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Set Your Watches For the End of Windows XP
An anonymous reader writes "In one year today exactly, Microsoft will shut down support for Windows XP. The deadline will prove a challenge for many of Australia's largest users of IT, all struggling to migrate to new Microsoft environments." Net Applications' chart of current OS market share figures shows XP only slightly behind Windows 7, even now.
lol
Yet another Linux fanboi who doesn't really know anything about security or security models assuming that the Unix model is ipso facto better. Sure, the Windows shell has promoted a culture of insecurity, but the underlying model is far more advanced than what traditional Unix has to offer. Linux still has plenty of security exploits, but they aren't often well publicized because of the heterogeneous nature of Linux distributions and the fact that these exploits generally affect a smaller number of people (because so few people use Linux in the same environments that Windows is used).
FWIW, in 2013, there have been 73 CVEs for Linux, 41 for Windows XP and 47 for Windows 7.
Does Windows 95 even run on modern hardware? I remember that getting Windows 98 SE to work in a virtual machine was a pain in the ass even after I found a floppy image that worked (b/c Microsoft in their infinite wisdom didn't or couldn't make a bootable CD image back in the day) because it didn't recognize any of the VM hardware and everything barely worked at the lowest-common-denominator level. For instance, the best video support I could get was 16-color 640x480 (i.e. absolute shit). Forget about sound or network access. I'm guessing the only reason why the Win98 installer found the blank hard disk file at all is because VMware was propping everything up and making it work behind the scenes. Hell, you couldn't install Win95 on a brand new PC without resorting to some kind of USB boot disk trickery because most new machines don't even have floppy drives anymore.
"It is a denial of justice not to stretch out a helping hand to the fallen; that is the common right of humanity."
With Windows 7, Microsoft finally made it work. They developed the Static Driver Verifier, which uses proof of correctness techniques to insure that drivers won't crash the operating system, and made everybody run their drivers through it before they were signed. That eliminated about half of all crashes. Anything else was Microsoft's fault, and they knew it.
Microsoft also developed an internal tool that takes in crash dumps and matches them to other crash dumps. This made it possible to digest a huge number of crash dumps and tie them back to the cause.
With those tools, Microsoft finally had the ability to make the thing work. And they did. Windows 7 is much more reliable than previous versions of Windows.
Then, having finally produced a solid desktop system, they found they were being clobbered by the tablet industry, and came out with a desktop interface borrowed from a phone. Sigh.
The activation servers will still be there after 2014.
See:
http://www.pcworld.com/article/250774/will_i_be_able_to_activate_xp_after_2014_.html
Compelling reason my ass. Stop being cheapskates.
My reason for using XP for my main workstation is because I really hate a lot of the interface changes in newer versions. The file requesters are different for little good reason, and the root directory is no longer the desktop. Lots of new, useless rubbish pollutes the GUI and much of it can't be removed. Everything is dumbed down. I couldn't care less about the Start menu, but the actual taskbar and pinned icons drive me nuts. The composited video system for the new GUI works MUCH more slowly, so most of my windowed multimedia and video software runs slower on Win7. It constantly thrashes the hard drive just as hard as Win95 did. The toolbars aren't as configurable. Selecting default colors is a pain (I do sensitive color work, so I want my desktop and taskbar to be neutral grey).
Everybody tells me I'm nuts for not loving Win7, but that's because they don't know what I do. If I just surfed the web, Win7 would be fine. As it stands, I can only use Win7 on my laptop, and I need XP to get real work done. I put off upgrading from Win2K to XP because XP was slower and I didn't really "need" it. I'm avoiding Win7/8 because those OSes are actually a downgrade for my requirements.
Microsoft had a proper security model for ages even before [Windows XP] was released.
Except this proper security model wasn't enabled by default. New accounts defaulted to administrator, not limited user, and there was no concept of a "sudoer", or a limited user who can gain permission to perform an action through a relatively secure user interface. Windows Vista introduced UAC, which emulated sudo, and Windows 7 refined it.
Sigh. First to be hacked at Pwn2Own means nothing if you had any clue about what the contest was about. The contest is turn based. First team that is chosen at random gets to decide which platform they want to target. If they don't succeed, 2nd team gets a chance at their platform at choice and so on. Every year, both Windows and OS X fall. Some years it is easier; some years thr team needs most of their allotted time. In some years, the flaw being exploited has already been patched but the platform was frozen at an earlier version. Some years Linux does not fall simply because they are not even chosen.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.