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Microsoft Counts Down To XP Death
mikejuk writes "Microsoft have just released an end-of-support countdown gadget that ticks off the days until XP is no longer supported — but it only runs under Vista or Windows 7! It focuses the mind on the fact that XP is being forcibly retired. It is a wake-up call to think hard about the unpleasant situation and consider the alternatives.So as you watch the count down to XP's death tick by think about the problems created by using software that actually belongs to someone else..."
does it work under wine?
Doesn't *ALL* software "belong to someone else"? Even with FOSS software you depend on others to maintain it. If they stop, then you don't get updates. Now sure, you could theoretically go down to the local college and get a programming degree and learn to do it yourself--but how often does that REALLY happen? At least with MS, I know the software is going to be supported for several years, and not become adandonware because Jeremy got a new job and doesn't have time to update it anymore.
SJW: Someone who has run out of real oppression, and has to fake it.
Windows XP is almost 10 years old. Find me a Linux distro that supports 10 year old versions, on the desktop.
No one cried foul when Windows 98 was EOLed, after only 8 years. That was because they liked XP. Microsoft has pushed back the EOL on Windows XP multiple times due to complaints, but it's time to move on.
If you dislike Vista and 7, use something a different operating system. Don't pretend Microsoft should support 10 year old software.
What abuse of power? You can continue using XP for as long as you want; they don't magically make it stop working.
They are just saying they are not going to spend further time and money updating it. After almost 10 years this should have been expected seeing that most software isn't maintained nearly as long.
So in order to encourage you to upgrade Windows XP to a newer version, they create a countdown clock that only runs on systems you have already upgraded??? Is it called the "Schadenfreude Clock"?
his is potentially good for the economy, because corporations across America will soon be forced to update the operating systems and IT departments may need to hire new techs for installations.
This is just another version of breaking windows (*sigh* just re-read this, the glass kind) being "good" for the economy because it caused people to buy windows and pay window repairmen. The "good" for the economy would be found instead in people switching to more efficient software, having less system downtime, and more security resulting in less spam/viruses wasting resources. But the simple forced switching causing companies to hire IT workers is not good for the economy.
Don't get me wrong, IT workers are important for a company, but you need to understand that all they do is lose a company money. Like HR, they usually don't produce product, they are on overhead. A good IT person can "save" a company huge sums of money by being efficient and lowering overhead and downtime company wide, but increasing IT budget is always a loss unless that increase is recouped by their ability to increase efficiencies elsewhere.
Good for the economy? Would you please look up "broken window fallacy"?
But in a nutshell, it's not of economic benefit to replace something that serves its purpose INSTEAD OF getting something new which serves a new purpose. The resources used "fixing the broken window" cannot then be used to, say, glaze a new window in a new store.
--PM
It really is not an unpleasant situation.
First as someone who develops web applications used by for the financial sector, I'll be extremely grateful when the operating system with which Internet Explorer 6 is bundled becomes officially obsolete. Perhaps at last these firms will face up to the inevitable and upgrade, and we can stop spending a significant proportion of every development cycle dealing with this terrible browser.
Secondly, supporting XP requires resources. I would much rather MS used those resources (presumably these days derived from selling Windows 7) to innovate and support their modern products, rather than support a legacy operating system loved by very few, and loathed by many who have to work with it and its corollaries.
Even though I still much prefer my linux boxes, there's no denying that in Windows 7, Microsoft have finally built a decent operating system. Let's close the door on a bad memory.
"Has the rule of law degenerated into the rule of lawyers?" (Niall Ferguson)
And which FOSS vendor gives 11 years of free support like 100s of millions have gotten from Microsoft on XP? To get the "self-support" option for a single desktop user from Red Hat you pay $49 a year.
"which linux distro releases patches for 10 year old releases, I'm curious.."
If you installed a 10 year old release of Debian you could likely update it to the current release version with no problems.
How the hell is a company choosing, after _13 years_, to no longer support a piece of software "abuse of power"?
Nobody's forcing you to uninstall XP. You'll just have to come to terms with the reality that at some point it will no longer be supported.
Dude, XP is over 10 years old. Please inform me which popular Linux desktop distro has backwards support for 10 year old packages?
