Windows 10 Compatibility Issues Forcing US Air Force To Scrap a Significant Number of Computers (betanews.com) 151
The US Department of Defense has decreed that the Air Force must complete its migration to Windows 10 by March 31 2018. From a report: Failure to do so will result in any systems not running Microsoft's latest operating system being denied access to the Air Force Network. However, because Windows 10 is not compatible with many of the Air Force's existing systems, a significant number of computers will need to be replaced in order to hit the deadline.
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There are a number of things that Win10 has broken at this point from a hardware standpoint. One of which is imaging devices if they're using a now non-supported imaging codec. This broke a great deal of web cams, and I wouldn't be surprised if it broke other WIA devices too like normal cameras and scanners.
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Maybe they use some proprietary data interface card that is only available in an ISA or PCI format, and modern systems don't support those kinds of slots.
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https://www.amazon.com/StarTec... [amazon.com]
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It depends. For example, if it is specialized hardware it can't just be replaced.
Linux (Score:4, Insightful)
Use Linux
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You're close, I bet. Proprietary (old) imaging and scanning hardware will not have drivers. Old apps will require these devices.
This isn't unusual for any large organization that standardized on apps. The planning and budgeting is a military problem only when there was a disconnect. Someone should have known this a year ago.
Re:Are they still using XP? (Score:5, Insightful)
"Slap in a SSD" is great when you have three computers at home. When you're dealing with thousands, the simplest steps become year long projects.
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You would think Linux would be perfect for old computers, that this would be a market niche they could capitalize on. You would be wrong. Unfortunately Linux breaks its driver compatability WITH EVERY RELEASE. They also on an irrational whim deleted XAA and dozens of drivers for older cards. The mentality of Linux devs seems to be that no one would ever want to use a computer that is older than three years and everyone should have the latest and greatest $1000 workstation.
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OK, I was overexaggerating a bit. If you go further back like ones from 2002 or before I think you'll have more problems
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Someone with navigation skills, can fly at night, has a lot of international flying experience, a top security clearance and the other people needed to load, unload.
That search deep into plain text Air force files cannot be logged, seen, recovered, tracked in any way.
Old version of mil computers stay secure from all congressional oversight.
A new MS OS might go full Iran Contra and recall freedom
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That reminds me of some of the laptop computers I worked on back in the early 1990's. I worked for a well-known laptop manufacturer who made some laptops for the military. The military laptop I worked with was Tempest certified. It had a removable SCSI hard drive where all data on the drive was encrypted. It was a nightmare to take it apart. Once you took off the cover you had to remove all of the RF shielding (128 screws held the RF shielding on, I kid you not!). The screen was an electroluminescent VGA sc
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I would have been horrified to know that our military just uses Microsoft Windows and not some super secret flavor of a home grown operating system. What happened to security?
Even Windows is more secure that some crap OS slapped together by a low-bid defense contractor. These are the people that designed the F-35. To get a feel for milspec software, go try to write a program in Ada.
COTS > Milspec
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It is actually happening in all of DoD. The big thing driving hardware refresh is the DISA mandate to use TPM 2.0 as part of their "Secure Hardware Baseline". There is a lot of hardware that is even just a couple of years old that is stuck at TPM 1.2 (vendors not offering updates) that is having to be replaced.
Comment removed (Score:5, Insightful)
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pcmcia cards
I thought these things were a myth.
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Really Sppoky to think (Score:2)
Re:Really Sppoky to think (Score:5, Informative)
Windows 10 Enterprise, but thanks for playing. "Secure Hardware Baseline" using TPM 2.0 is what is the big driver. Even systems only a couple of years old are having to be replaced because mfg's not offering updates from TPM 1.2
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I was really confused because how does a computer replacement fix compatibility "with many of the Air Forceâ(TM)s existing systems"? In context systems didn't seem to mean end user computers. Or servers.
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You left out that Windows enterprise lacks the anal probe and does not claim ownership of your software claiming the right to install any software they want and any time they want and of course delete any software they want to for any reason they choose. Notice the latest scummy MS paid troll tactic claiming the professional version is not as corrupt as home user, mind you they demand the right to spy on you at your expense, you pay for the hardware, you pay for software and you pay for the internet connect
About time, overdue replacements (Score:2)
Many of the systems I see around are identical to the models I was putting in place in 2009. They need to upgrade, and anything to pressure them to do so is a good idea IMO.
