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Windows XP Spotter (the club)


FranceBB

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I was at a customer site a couple weeks ago to do some physical inventory work and they had quite a few Windows XP computers at both of the locations I visited. I thought about this thread but also knew it would not have been appropriate for me to take pictures of those computers. They were only being used to run old machines. Some were used to run some sort of metal grinding machine and others were used to operate lasers.

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I know this is about XP, but...

Couple months ago i was tasked with transplanting the Win2K install of some old CNC controller system into a more modern Core I3-5-7 PC.

As you could guess, it failed, so we ended up fixing the old system instead. Even if i had managed to get Win2K running on the new system, i doubt that i would be able to find any Win2K drivers for the integrated GPIO ports.

 

It turned out, the local dealer/support company for that CNC controller was holding on to the fix in order to make the client buy the modern version...

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Kinda no surprise there.

We have regional dealers that are caught holding back fixes like that more often than you might think.

There are 300-some "robots" at the factory and 260-some all run XP (I would be fired if I posted a picture, these robots build electrical parts for BMW, Daimler, and Ford and warranty-only parts for a GM model no longer used in current production vehicles).

 

The funny part is the teenage kids working the factory floor right out of high school, "We could build parts faster if that robot was upgraded to Windows 10."

You reply, "XP is actually fastest for this application, it's an embedded OS on a socket-479 90nm cpu running at 1.8 GHz with a 400 MHz bus."

Their eyes glaze over like they just missed the bus and have to walk to school.

 

 

Edited by ArcticFoxie
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  • 3 weeks later...
On 8/30/2021 at 1:48 PM, ArcticFoxie said:

The funny part is the teenage kids working the factory floor right out of high school, "We could build parts faster if that robot was upgraded to Windows 10."

That's hilarious!

Windows 10 is so much slower in general (primarily because of all the extra "features"), that I think production would slow to a crawl if those robots were upgraded to it.

Besides that, I doubt 10 would support them anyway.  11 certainly won't, unless M$ relents on it's somewhat unrealistically high minimum requirements (last I heard, there was some rumors suggesting they might, but that was several weeks ago-- an eternity in the computer industry).

c

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On 8/29/2021 at 6:07 PM, jaclaz said:

@FranceBB

I wonder what is the use of the post-it with KL4665 on it :whistle:

jaclaz

I really hope it's the name of the host and they login with their own account via Active Directory...

 

... and that the post it is not the password xD

 

P.s why do I have the French flag? I didn't choose it. Besides, I'm not French, "France" in my nickname stands for my first name: Francesco (aka Frank) and "B" is the first letter of my surname (double B cause FranceB was taken). Not much creativity, I know, but still...

Edited by FranceBB
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14 hours ago, FranceBB said:

P.s why do I have the French flag? I didn't choose it. Besides, I'm not French, "France" in my nickname stands for my first name: Francesco (aka Frank) and "B" is the first letter of my surname (double B cause FranceB was taken). Not much creativity, I know, but still...

There is something weird about how the flags work in this version of the forum.

https://msfn.org/board/topic/182837-my-flag-got-changed-to-uk-where-did-scotland-go/

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14 hours ago, FranceBB said:

P.s why do I have the French flag? I didn't choose it. Besides, I'm not French, "France" in my nickname stands for my first name: Francesco (aka Frank) and "B" is the first letter of my surname (double B cause FranceB was taken). Not much creativity, I know, but still...

What country are you actually in?
The flag should surely follow the country stated in your profile.
:dubbio:

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10 minutes ago, Dave-H said:

What country are you actually in?
The flag should surely follow the country stated in your profile.
:dubbio:

I was born in Italy, but I've been living in the UK since 2015 (namely in Chelsea, London), so my IP Address is always a British one.

I didn't pick any country when I registered, but rather "European Union" in fact I had the EU flag (not for any particular reason other than trying to be as generic as possible).

Edited by FranceBB
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14 hours ago, FranceBB said:

I really hope it's the name of the host and they login with their own account via Active Directory...

 

... and that the post it is not the password xD

My office desk several years ago and two jobs ago almost always had a stack of 10 to 20 post-it notes with anywhere from only one to ten or so seemingly random text strings of three to five characters.

One day the IT Manager calls me out specifically in a meeting with about 20 of us and reminds us all that passwords are not supposed to be written down where prying eyes could find them.

Accusing me of violating company policy, then he asks "Why do you have so many passwords?"

