Do Old Operating Systems Ever Die?

[iseeuu]

Riding a Dead Horse (like an Old Operating System?)

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.

However, in modern business and government, because of the heavy investment factors to be taken into consideration, often other strategies have to be tried with dead horses, including the following:

1. Buying a stronger whip

2. Changing riders

3. Threatening the horse with termination

4. Appointing a committee to study the horse

5. Arranging to visit other sites to see how they ride dead horses

6. Lowering the standards, so that dead horses can be included

7. Appointing an intervention team to reanimate the dead horse

8. Creating a training session to increase the riders load share

9. Reclassifying the dead horse as living-impaired

10. Change the form so that it reads: This horse is not dead

11. Hire outside contractors to ride the dead horse

12. Harness several dead horses together for increased speed

13. Donate the dead horse to a recognized charity, thereby deducting its full original cost

14. Providing additional funding to increase the horses performance

15. Do a time management study to see if lighter riders would improve productivity

16. Purchase an after-market product to make dead horses faster

17. Declare that the dead horse has lower overhead and therefore performs better

18. Form a quality focus group to find profitable uses for dead horses

19. Rewrite the expected performance requirements for horses

20. Promote the dead horse to a supervisory position.

A similar list, much longer, appears here: Beating a Dead Horse

Author unknown

 

[mckillwashere]

Alot of times in the corporate environment, updating one thing means updating everything.
Say you have two servers that are for one or two applications, If the server is an unix environment. The application only runs in the unix enviornment. Then there are a few more servers that are running applications in windows advance server. The software thats running can talk to the unix servers and another set of servers. In order for a non unix server to talk to a unix server it has to have an encoder and decoder. So your translation program only runs on advance server. then you have some Nt servers and 2003 servers. They can all talk to each other buy all rely on the Advance server to talk to the unix server. If you buy a new base operation program then you have to replace the unix server. Then the win advance server has to be replaced since the new application does not work with the program you used. the line trickles all the way up the line to the user's since now you have to re-train them.

 

[iseeuu]

Alot of times in the corporate environment, updating one thing means updating everything.
Say you have two servers that are for one or two applications, If the server is an unix environment. The application only runs in the unix enviornment. Then there are a few more servers that are running applications in windows advance server. The software thats running can talk to the unix servers and another set of servers. In order for a non unix server to talk to a unix server it has to have an encoder and decoder. So your translation program only runs on advance server. then you have some Nt servers and 2003 servers. They can all talk to each other buy all rely on the Advance server to talk to the unix server. If you buy a new base operation program then you have to replace the unix server. Then the win advance server has to be replaced since the new application does not work with the program you used. the line trickles all the way up the line to the user's since now you have to re-train them.

Yep ... that horse definitely died ...

 

[johngalt]

The Dakotans were simply trying to say this: Change is inevitable.

Everyone else in the world is scared poopless at change - and thus they are going to continue to use their XP, Windows 98 or *shudder* OS/2 Warp machines til the end of time, thinking they are the safest on the planet.

it's quite funny, though - every XP and 9x user that I know is running around 6-10 anti-malware programs....

 

[mckillwashere]

it's quite funny, though - every XP and 9x user that I know is running around 6-10 anti-malware programs....

Wait they only run 6-10..... AND THEY DONT GET VIRUS'S!!!!!!


and they wonder why there system is slow. All those virus's.

And I do understand what they were saying. I felt like being stubborn at the moment.

 

[TheSchaft]

The Dakotans were simply trying to say this: Change is inevitable.

Everyone else in the world is scared poopless at change - and thus they are going to continue to use their XP, Windows 98 or *shudder* OS/2 Warp machines til the end of time, thinking they are the safest on the planet.

it's quite funny, though - every XP and 9x user that I know is running around 6-10 anti-malware programs....

A lot of the people I've talked to about switching from XP to Windows 7 say they don't plan to until they get a new system. It isn't fear so much as inertia - why fix something that isn't broken?

As for the multiple anti-malware programs - chalk that up to good marketing.

I suspect that the majority of people use their computers, of whatever flavor, to read e-mail, post on the occasional forum, read news, and maybe keep a household budget or write a newsletter - nothing sophisticated, nothing needing 4 cores and 6G of memory and a terabyte HD.

The computer is an appliance now. (I had written it is a tool, but it has passed that stage for consumers.) Turn it on, connect, look at e-mail, turn it off and go read a book, watch TV, etc. How does it work? Don't know, don't care.

Another driver I've heard is that they are satisfied with the software they currently have, and they don't want to spend the money and time re-learning newer products.

When my neighbors ask me for advice on buying a system, I used to ask them what they would be using it for. Now I take pity on their struggle to come up with a reason to get a new system and just recommend a system that I think they can afford. (Actually, since PCs now all come preloaded with Vista, I advise them to wait until after 22 October.)

After the "fun" with Vista, I suspect that many businesses, especially the bigger ones, will wait up to a year to switch their desktops over from XP or NT to Windows 7.

None of the above applies to geeks and gamers, obviously.

 

[patio]

Not sure what the analogy has to do with OS's...
Many are still in use today ...even by myself.

 

[chuckr]

Riding a Dead Horse (like an Old Operating System?)

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover you are riding a dead horse, the best strategy is to dismount.
Author unknown

What does the same author have to say about:

Riding a Live Horse (like a current Operating System?)

The tribal wisdom of the Dakota Indians passed on from one generation to the next, says that when you discover you are riding a live horse, the best strategy is to ...... ???

Seems (to me) that we need some 'balance' here...

This might be an interesting read:

http://www.gcn.com/Articles/1998/07...-leave-Navy-Smart-Ship-dead-in-the-water.aspx