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Though typically deadline pressure only gets enough people added to the project when it's already too late.
A better strategy would be to re-evaluate systems that are likely to miss the deadline, put exceptions in for those, and get the staffing needed to meet new deadlines that are realistic.
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As an Air Force member this sounds absolutely preposterous.
Mass Chaos (Score:5, Interesting)
I worked for the USAF for 8 years as an Airman and 30 as a civilian. I went from an HP85 for line monitoring at a comm site in 1983 to workstations in an aircraft hangar in 2017. I remember going from win95 to win98 and it was good. We went to win2000 and it was good. XP Pro upgrade was good. Then Vista came.....over 50% of our workstations were down at any one time for over a year. After a few years we got Win7 and it was so wonderful. I use Linux at home but Win7 was as stable as I could wish and a million times better than Vista. They avoided 8 and when I retired last year the big dread was Win10. Nobody likes it at home, I know a bunch of people that bought Macs just because of Win10. I'm glad I'm going to miss that adventure.
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Re:Mass Chaos (Score:5, Interesting)
Windows 10 also has spam in the start menu ('Suggested Apps'), mysterious phoning-home ('telemetry'), on-by-default web-search in the start-bar search, it deliberately makes it difficult to disable Cortana, and they're pushing UWP, the whole point of which appears to be lock people in to Microsoft's app-store that nobody asked for.
But there's Direct3D 12, which seems neat... if you can't use Vulkan.
Re:Mass Chaos (Score:4, Informative)
Windows 10 also has spam in the start menu ('Suggested Apps'), mysterious phoning-home ('telemetry'), on-by-default web-search in the start-bar search, it deliberately makes it difficult to disable Cortana, and they're pushing UWP, the whole point of which appears to be lock people in to Microsoft's app-store that nobody asked for.
But there's Direct3D 12, which seems neat... if you can't use Vulkan.
These "features" are irrelevant to an Enterprise installation of Windows 10 since they can and should be disabled for all Enterprise installations by competent system administrators.
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Suggested Apps can be deleted, Cortana can be disabled through the registry. Telemetry can be disabled/blocked. Some other web browsers are just as bad. I've seen telemetry streams go to Kaspersky Labs in Virginina. You can't blame Microsoft for wanting UWP. That was the pain with the old non-networked PDA's like the Palm Pilot in that you needed to keep them sync'ed manually between every machine you docked them with. Without anything like svn or git, a single text file could end up with three or more vers
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Our VMWare farm does it just fine.
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If you don't do all th
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Oh, but you can turn that off (if you're paying enough attention to realise they're doing it in the first place, and have the technical competence to disable it)
Other companies are doing it too (and therefore it's ok?)
It's understandable why they want to do that to their customers (and therefore it's ok?)
Mixing weak sauces doesn't give you a stronger sauce.
Your defence of UWP is particularly pitiful. Microsoft deliberately want to prevent distribution outside their app-store. They don't want you to be ab
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you turn those off dipshit.....and it isn't even on for enterprise.
UWP is dead. Microsoft accepted that already. PWA is coming in the spring update and UWP will be tossed in the trash.
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At home, sure it might be a problem for someone that needs to look at their start menu to figure out how to open an app.
At work, all that crap is gone. Win10 not running on some hardware is a bigger problem for us - we needed to find devices running older chipsets that still have Win7 drivers as our Win10 migration is dragging out much longer than it should.
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Windows 10 also has spam in the start menu ('Suggested Apps')
Only for stupid people who don't turn off the most obvious of settings "Occasionally show suggestions in start".
Seriously anyone running windows 10 with this setting on should be given an etchasketch because they are too stupid to own a computer.
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Microsoft is getting rid of Cortana as you know her and she is becoming a machine learning service. Your search will not need to involve her....and she is way better than clippy reborn...but you probably hate Google Assistant too.
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Re: Mass Chaos (Score:2)
Neither does Win10 Enterprise.
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And for those who can't get Enterprise??
This policy from Microsoft leaves a substantial gap in the market! There is a group of users who need control over their PC, so Home and "Pro" (it's not really since MS removed many options) are out, but they aren't large enough to justify the cost and infrastructure required for Enterprise. I'm guessing MS have decided that this market doesn't matter much to them as they are entirely neglected by the current licensing model.
