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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.
.. where people finally say:
"I'd rather have software that works than software that's supported?"
Because it's about time.
Perhaps some will struggle to migrate to a non-Microsoft environment and avoid the recurrence of this particular struggle next time.
XP will no longer be "supported" but it will certainly still be used by 10's of millions of computers a year from now (and two, and three, and more). It's also a certainty that a stationary "unsupported" target will get a lot of attention by exploits and black hats.
XP -> 7 is entirely worth it. I'm no IT professional and don't know the logistics of it all but when I upgraded it was like day and night. I really don't understand the slow uptake to 7. Laziness? XP to Vista I understand, Vista was a pile of poopy fart poops. But 7 is a breeze and if I may boldly say in my experience even more reliable than XP. Of course, I could be letting the odd obscure legacy program go over my head but still... 7. 7 7 7 7 7. Did I mention 7?
You can dance if you want to.
I have never heard of anyone doing this.
What other choices do I have?
Mac's are light years ahead of Ubuntu and Ubuntu is moving backwards. There's only one realistic answer to that question.
More a sign that the world is abandoning Microsoft.
Microsoft Corporation (MSFT): Windows 8 Has Failed, Now What?
The rise of tablets and smartphones has shaken up the once dominant “Wintel” PC paradigm. In an attempt to re-establish its supremacy, Microsoft Corporation (NASDAQ:MSFT) designed Windows 8 to be a hybrid operating system, useful on a variety of platforms.
But Windows 8 adoption has been poor -- consumers seem baffled by the changes. Meanwhile, Windows tablets are selling poorly, and Windows Phone remains in fourth place.
http://www.insidermonkey.com/blog/microsoft-corporation-msft-windows-8-has-failed-now-what-110483/
Actually Windows 95 is becomming secure because it is so obscure and limited that most current attacks are unable to run on it. Attacks that used to run on it are pretty much dead, much like Stoned for DOS is now officially no longer a threat to anyone. I remember seeing the article about a year ago, so sorry no current link to the story.
The truth shall set you free!
^^this.
If you're still running 16bit DOS, your machines are highly malware resistant today. I know of no virus or malware circulating currently that will infect your machine.
Indeed, the year of the Linux desktop was 2011/2012. Some of us just didn't notice because the GUI was neither Gnome nor KDE, but Android. By 1014 people will be buying more Android devices than Windows devices.
"Is an Android device a computer?", you might ask. An Vista machine with a dual core 1.3 GHz processor and a GB of RAM is always counted as a computer, so I see no reason why a machine with the same specs running Linux, Android or any other distribution, isn't also a computer. So the way I see it, there's soon to be more Linux computers than Windows computers. They're just a lot more portable than we expected.
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."
Wait until Microsoft tries to force everyone to move to Windows 8.
Cheers,
Dave
They that can give up essential liberty to obtain a little temporary safety deserve neither safety nor liberty.
Ben
Or against a guy with a tank and an RPG...
Windows 98 does. I have one for running OLD games, under VMware Fusion.
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
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.
You mean all that stuff compiz, etc are trying to reimplement on Linux?
I run: Windows, OS X, Linux, FreeBSD. Just because you have a hammer, doesn't mean everything is a nail.
for January 19, 2038. Because that's when Windows XP stops working
^^this.
If you're still running 16bit DOS, your machines are highly malware resistant today. I know of no virus or malware circulating currently that will infect your machine.
If you're running DOS you're not going to be connected to the internet, so unless a Russian cybermastermind sends you a free floppy disk full of ASCII porn in the post, how are you going to get infected anyway?
To have a right to do a thing is not at all the same as to be right in doing it
No - just that yet again MS produced a crap version of Windows. *If* history repeats itself, then Windows 9 will be considerably better than Windows 8
They are resistant to the average malware. They are not resistant to a targetted attack from a hacker practiced in social engineering, and sufficiently skilled to look up one of the old exploits, or to write their own trojan.
So what? No system is resistant to things like that.
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.
But that also means that all those insecure apps they are using on XP won't be allowed to work the way they expect to when they move to WIndows 7.
now we need to go OSS in diesel cars
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.
You are talking about redefining a system service. That's an not an application anymore but an OS change.
So as I understand it, you're claiming that anything that operates on more than one file per user interaction and isn't full-text search or file archiving, such as Dropbox or revision control, constitutes "redefining a system service" and should be made artificially "a mild pain in the neck" to users. Would you mind if I quoted you on this position?
Use a developer SDK
In your opinion, should a device manufacturer have monopoly power to provide such a developer SDK for devices that it sells?