As I mentioned elsewhere, I haven’t engaged much (or at all, really) with @Martin_Hyde, so I’ve had nothing to say one way or the other in this pitting. But one of his comments recently really pissed me off. In the Windows 11 thread in IMHO, several of us mentioned that we had no intention of upgrading in the foreseeable future and were in fact still running older versions of Windows, in my case, Windows 7. I mentioned that I’d possibly still be running Windows XP on at least some systems except for the fact that some components had become obsolete and no longer functional.
This post is not about the debate of staying current or not with the latest OS, which is a matter amenable to reasonable discussion and greatly depends on individual circumstances. This post is about @Martin_Hyde being an asshole. Instead of a reasonable comment or attempt at discussion, in this post he drops the following threadshit:
The type of people in this thread that are celebrating using operating systems like Win XP for 5-10 years after they were serious security risks, application compatibility troublemakers etc are a major impediment to good computing generally and a blight on the world of software.
To which I have the following response.
Listen you pompous malodourous dumbass, the only “blight” around here is you, who seems to specialize in toxic accusations and gratuitous insults whenever you post. You know absolutely nothing about me, my background, the environment in which I operate my systems, what I use them for, and how they are secured. And maybe you missed the fact that major financial institutions are still running Windows 2000 (or worse) in customer-facing frontline systems and branch back office workstations. As someone who has made what I think are notable contributions to software engineering over the course of my career I find it humourous in a pathetic sort of way to have a random douchebag on the internet call me “a major impediment to good computing generally and a blight on the world of software”.
Just as a random example, there’s lots of buzz currently about the PrintNightmare vulnerability in the Windows print spooler. How are you doing with that, with your “latest” version of Windows? Turns out, Microsoft’s hotfix for Windows 10 is both buggy (in certain cases) and ineffectual. It’s no better for Windows 7, but I haven’t even bothered yet because I address threats like that in other ways, like Group Policy restrictions on remote access to services, enterprise-class malware protection, and safe computing practices generally.
This is not about whether it’s wise for most people to stay with supported operating systems. It’s about the fact that you’re an annoying arrogant douchebag. Go fuck yourself with a cactus.