the risk is acceptable and mitigated. We will be changing to new instrumentation in 2022, but in the meantime, we’re paying for support. My at-home personal hardware is included in that support agreement.
Oh, that makes sense.
I’ve heard of this but never really had to deal with it, thank goodness. Every instrument I worked with had an analog or RBG output that was easy to convert to digital with the right A/D board. Back in the [cough] [wheeze] good old days.
My only problem with this kind of thing was a one-off laptop I got early on that had a nice 4x3 aspect ratio screen (which I prefer) and lots of power (mostly for analysis and image-related stuff) for the time. Eventually TPTB wanted me to get rid of it because of the old operating system. Their replacements were the cheapest things you could imagine, because the agency wide IT folks mostly dealt with office workers. Us lab people were only a small minority of folks. I could have my office and lab computers separate, with the latter off the internet, but that seemed really unwieldy since I had to send data and results back and forth to people outside the agency – other researchers and journals (who were getting into digital uploads of papers).
Maybe I was being a pain . . .
Yes, it’s a huge pain in the ass. In this case, it’s a clinical trials lab, and the instrumentation is atomic absorption spectrometers that are used for detecting levels of metals in blood with very high accuracy.
There is newer and better instrumentation available now, but it simply isn’t done to change instrumentation during a clinical trial. Best case, it would require an adjustment to the protocol; worst case, it might invalidate or call into question several years and many millions of dollars in research.
It actually reports results via good ol’ 2400 bps serial data to our data acquisition system, and has no other connections, so this is about as safe as can be.
That particular CT has another year to go, and which point we’ll sell off the old stuff and buy new if we have an ongoing need for it.
My personal use of Win7 is just me being stubborn. When I can’t use it anymore, I’ll probably have to break down and use Win10, at least in some form. But not until I have no other choice. In the the meantime, everything else in our house is Win10 or Linux, and we’re well-protected by a NAT firewall, good malware protection, and fanatical backups.
When you do go Win10, I recommend the Pro version, even for home use, because it gives a lot more control. It was a careful decision for me a few years ago, and I’m happy with it. Win10 caught a lot of flak, but almost all of that was aimed at the home/consumer version where you have no control over it. The Pro version is pretty good.
You’ll need a VM to run any old 16-bit software, but Virtualbox makes that easy enough.
That makes sense! But not to a cardiac surgeon I ran into at the FDA who ran his own artificial heart valve company (at the back of a Bed, Bath, and Beyond). The valves are required to undergo accelerated wear testing to simulate five years’ of use. He once changed the testing rate of the machines half way through the test. He violated all sorts of rules (his clean room was behind a shower curtain, which he probably got at the BB&B), and was finally shut down for contaminated water used to rinse his products. This surgeon was an utter asshole, who thought he knew everything about everything.
I can see that. Design-wise it at its peak IMO. Ever since Win8 we’ve been using Classic Shell to make it seem a little more more Win7-like. And lots of anti-malware software.
That’s really fairly unlikely. I am scarred by an episode that happened some years ago. I was using a Win10 laptop to show data at a presentation. It suddenly decided to shit all over itself and demand an update right now. The update could not be stopped and I was reduced to reading spreadsheets to my betters while Win10 was chatting with the Microsoft mothership in full view on the giant display monitor. I don’t mind looking foolish, but I hate looking stupid.
Really the only things I use that require Windows at this point are Scrivener and Delphi. And there are Linux workarounds for those. I will be partially retiring this summer so my use case will change significantly anyway.
That bit a lot of people. Automatic upgrades can be awful, though some consider them a necessary evil. To me, ‘added protection against malware’ isn’t a big selling point when it acts like malware itself. That’s why when I made the switch I made sure to get the Pro version and turn off all that stuff right away. But I can totally understand not wanting to deal with it after being burned like that.
Their privacy moves may also interfere with Gerrymandering.
I wish they’d take race off the census. Or would that cause more problems?
raw data for gerrymandering, per above
Likely they’d get the data through stacking the place with bad actors for leaks, like every other agency.
I shouldn’t be so cynical. Embargoing data used to be easy but now it’s easy to leak. There are other ways to deal with gerrymandering though.
So apparently, some nft-heads are angry that browsers still enable right clicks or command-clicks…
Okay, it looks like they were a kludge to try to make it easier to find who created an image, since (a) people often share images without listing the credits, and (b) companies sometimes merchandise off images without paying the creators.