My first reply was, "They're not passwords, they are all text only and no numbers, all of our passwords are not only alphanumeric but also have to be a minumum of 12 characters long."

STILL accusing me of violating company policy, he INSISTS that I reveal the "hidden meaning" behind all of my post-it notes.

"They're stock market ticket symbols that I'm monitoring as investment opportunities."

 

edit:  meant to say ticker, not ticket

Edited by ArcticFoxie
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The post-it notes would be dated on when I added the company to my "watch list".

The IT Manager was convinced that it was a hidden code for basically only three passwords required for various network applications.

He thought that if I put all of the pink post-it notes in chronological order, that was one password.

Put all of the yellow post-it notes in chronological order, using only those with one text string, that was another password.

For the next couple of weeks, all 20 or so of us that were in that meeting put random post-it notes anywhere and everywhere.

The receptionist always brown-bagged her lunch and always used a post-it note whenever she left something in the refigerator.

She wasn't in the meeting but it got to the point where she would no longer put her NAME and DATE on her refrigerator items (a prerequisite by the cleaning crew), but was putting things like "The password is 'pAsswOrd' ".

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35 minutes ago, FranceBB said:

I was born in Italy, but I've been living in the UK since 2015 (namely in Chelsea, London), so my IP Address is always a British one.

I didn't pick any country when I registered, but rather "European Union" in fact I had the EU flag (not for any particular reason other than trying to be as generic as possible).

I suspect that the EU flag was probably dropped in the new version of the forum software, and it defaulted to France as it's what it thought was the nearest equivalent!
If you want to change that I guess you'll have to set yourself as being in the UK in your profile.
:)

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1 hour ago, Dave-H said:

I suspect that the EU flag was probably dropped in the new version of the forum software, and it defaulted to France as it's what it thought was the nearest equivalent!
If you want to change that I guess you'll have to set yourself as being in the UK in your profile.
:)

I suspect that if he specifies Chelsea he will get a Russian flag instead ... :whistle:

@FranceBB

... and all this time I thought you were an AirBnB superhost :w00t:

jaclaz

Edited by jaclaz
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17 hours ago, FranceBB said:

I really hope it's the name of the host and they login with their own account via Active Directory...

 

... and that the post it is not the password xD

Sticking to Password and security topic - back when I finished university and went to my first full-time job, in an outsourcing company doing stinky stuff for the very big IT company we love to hate here for dropping support for older applications, messy documentation, dying domains etc... with a lot of other newcommers like me... needless to say, the sense of humour in the office was between high-school hoolies and conscript barracks, so we were so below the floor we could scare people knocking at it from below. And rotation was so high, that having a year-long experience in this company was considered long experience. But that's the reality of neo-colonial slave meant to make money for his overseas masters. Anyway, you get that the atmosphere was highly 'professional'.

But, still, the thing we were working on was highly confidential - which makes me laugh right now, but back then, we could not bring mobile phones to the room, the windows were without knobs, so we could not throw out a device with unpublished code and transfer it via the window, and all of that in the office with full access to unrestricted internet, unblocked USB ports and so on. The internet was THAT secure, we were being trafficked via clients proxy and going via his AD domain, so our IT supervisors could not even track us, as we were seen in reports as only going through client domain, so when the request came to reduce usage of Facebook and Youtube in local network, we were secure. Did I say every newcommer had admin rights from the start (remember, mainly people with zero-to-none professional experience XD), because we had to run 60-lines-long Powershell script and signing it or walking any other way around was too much for our supervisors XD

Then, as said, we had domains in client account.... ehem... and some further repositories and systems were locked with extra smartcard verification, so at peak point we had 80 people on project with only three people having access to crucial tracker due to authorization bug, who could not upgrade their PCs as any change would have broke it. Did i mention, that Smartcard were flying from client's HQ, so when we finally received them... they were malfunctional and we had to wait one month more.

With all this security, we had a problem on a client's side-project, that, surprisingly, required to take as much people as possible for a weekend overtime job, mainly because our main progress-tracker was an excel file overloaded with VBA macros, which was located on a shared drive with +-5 second ping and took 5 minutes to save. If you still didn't grasp what the company I was working for, a hint - major competitor in cloud applications and office suites, both now and then. And, a surprise, around 90% of people hired, or rather, caught for this side-project either had no account in clients Account Directory or were waiting for having access granted, but oops, client's office is closed during weekend.

And we ended up with our team lead posting his login and password on whiteboard.

And y'all had it right, I had the moral high ground, having proper, accessfull AD account from the start and sharing it with noone at all.

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