On Tue, May 16, 2017 at 10:57:04PM +1200, Simon Geard wrote: > On Tue, 2017-05-16 at 11:03 +0100, Richard Melville wrote: > > > Recently, I saw Windows XP on a consultants terminal at a local > > hospital. When I expressed my concern, and disbelief, he just threw > > up his hands in a helpless manner and said that that was what he was > > stuck with. Now we've seen the results of that folly. > > My understanding is that that has little to do with Windows, and more > to do with the nature of the healthcare IT industry - lots of small > companies that sell something useful, but go out of business quite > quickly due to an inability to make money out of it. As such, hospitals > are full of unsupported old software - often tied to specialised > hardware - that can't easily be made to work on a newer OS. > I don't totally agree - yes, specialist hardware/software only gets developed for one OS. But as with all things, keeping things going should be a budgeted cost. My understanding is that we (British taxpayers) used to pay M$ for XP support after it was EOL'd, but somebody in the government decided to cancel the contract.
For any large business, paying for software support is an accepted way of working: I used to support a payroll system based on a proprietary package, and I don't think anything libre could have kept up with regulatory (tax) changes in an acceptable manner. But our current overlords would have problems managing the proverbial ... in a brewery. Sorry, I've been trying to keep politics out of this, but it seems better to assign the blame where it is due. ĸen -- I live in a city. I know sparrows from starlings. After that everything is a duck as far as I'm concerned. -- Monstrous Regiment -- http://lists.linuxfromscratch.org/listinfo/lfs-support FAQ: http://www.linuxfromscratch.org/blfs/faq.html Unsubscribe: See the above information page Do not top post on this list. A: Because it messes up the order in which people normally read text. Q: Why is top-posting such a bad thing? A: Top-posting. Q: What is the most annoying thing in e-mail? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style