XP was still on sale last year when I bought my netbook (now wiped and running Ubuntu). The date it was first released is meaningless.
Ubuntu. You can just keep upgrading in place for 0. Debian is another, you could go get a 10 year old disk and if it would install dist-upgrade your way all the way up.
When did MS start giving XP users free win 7 disks?
I work in manufacturing. We have HUNDREDS of very expensive machines ($100K - $2M cost each) that are controlled by PCs running everything from Windows 98 to NT to XP. In fact, I think there may even be some tools that still have Win3.11 interfaces. I think the majority are still using NT 4.0.
They still chug along. It's getting more expensive to get some replacement parts that work, but it's still cheaper and easier than having the tool control software and drivers completely re-written for a new OS.
I doubt my experience with this is even remotely unique in the manufacturing world. Tools are expensive and tend to stay around for a LONG time.
If you've only seen two then you must have been trying very hard to avoid them...
As constrast to your statement, my work laptop has more than a dozen programs that installed themselves as 64-bit by default.
Greylisting is to SMTP as NAT is to IPv4
"which linux distro releases patches for 10 year old releases, I'm curious.."
If you installed a 10 year old release of Debian you could likely update it to the current release version with no problems.
Been there, failed at that... Support for jumping revs of glibc is NOT as good as it could be.
So what's going to happen to the online activation?
Long ago when XP came out there was an issue of what happens when XP gets killed and there's no more activation. I believe Microsoft claimed that they were going to release a patch to take away the activation before killing XP, but I don't know if that's even true. And if it's not, people may be in serious trouble when their XP thinks their new harddrive requires phoning home and Microsoft refuses to answer. Forced upgrades for everyone.
Did Canonical mail you a free Ubuntu 10 disk?
Canonical used to run a program called ShipIt that would, indeed, mail free discs. But it still sells 5-packs for 5 GBP. And for people already fortunate enough to have broadband with a cap in the double-digit GB per month or higher, downloading and burning Ubuntu costs far, far less than a copy of Windows 7.
That's why I write my own OS, drivers and software. I also dug my own well in my backyard, bought a windmill-powered generator, built my own car, bake my own bread and only read stories that I wrote myself. Of course, with the latter, I usually have to wait about five years to forget the plot, but at least I know I'll like it.
Actually, I do bake my own bread, weather permitting.
This unbiased moderation brought to you by the Porcine Aviation Group!
It may very well be that some folks within the company really are trying to be helpful and let you know that, hey, there's something newer and better available.
But in reality, it's just marketing. Advertising. Vista was bad enough when it was released that I think folks wouldn't have wanted to switch regardless of whether they were on Windows 98, much less XP. The situation was exacerbated when the uptake of Windows 7 was still slowed by folks hesitating from moving away from Windows XP.
In fact, it seems similar to how they've had to try to push people away from older version of Internet Explorer. It seems Microsoft is fighting to keep their new offerings relevant. For the most part, I think they're improving. IE is looking much improved over just the last five years. Windows 7 is close to erasing the tragedy of Vista but could perhaps still use some help.
As for Office... well, I think the best thing they could do for Office would actually be to start trimming it down rather than trying to add new features. It's better than it used to be but it seems like they're starting to run into a wall where they've reached the limit of real useful new features they can add and are now trying to just spin straw into gold with smaller features and tweaks and UI changes.
The last "support" I saw for XP was SP3 so the lack of any more improvements, bug fixes or security patches really won't make any difference to me. In fact, not having patches forced onto my XP VM could even be one less distraction and annoyance. I fully expect to get at least another 10 years service out of it and will only stop using it when the copies of Office, Photoshop and the development tools I need stop working.
politicians are like babies' nappies: they should both be changed regularly and for the same reasons
Just because Microsoft won't support XP, doesn't mean my company won't still be using 14+ year old software.
The large majority of PC owners (not the corporate accounts,) take whatever OS comes with the box.
The corporate accounts have staff who absolutely HATE change.
They buy based on functionality and make NO changes. (I know of some FAX servers in an office's closets in the midwest that are still running on IBM hardware and on OS/2 and will until they stop running.)
