It liiives! Sorta. Gentle azure glow of Windows XP clocked in Tesco's self-checkouts, no less OK, so it's not quite Windows for Warships, but Tesco's point-of-sale terminals appear to still be running Windows XP more than two years after Microsoft ended support for the aged operating system. A hungry vulture looking for some luncheon snapped this Tesco PoS terminal which seemed to have crashed and rebooted, going via …
Morrisons have a different message. Theirs says (at some volume): "Surprising item in bagging area."
I don't know why it's surprising. OK, this particular item was a cucumber, which could cause surprise in various NSFW ways. But the staff member didn't seem at all surprised at the checkout going on the fritz, and nor was I.
The big machines that measure the pressure in your eyes (Henson) used to use BBC Micro to do the work. I know there were still some around 15 years ago. I'm sure there are still some doing a good job now. Can tell from the distinctive two tone startup tone.
That said, they're not Internet connected, so perfectly safe.
> Yes but did they lock down the USB ports?
At some major EU airports, the PC's used by security staff to the X-Ray (etc) machines have their cables and unblocked USB ports facing users, directly on the edge of the desks right where they're accessible to people just casually leaning on the desks.
For anyone so inclined (not me) they'd be truly trivial to stick something in.
Not sure how that gets past any security audits.
Various endpoint protection programs can lock down the USB ports -- there's a (slim) chance they're using something like that. Though that probably wouldn't save them from USB Kill or similar. But I suspect that deploying that would quite likely cause you to be delayed from reaching your flight, or anywhere else for that matter.
> That can easily be done via Group Policy or an application control piece of software.
Strongly suspect any decent grade USB malware would get around the more common USB blocking approaches.
Sure, someone plugging in (say) some random storage device or wifi stick will likely not have it work.
But anyone clueful doing it "on purpose" and with evil intent is probably not going to be stopped by the kiddie barriers.
"running XP is not really that bad especially if the machines are not connected to the Internet"
For point of sale equipment, it is almost certainly connected, if not to the internet at large, at least a corporate network. You could create a communication system that lets information about payments be sent out without networking, but that is difficult and probably wouldn't be attempted. These vulnerable devices have been used before to gain access to payment information, usually after a breach somewhere else in the network.
We have one of these in the workshop at my company. Its doing the same job as it always did, running tests on new/refurbished hardware.
It'll only get replaced if the company we are doing the work for stumps up the cash to replace it, the problem being that if it were to break, we're out of replacement hardware for it...
>I don't know about POSReady 2009, but with the earlier versions of XP Embedded that I was familiar with, pretty much every component of regular XP was available as an option
.....indeed and you can actually go the other way and keep the EOL'ed XP editions fresh using the POSReady 2009 updates and a couple of registry hacks. Latest updates were rolled out 10 days ago BTW so why this is a story I'm not sure.
I did this out of curiosity on an XP desktop used a couple of times a year in the workshop. It's pretty easy (unlike Win10) to review the suggested updates and hide the ones only needed for a POS and inappropriate for a workstation.
I have a 2 way belkin box someone chucked out. The other PC on the box, sharing screen, keyboard and mouse is running Linux Mint + Mate. The WINE on it runs some old VB6 and other programs needed in the workshop for test gear that won't run even on 64 bit Win7, though they do work on 32 bit win 7.
Likely the Office XP / aka Word 2002 might be a risk?
Fine if not used on the Internet or with files of unknown provenance (data or programs).
Built on the XP codebase, these embedded operating systems hit end-of-life in January and April 2019 respectively, as Microsoft explained four years ago.
Either there is some time travel involved or there is a date wrong. I was under the impression that we were not yet in 2019 and especially April as BREXIT would have happened and someone would have told me. (sic)
This post has been deleted by its author
Well, 4 years ago, Windows XP was legal!
I don't know what the rules are where you come from but XP is 18 tomorrow. In civilised countries, people say that someone is "legal" when they reach 16 or 18. Four years ago, it was approaching 14. You can get locked up for that!