The problem is that most people currently w
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Windows 10 is wonderful. Macs are crashing left and right and Windows 10 just keeps chugging.
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Why doesn't USAF use Linux or something else to save costs? They can even customize their own OS with it!
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Nobody wants the US mil to have their own OS the US mil can create and upgrade using their own internal experts.
The more Windows, the more work for contractors and consultants.
Thats decades of wages, pay, shareholder value and over time.
Entire parts of the US private sector are supported for years by helping the US mil understand and use M$ products.
Should the US ever go back to an Ada or their own Linux with internal US mil work
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The short answer is they do not for the same reasons other organizations cannot be rid of MS...too much computing infrastructure and organizational processes rely upon MS software. Throwing Linux in there does not solve those problems. And no organization can halt operations while ripping out MS Malware and replacing it with software, especially not the U.S. Military.
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With 114,000 employees, Microsoft is one of the largest employers in the US which means that congress people kiss their booty and pass bills requiring the military to use products made by Americans that benefit the American people. Fat chance finding a Linux company that passes the muster, outside of RedHat which dropped development of their own desktop OS long ago.
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The Air Force does have it's own Linux Distribution but it's not for standard installations. https://spi.dod.mil/LPS-Public... [dod.mil]
govt joins the club (Score:2)
Consumers, and business owners in particular, love to drag their feet on upgrading their hardware. Kick the can down the street again and again, until finally they hit a wall and are forced to upgrade. It's interesting to see the government pulling the same derp maneuver.
A better plan is to do gradual upgrades on a schedule. When you suddenly find you have to upgrade a bunch of computers, AND peripherals AND os AND proprietary software all at once, it's not only financially painful but causes major pains
Re:govt joins the club (Score:4, Insightful)
A better plan is to do gradual upgrades on a schedule.
Yep, cuz when you're managing 1,000+ systems it's much easier to deal with 5-10 different configurations than it is for just 1.
Re:govt joins the club (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:govt joins the club (Score:5, Informative)
I've seen it way too many times. The typical argument is "Why do I need to replace the controller, it works fine". The answer is, because it runs on a serial board interface on your old Win 95 machine that just died (22 years later) and the board doesn't fit in any new computer, and nobody makes the software for it or makes a replacement serial board to drive the machine.
The sad thing is, that just might bust the company.
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The sad thing is, that just might bust the company.
Jeez, it's a real shame nobody ever thought of creating another operating system to save these people from Microsoft's reign of terror.
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That's what
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If I had installed a 386-sx motherboard into some piece of hardware in 1996 that controlled a steel mill, or a lathe, and the software it ran on was embedded Linux, none of the current mainstream versions of Linux would now run on it.
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On the other hand, you would have no problems using whatever version of Linux you were using back in 1996, and if you had to, you could even modify it.
One of the problems I have seen with equipment running something like Windows XP is that Microsoft will not sell or license Windows XP anymore (outside of a MSDN subscription) which means that if you need to replace the computer, even if you can procure some new hardware that's compatible with Windows XP you can't actually buy a license from Microsoft to inst
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Most of those devices like don't even handle the RS232 standard that well either. Granted, they can generally do fine with how almost all RS232 devices are actually implemented. However, for example RS232 standard allows for the voltage level to be up to +/- 15 V, and if you manage to find some weirdo device that actually uses something like a 12 V signalling level, good luck trying to find something that can talk to it that's not ancient.
Other way around (Score:2)
Many of the systems are incompatible with Windows 10, not the other way around. One piece of govt software I work with uses a version of Crystal Reports that's about 15 years old, and hasn't been supported for ages. The reports do not function on newer drivers, and there's no compatible driver for W10, so users of that softwa
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Luxury!!!
We're still supporting Lotus Approach databases, which was deprecated in favor of MS Office back in 2003.
Yep, 15 years later and these groups still haven't moved to a newer program...
Yeah, I feel their pain... (Score:2)
Re: The hardware apocolypse is getting worse (Score:2)
Yeah 2 years to rewrite all the drivers and 3rd party software
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I kept a coffin dodger laptop alive this way. There used to be companies who dealt with recycling spare parts for laptops plus the manuals in PDF form. The LCD screens were the most expensive part at half the price of the original laptop with a trade in of the old screen (they could replace the mini fluorescent tube). Everything else was fairly cheap - cooling assembly for the CPU/GPU, logic circuit for the screen lid closed latch. Even when the audio jack got mangled due to the cable being pulled, that cou
Deep State 9 (Score:1)
I'm pretty sure that the government is forcing the Air Force to upgrade to Windows 10 so they can install spyware and find out what the Air Force is up to.