The people who hate change even more than IT staff are accountants. They LIKE hardware that behaves like it.
That is the nature of their customer base.
The people who buy microsoft's new OSs are OEMs, who don't use 'em either.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
It's time for all coders to go over and give the guys at REACTOS a hand getting it out of Alpha.
"A person is smart. People are dumb, panicky dangerous animals and you know it." - K
As a competent admin I can build packages from source if need be. If the application that it depends on is no longer supported at all, then alternatives will have to be found. Just like moving from XP to 7, or when MS started forcing IE7 on everyone.
Micro$oft is killing Windows XP only because not enough users have switched to something newer.
Per W3Schools, Windows XP is used on 42.9% of computers while Windows 7 is used on only 34.1%.
Per StatCounter, Windows XP is used on 47.32% of computers while Windows 7 is used on only 30.6%.
(Both sets of stats from March 2011.)
The major problem is that I use software with Windows XP that will not run on Windows 7. Those applications do exactly what I want, but there are no new versions for Windows 7. Not only will I have the expense of upgrading Windows, I will also have the expense of replacing otherwise good applications.
October 22, 2010 is the last date you can sell a PC with XP on it, from Microsoft. If someone is continuing to sell them, that's between the purchaser and the seller, and Microsoft would not be too happy about it.
http://windows.microsoft.com/en-us/windows/products/lifecycle
Microsoft is not selling XP, resellers are. And Microsoft would prefer you chose Windows 7, not XP.
A decade ago is when XP was introduced. It was still sold as recently as 2 years ago.
XP came with my netbook, which is still in perfect condition, but doesn't have the horsepower to run Windows 7.
Seriously, the OS is just a way to start applications by clicking on them. XP performs this simple task pretty well.
Um...last time I checked there are around 73,357,145,315* companies in the world which will provide support for Micorosoft products.
Dude, when MS pull the plug on XP, the game is over. No company can spring up to plug the gap. That is the different.
Like all pain, suffering is a signal that something isn't right
If I buy a brand new car, of a model whose current design is based on one initially released ten years ago, I absolutely still get a standard warranty with it. Indeed, this happens all the time, as refinements and superficial changes are added to an existing frame.
For example, upgrade to the latest Ubuntu, say, isn't an issue because it is free and if the hardware won't go there you can just stick with the old version, safe in the knowledge that developers aren't actively trying to find reasons to make their latest offerings not run on it.
Sticking with old versions of Linux can be problematic as well. Unless you're willing to continue using old versions of all of your applications, you'll want to build packages from upstream source. When you try to do this, you'll find that many of them have dependencies on newer versions of libraries which aren't available in the older distro's repository. You can end up in a situation where you're needing to track down and port a whole bunch of libraries yourself... and at the end of the day, you may still find that one of them relies on a kernel feature that simply isn't there. Unless you've got a lot of time to spend mucking around, or are willing to accept the fact that many newer applications simply won't work, running outdated Linux distros isn't going to be a cakewalk.
You also won't be getting automatic security patches (though I suppose older distros are going to be relatively secure via "security through obscurity").
In a VM. Hell, airlines and the banking industry run IBM 360 programs from the 1960's in a 380 emulator runnning a 370 emulator which in turn runs a 360 emulator.
Legacy projects wont die because the accountants want to extend life of an investment and upgrading gives no return on investment. Today it is still political to keep XP as many IT managers want to keep their jobs for paying $400,000 for activeX intranet crap that only work for IE. TO suggest to upgrade is a direct threat to these employees who will fight tooth and nail agaisnt Windows 7 migration so they can look good for their bosses.
I wish Oracle would stop requiring activeX and java frameworks that only work in IE 6. Yes you heard me, Java applets that wont work with any VM other than java 1.3.1 not 1.3.2 or 1.3.0. Sigh
So XP is here to stay forever.
http://saveie6.com/
from Windows 2000. Seriously.
As a final act, will Microsoft release an update to XP systems that just disables it, or turns off key functionality?
Remember when Tivo did that? Remember when Sony did that? Do you have a contractual guarantee that Microsoft won't do that?
Time for everyone to finally move to Linux!