Last time I saw XP in the wild (i.e. not reported by El Reg), it was also a self-checkout at US hypermarket chain Meijer. I know the local Ace Hardware locations also use a Windows-based POS, but I don't know which Winver.
I don't understand why NCR and the lot their peers bother to use anything so bloated when an R-pi properly configured could do the job. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong, please.)
I don't understand why NCR and the lot their peers bother to use anything so bloated when an R-pi properly configured could do the job. (Someone correct me if I'm wrong, please.)
I suspect it's a matter of availability of drivers for the hardware, there may not be Linux equivalents to run the various peripherals.
Certainly when our company had a brief dalliance with ticketing kiosks, some years ago, the only available software was Windows based, and relied on a proprietary interface card to join all the bits up - no USB equivalents.
Also programmer availability. Windows desktop GUI programmers are easier to find than Linux desktop GUI programmers. Any Visual Basic programmer can do a Windows GUI.
Also on a typical big-company Windows-based corporate LAN, developing for Windows is easier than developing for Linux because everyone has Windows PCs.
It shouldn't be hard at all for find a developer who can make a GUI that runs on multiple platforms.
Java does it, .Net/Mono does it. There are no real differences, a button is an instance of the button class regardless of the underlying OS or graphical subsystem. This is precisely the main drive behind these languages. Sure there may be a difference in IDE but anyone who has used an IDE long enough will be able to adapt and anyone who hasnt will just see it as part of the same learning curve as before, assuming they do the development on the LInux system itself! They could just keep using their proffered IDE and simply test on a Linux system.
My god you could even use the most universal of cross platform of interfaces, HTML!
I have developed stuff for android. The IDE runs in Java, on any OS that runs Java. The VM that I test on runs on any platform that runs a supported Java, heck I usually just forgo the VM and push the app to my personal phone, using USB! With full debugging, live over USB. In Linux, just by plugging it in. I dont do it in windows because I cba to hunt down the driver I need.
Also, if anyone is using Visual Basic nowadays to do anything other than making a GUI for prototyping I'd be very worried.
And windows PC's can run virtual machines nowadays. Download a development environment turn-key VM, run it in a hypervisor. Develop on windows, compile, move to the Linux VM, run.
I've been doing this since the early 2000's there really is no excuse any more.
Once all the kiddies with their Linux running raspberry Pis grow up and expect to program on Linux because "everyone had a linux RPi" we will see the opposite argument I bet: "Nobody will develop a GUI for windows because everyone runs Linux and ts hard to find developers who can write a GUI for windows".
Everyone running Linux would be great of course. But that argument would still be stupid just as it is now. Cross platform development is EASY. The hard stuff was done by other very clever people a long time ago.
Hey, did you know? Minecraft runs on Linux, and windows. One executable. What is this sorcery?
Yep a cross-platform UI for kiosks would be straight-forward. Otherwise... not-so-much.
Kiosks are much simpler for such things because the UX is constrained by the very specific nature of the device. But the vast majority of software in the world does not run on kiosks. It runs on various different devices and form factors and operating environments, many of which specifically differentiate themselves from others by differences in the UX.
If cross-platform development was EASY, everyone would be doing it by now and it wouldn't need to be constantly re-invented to get-it-right-this-time-no-honestly-we-have-nailed-it-now. I am guessing you don't remember (perhaps weren't even born at) the time of the likes of Omnis and various other 4GL's that had "nailed" cross-platform development in the 90's - a time when there was far less diversity in platforms to contend with.
Which is of course why Omnis and it's ilk went on to dominate the software development industry and why we are all using those tools now.
Oh, but wait. Then came Java with it's Ultimate Solution to the write-once-run-anywhere problem. Hmmmmm.
Then .NET. Then Qt. Then FireMonkey. Then Xamarin. Then .net Core (Jeez even .NET is taking two bites at the cherry).
It's almost as if this is a bit harder than some people seem to think.
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
