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China Has a Massive Windows XP Problem
An anonymous reader writes "The Chinese are going to have a very, very hard time kicking the Windows XP habit. The deadline for the retirement of Microsoft's most successful operating system ever is eight months from tomorrow: April 8, 2014. That's the day when the Redmond, Wash. company is to deliver the last XP security update. According to analytics company Net Applications, 37.2% of the globe's personal computers ran Windows XP last month. If Microsoft's estimate of 1.4 billion Windows PCs worldwide is accurate, XP's share translates into nearly 570 million machines. In the U.S., 16.4% of all personal computers ran Windows XP in July, or about one in six, Net Applications' data showed. But in China, 72.1% of the country's computers relied on the soon-to-retire operating system last month, or nearly three out of every four systems."
Once the patches stop and they all get infected, they'll be so busy sending junk to each other that they won't have time to compute anything.
The determined Real Programmer can write Fortran programs in any language.
Relevant.
They'll probably just push Red Flag Linux to everyone.
I'm starting to think GNU is the problem with "GNU/Linux" these days.
I still use Windows XP and Windows 2000. They were good operating systems and, from my perspective, Vista, 7, and 8 haven't brought anything to the table. Quite the opposite, in fact: I went full penguin after Vista came out. It was patently clear that Microsoft was going in a direction I didn't want to go.
Yes, but what of the botnets? Who will take care of them? Without care and feeding of ineffective security updates to make users believe they are safe from such things, the botnets will wither and die.
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
DOS still works too, if you find the right hardware to run it on or use it in a virtual machine. Does that mean we should all be using DOS?
Pirated/hacked copies and Linux...
The ability to hack Linux is by design.
He/she meant Pirated/hacked copies of WINDOWS AND linux, genius. Learn to 'merican.
Python: 'And then suddenly you have a language which says "we're all stuck with whatever the whiniest coder wants".'
But Ballmer, dog bless him, is slowly but surely solving it for us all!
That might be an apt metaphor if Honda was a criminal organization, operating an illegal monopoly of cars that were notorious for exploding or simply falling apart for no reason.
Don't worry, Linux boxes are far from immune from them. As soon as they take an interest, the botnet creators will be happy to make sure that their software is safe and sound on your Linux and MacOS boxes.
Warms the heart, really.
I prefer Black Flag Linux. It only costs 35 dollars and a six pack to license.
Uhhh...you wanna explain how a million infected devices is 0.1% Miss AC? because i REALLY want to hear the logic hoops you pull out of your behind to explain the evidence away, i REALLY do.
Like it or not Android, which every Linux advocate has claimed as their own from day one, proves beyond a reasonable doubt what so many of us have said for so long...OSes are some of the most complex code ever written and because man is fallible there IS bugs which WILL be exploited once a target becomes big enough which tada! Is EXACTLY what happened when Linux on mobile went mainstream with Android.
So welcome to the club, the coffee is in the back, ignore the guy rocking in the corner as that is Mac who felt like you he had magic armor and then he got a beatdown from macDefender and Guardian and is still traumatized. I don't know what they did to him but considering he's been like that for awhile and keeps muttering "You shore are purty"? Probably best not to ask.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
... or nearly 721 out of every thousand.
721000 ppm?
It is dangerous to be right when the government is wrong.
can't... resist..... do we really want hardware that must bit bang ports used to maintain aircraft? Or a person working on airplains who cannot spell airplain?
Webmasters are tired of IE 8
The hell you say! Only just yesterday I had the joy, the pure joy I tell you, to debug an IE8 issue where it would show an error message helpfully informing the user that the website was unreachable because I had the audacity to send a PDF file over HTTPS and include the standard headers to disable caching. So now my application is technically broken for everything else in that it might allow caching of those PDF files, but hey, at least IE8 works with it again.
IE8 is seriously a pure joy to work with. Any developer who has set up a page which features HTTPS and a Flash movie inside an iframe trying to launch an external URL to an Office file (but only with Office installed!) knows what I'm talking about.
"Our two-party system is like a bowl of shit looking at itself in a mirror." - Lewis Black