Anyone who loves freedom will fight the government's efforts to control the military. Obama took away our guns and now he's trying to take away our F-22 Raptors, too.
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Obama took away our guns and now he's trying to take away our F-22 Raptors, too.
You sir, are a moron
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I am a moron, but you still get a "woosh!" for not realizing I was joking.
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Most of us know you're just a joker.
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One would hope.
My jokes and witty repartee are the reasons I was elected President of Slashdot Comments three times. And I intend to represent all Slashdot commenters, even the haters and losers.
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No shit, Sherlock. It just shows that the most outrageous and uninformed statements can be easily mistaken for mainstream Republican views.
Latin never goes out of style (Score:1)
If they had used Mainframe "green screen" applications, they wouldn't have this problem.
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Certainly. The applications would still be running in terminal emulators on whatever hardware is current.
Wondering what happened to them all? (Score:1)
Check out gsaauctions.gov. When government property isn't needed any more, it usually goes to some type of surplus room for a while. If no one claims the item from surplus then after a while it will be auctioned off to the public. Hence the site. They have all sorts of stuff on that auction site. From old FBI police cars to former DoD computers. Note that most of the computers have had their hard drives removed though.
Hum. MS has to love the profits (Score:2)
Changing OS is easy, unless.. (Score:2)
..you have old computer controlled machines. The device drivers may not be available, either because the product is obsolete, the company is dead, or they decided to not update the drivers, or the updates are prohibitively expensive
It's not just hardware. Some old (very expensive) software only runs on the old OS.. same problems as device drivers
If all you use is common, recent software... no problem
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At a previous job, we had two Unholtz-Dickie shaker tables. One was controlled by a PC running Windows XP, the other by a PC running Windows 2000. Nobody ever touched the machines except to run the U-D application to operate the shaker table.
It's no more of an issue than the fact that some equipment might use Amphenol connectors that might have been out of production for a decade or more.
At my present job they are scrambling to find ancient Cinch-Jones connectors.
Why Not Virtual Machines atop Linux? (Score:1)
Why not install some version of Linux and run whatever windows is necessary as a virtual machine? Sure would make windows upgrades easier to deploy, as one could merely distribute an updated image, and machines would be less likely to crash all the way down, and instead would only crash the emulator. For devices that depend on old versions of windows, the VM image might be read only in order to halt any malicious writes.
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Re: Why Not Virtual Machines atop Linux? (Score:2)
Microsoft has done it's marketing and schmear. Forget about what's best, consider what is politically best
800-53 (Score:2)
They should require a complete set of source code (Score:1)
They should require a complete set of source code for every piece of technology utilized. There should never be a piece of third party technology that has a dependency like this that puts a third party in control of critical technology.
It's utter bull shit that a government entity of any kind anywhere is putting themselves in such a situation where they do not have full control over the technology they're adopting. Talk about a security failure.
I know there is at least one major government which is not Russ
Not too hard (Score:2)
For a fraction of the cost of the shitty F22 Program, the air force could...
-Deploy brand new, state of the art computers across the entire Air Force.
-Pay to have any legacy programs rewritten or migrated to their OS of choice.
-Pay to have all of those certified.
-Pay Microsoft to develop a DoD-grade OS compatible with those programs.
-Give every Air Force employee a huge Christmas bonus.
-Solve world hunger.
-Fix the national debt.
-Find extra-terrestrial life.
They could use Linux..Wait, no (Score:2)
I was about to say that with Linux this wouldn't happen. But then I remebered that X.org had deleted dozens of video drivers when they decided on an irrational whim to delete all of the XAA code which turned a huge number of older computers into boat anchors. Linux systems developers seem to think you should need the latest Intel GPU made within the last 3 years. Whoops.
Anyone solved the multiple PIN prompts issue? (Score:2)
Lots of people having multiple prompts for smart card PINs. Has anyone solved that one? And no, Google search doesn't return useful results.
How old are these machines? (Score:1)
Even in Linux, at some point the hardware is just too outdated.