Could you let us know the bank so that we can get our money out before April 2014? When I was partially responsible for our enterprise security, a person saying this would have been transferred to where he can do no more harm. I have seen hackers crack completely internal high-security server administrator passwords and yes he was fired when we trapped him. BTW, I am not a fan of Microsoft, although I do use one Win7 machine. In another thread I pointed out that neither Microsoft nor Balmer had an upgrade path. Given the changes in Microsoft, someone inside the company is certainly worrying about it.
I agree with your comment in general. While it seems like a sensible approach, I will be retiring my XP backup machine in 2014 which sees limited usage. My upgrade will be either Ubuntu or Mac. I am tired of spending so much time maintaining my machine. I would like to go back to the good old days, when I actually used my machine and was not an unpaid techie. For fun sometime, look at the advertised costs of supporting a cloud server -4 times the unix server for a windows server. Why would that be I wonder? Are you really certain given the news of government spying that there has never been any kind of backdoor installed in operating systems? The problem is not that they find something bad on your computer, but that they install such things. Try denying it! Read history to see examples of the use of super large spying networks. I think that for years the threats have been too organized to just be a few smart kids hacking networks. Do you think that all the media reports of hacking ( CME, banks, military) are just some poor security setups? I hope you have never use a browser, flash, word, excel, adobe, and all the other applications that can infect a PC. Hopefully you have changed your administrator name and password, setup the minimal security precautions, kept others off of your machine, downloaded anything. If that is all true, I think you are OK. For me it is just easier to move on. I will say that you are a braver person than I am!
" Windows 7 is still growing more quickly than Windows 8 and 8.1. " I am getting a new laptop with 8.1 and the first thing I am going to do is to install Classic Shell.... On the other hand, old but still nicely working XP machines can get a new life if you install Linux (I like Mint) on it, it seriously fasten them up, and grandpa or the kids can use it without downloading anything harmful...
The backroom server infrastructure is a very different situation than the employees' laptops running on Windows XP. Most infrastructure does not run on Microsoft products, and has stringent security requirements associated with those who have access to 'production' environments and large-scale customer data.
Yes. Ours had no Microsoft servers, multiple IP transport protocols, multiple environments, distributed authorities, locations across the country, and a need for a few applications to have always on capability. We had multiple architects, freeware, in-house development, and business user development capabilities. The company went on a string of buying companies and each one's IT products had to be integrated quickly. We were always left to clean up the messes. The business didn't care unless something went wrong. A decade ago, we already had applications out less than 15 minutes in 5 years, I was responsible for the Internet facing architecture among all other middleware considered to be critical infrastructure. The Sarbanes Oxley consultant was asking my advice on securing everything. Not an easy task - the biggest threat was always from inside the company. BTW, the biggest weakness IMO was the Microsoft implementation of the X400 standard. So I feel your pain. I am glad I am out of it now.