Whitehall and Microsoft negotiate NHS Windows XP hacker survival plan

Re: How about @HollyHopDrive

Well I do know about a couple of systems.

One was last time I saw it a MS Dos application, the other a Win32 application.

Both would work on XP but one on anything newer.

Now since the second system was written by some of the staff (after they escaped) of the first I expect they will offer an escape route to their competitors customers. But moving data around systems is a huge task.

But a lot of software is written by small companies and the owners are nearing retirement, the code has worked for years (20+) without huge modifications, Noone is supporting those industries so people keep hold of their small systems.

Now they have OSes which cannot run them.

It can take years to migrate systems.

Re: How about @HollyHopDrive

@Steve Todd - no not at all - I'm not a developer (miss the days though!) migrated up the tree a bit. [better money, shittier work :-) ] but the stuff is obviously so out of date you need to sort the problem properly, not a half arsed fix.

The "web" has matured enough to allow browser based applications to be good enough as fat client. I'm not naive enough to suggest this is a quick 6 month project and all will be well, but a 5-10 year plan to sort things out properly. And one of the things that has to go is legacy crap.[it may be functionally ok but if it isn't a strategic solution built for the future it needs to go] You wouldn't keep an 15 year old ambulance with 15 year old equipment in would you? But likewise, you can't just throw them away and expect nothing to fill the gap. So, you just have to say, we are going to refresh everything but anything that we buy or put in from this point forward must be new and conform to the following criteria. No exceptions.

The NHS are a massive customer, if you tell the vendor it must be modern browser compatible or it will be replaced with one from your competitor. I'll tell you now, those companies will rally round and fix the problem. Open standards too so you can get your data out!!

If the software isn't modern, its probably riddled with security nightmares anyway, so likewise it probably needs to go sooner rather than later.

@afflicated_john

I'm very aware of the NHS. In fact I've worked on many a government project. And they always strike me as very political, big divides and the wheels that turn so slowly you wonder if they do actually move at all.

I'm just saying it needs somebody with some big balls to come in and shake this shit up. Not just throw some money at it and hope the problem goes away. It won't, but if you don't make some strategic plans to get out of this cyclic mess you will be doing the same thing again in 5 years time having blown a couple of billion we can little do with wasting a second time!

I for one as a taxpayer in the "shouldering the burden" tax bracket don't like this current bunch of fuckwits wasting my hard earned pennies. No commercial business would last with the same attitude to blowing money on failed projects and half fixes without going bust, so why does the public sector think its ok? Is it because they can just tax us all a little harder rather than addressing the real issue of just trying to spend less in the long term?

Re: How about

@ AC, You're welcome to come and try to speak to my team but we will politely sit you down and explain that yes, we've been aware of this issue for years. We told the board four years ago and we've been begging our finance department for funding for the last three years. The IT representative at board level has been begging for us as well. Unfortunately we have a finance director who can't see past the end of her nose (usually because it's buried in the anus of the chief exec), is totally dis-interested in general IT issues aside from "When am I due a new laptop?" or "do you have a spare laptop? My son needs one for a school project" (Yes really)

Most of our PC estate is only just able to run XP so upgrade to Win 7 or 8 will also incur a huge hardware cost as well (at last count £2.7 million in hardware alone nevermind the cost of licensing which will probably add the same sort of figure). We are a relatively small trust with around 4000 PCs covering a relatively small geographical area. Multiply this by all the NHS trusts and you start to see the problem .

Please do tell where this mythical budget is available from as I've yet to see any of it. Speaking with collegues from other trusts it is a similar situation there. We are being told "There is no budget". We can't magic hardware or software out of thin air. What in your infinite wisdom do you suggest we do? Oh and I will laugh at you if you suggest open source. I'm not against open source but when you have as many standards, interdependancies etc that we have, open source just doesn't work, no matter how much I wish it would.

I assure you, this issue is generally not the local IT department's fault but a fault of senior managment/board members.

Additionally you're welcome to try to "slap the incompetence" out of me but I assure you it won't end well for you.

AC for obvious reasons.

Re: How about

No actually. Centralised.

Re: Balmer for the win!

Here goes, these two have caused us along with many other people issues.

1) Full screen DOS mode in Vista also followed with 7, some DOS executables run in various VGA graphics mode to provide more lines per page. Fixed by using XP instead.

Why MS are bumholes

2) Removal of NETBIOS, this stops a lot of applications which rely on it for inter program communication.

This is an example

There you go two pretty serious issues, and we still have a couple of customers unwilling to update so they HAVE to stay on XP or earlier.